Sir William Petty, whose fault this is not.
On Wednesday 22nd March 1665 the great diarist Samuel Pepys dined at the house of the merchant James Houlbon. Also in attendance was the economist and philosopher Sir William Petty. During the meal Sir William described several clauses in his will that were designed to reward those who could address or invent "such and such things" that had intrigued or baffled him during his lifetime. One of the provisions was for an amount to be gifted to the individual "that could invent proper characters to express to another the mixture of relishes and tastes", something Sir William clearly felt lacking from the language. One may surmise that the money remains unclaimed over three hundred years later. It had not really invaded my consciousness until I began to write for this blog that we are woefully under equipped linguistically to describe the myriad smells that surround us.
One approach is to simply list the ingredients and leave it to the reader's imagination to piece together the experience of the scent. This won't really do on two counts. Firstly an inventory does not adequately describe quantity, nor how the constituent parts are combined and secondly the subtle combination of smells can create an overall effect very different, if not greater, than the sum of its parts. In much the same way that hydrogen gas and oxygen gas when combined in the proportion of of two hydrogen atoms to a single oxygen atom make a very different substance than their gaseous components do alone so it goes for combining cedar and galbanum, as Parfumerie Generale do in their wonderful Bois Blond. This mixture creates a scent that is more hay loft than wood and gum. There is a further problem to this "shopping list" approach, that of an assumption of extensive knowledge on the part of the reader. I am new to the world of perfume. It delights me but I am inexperienced and still have much to learn, especially when identifying the more exotic ingredients of the better scents. Comestible scents I have little difficulty with because, as those who know me can attest, I am not short of knowledge in the ancient and noble art of eating heroically, and because I cook I know what makes up the flavour. Thus fragrances like Creed's Neroli Sauvage, whilst delightful, do not really challenge the literary talents of the writer because we all know what oranges smell like. It is when more esoteric ingredients are used and mixed that we find that merely listing ingredients will not help most people get a sense of what the perfume is really about. We are driven to try a different tack, that of attempting to describe scent via simile and metaphor.
If we do not have the words to describe perfumes' olfactory qualities in their own terms, we can at least attempt to describe the experience of smelling them. I might say that Bois Blond has a transportative quality whereby I am taken to a bucolic rural idyll some time in late September; the straw is beginning to ferment and the grass is ripe. I might also add that the fragrance opens with sense of fresher grass and spring time sap. The physical components and procedures in the perfume's manufacture cease to be important, it is the emotional and sensory experience which now come to the fore. This approach, whilst not requiring any specialised knowledge from either reader or writer, still has its pitfalls. One is a matter of taste. When describing scent in this way one walks a very narrow ledge with the precipice of pretension on one side and imprecision on the other. Here the writer invests much of him or herself in the description and this depends upon the experiences of both writer and reader. If I describe Bois Blond as being redolent of silage, a scent I find has strong connotations of my youth in the English countryside, it defines the qualities I experience from the scent precisely, and probably explains why I love it so much - the nostalgia. For someone raised in the city who may not only have no idea what silage smells like but will probably have little emotional connection to the smell if they do, my description is next to useless.
Ultimately the problem with writing about perfume, or indeed any smell, is that they are so profoundly connected to our life experiences: each smell will be evocative in as many different ways as there are people to experience it. Smell is a profoundly emotional experience, it cannot really be clinically analysed or abstracted. This inability to apply scientific rigour is compounded by our linguistic shackles. Not having a specific word for something is a greater handicap than just struggling to find a clumsy synonym or simile. Language and perception are inter-related. It is known that Russian speakers can differentiate between a greater number of shades of blue than English speakers. There is no single word for "blue" in Russian and, it is surmised, this explains the keener perception of the Russians over we poor insensitive English-speaking barbarians. What if the same is true for smell? If we do not have the words to describe them, can we not smell them properly? This I have no answer for but please, gentle reader, if we seem to struggle when attempting, in our own heavy-handed way, to describe the delights that pour forth from the perfume bottle perhaps this piece may give a hint as to why.
