The Metro (dreadful free London paper) has a piece today on Sécrétions Magnifiques:
New perfume smells of semen and sweat
Want a scent with a distinct fragrance that no one else has?
Well, blood, sweat, saliva and a dollop of sperm is just the thing for the stinking rich, if a perfume on sale at Harvey Nichols is anything to go by.
The perfume, Sécrétions Magnifiques, contains the smell of all those things and still sells for £76 a pop.
Maker Etat Libre d'Orange markets it as a raunchy alternative to the likes of Poison and Chanel No.5, calling it 'subversive' and 'disturbing'.
The company said: 'It's love or hate at first sight. Like blood, sweat, sperm, saliva, Sécrétions Magnifiques is as real as an olfactory coitus that sends one into raptures, to the pinnacle of sensual pleasure.
'Tongues and sexes find one another, pleasure explodes and all goes wild.'
The perfume mixes accords - a blending of scents - to recreate the smell of blood, sweat, saliva and semen with the more pleasant odours of coconut and sandalwood. Perfume expert Roja Dove said the aroma was a refreshing alternative to bland fragrances.
'The kind of people who will like this range are people who think they are being really, really alternative and going against the establishment and being really rather racy,' he said.
'But it is a bit of a mystery why anyone would want to smell of sweat, blood, saliva and sperm.'
Another perfume in the range is Jasmin et Cigarette, which does exactly what it says on the tin, stinking of jasmine and uh, cigarettes.
A spokesman for Harvey Nichols, the only shop in the country to stock the range, insisted it was popular. 'Niche fragrances tend to do very well in our fragrance offering,' he said.
Well, this is the Metro we're talking about, so it's not like I expected quality journalism. But... really. Shall I complain first about the glaring factual errors (Harvey Nichols isn't the only shop in the country to sell the range - I was sniffing them in Les Senteurs just the other day) or the horrible writing (Jasmin et Cigarette does not stink of jasmine, thanks very much)? I almost can't decide. I should mention that the print edition of the paper had an extra subtitle for the article which claimed that the fragrance was made from semen and sweat. Nice work, guys.
Putting the journalistic crappiness of the Metro aside for a minute, this part interests me:
Perfume expert Roja Dove said... "But it is a bit of a mystery why anyone would want to smell of sweat, blood, saliva and sperm."
Did Roja Dove really say that, do you think? Dove is one of the world's leading experts on fragrance, so I seriously doubt that he finds body smells 'a bit of a mystery'. I should have thought he's encountered them before. In fact, he once described a fragrance as 'what it would smell like if you inserted your finger into a clean rectum and then sniffed it' - and he was selling that in his shop. Or is he just bad-mouthing Etat Libre d'Orange because Harvey Nichols is his main competitor?
There is, perhaps, a good reason why Dove might dismiss Etat Libre d'Orange's fragrances: it would be fair to accuse the company of prioritising style over substance. Those I smelled the other day weren't particularly great, smelling generic and uninteresting, even though I love the names. I suspect, though, that the most probable explanation for Dove's comment is that the Metro made it up.
2 comments:
"Want a scent with a distinct fragrance that no one else has?", Metro asks. But doesn't everyone to some extent smell of blood, sweat and saliva, and don't considerable numbers of people also smell of sperm?
I went to the Etat Libre d'Orange shop in Paris in December. Wall-to-wall corny porny styling. Big coffee-table books full of grotty old smut scrubbed up by Taschen and repackaged as "vintage pornography". Sales assistants wearing zipped black leather and ironic haircuts. Dull, predictable array of BDSM props. We have a diamante-studded whip for 200 euros, check out how subversive we are! Will that be Visa or Mastercard?
I was left feeling that there is nothing remotely "subversive" or "disturbing" about Etat Libre d'Orange. They may consider their brand of expensively commodified sexuality to be challenging and countercultural, but in fact it's profoundly conservative and humdrum. If Roja Dove said any of that quote, he was on the mark with this bit: 'The kind of people who will like this range are people who think they are being really, really alternative and going against the establishment.' Yes, bless them, they think they are. And yet what they're doing is switching off their own imaginations to buy and sell commodified sex. I can't think of anything that more strongly reinforces the establishment than that.
I've seen what Etat Libre d'Orange is doing at least 8 million times before, from Agent Provocateur to Poste Mistress to Suicide Girls to the Erotic Review to the Pussycat Dolls. All package up their wares in the same supposedly "alternative" me-so-horny branding. The prime motive? Selling a product.
If someone's trying to sell you sexuality, it's not sexy. Real sexuality is about your own imagination, physicality and personality. It is not about buying a 200 euro diamante whip, a 300 euro pigskin gimp mask, a 50 euro Taschen compendium of sad-eyed women in the 1970s showing their tits, and a 100 euro bottle of pretend spunk perfume. Buying this stuff does not make you sexy. Actually it makes you kind of a geek. These are the props for the pornocracy's own MMORPG.
The "pinnacle of sexual pleasure" is never going to be found in a bottle, and nor is it going to have a price on it. Perfume is one of my greatest sensual pleasures, but actually I find myself agreeing with Professeur Dove: why would anyone want to spray on something purporting to smell of sweat, blood, saliva and sperm? There's no subtlety, no playfulness, no intelligence, no imagination. And, Beverly, I agree with you: the smells themselves are hollow and generic. How apt.
Wow, Christ! I had no idea the Etat Libre shop was so tacky. I hate that kind of alterna-porn crap.
Couldn't agree more with everything you say about the smells - but the write-up of the scent in The Metro interested me. Its sense of disgust towards anything body-related or sexual was overwhelming.
I wonder what they'd make of the clean rectum smell?
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