Perfume is Pleasure

As a professional fragrance educator and coach in a world that says: “You’re a what?!” I must infuse cyberspace with my presence. The mission: Paint my solution to the big problem - Consumers Lack The Language of Scent - on the canvas of the Internet. Normally, I would contain myself to perfume, home fragrance, scent marketing and the like.

Social networking (code for online marketing, but in a friendly, personal way) is new to me, but my future depends on it, I am told. In a prior corporate incarnation, I looked with disdain on “reply to all” and other mass broadcasts of information that could and should have been delivered discreetly from one individual to another.

Now, compelled by the advice of people who know, as well as by the gut sense that I can no more successfully resist this than I did voicemail, I am nominally “on” Linked-in and Facebook, but not yet “up” on either.

For the record, I’ll twitter over my own dead body. Maybe I take myself too seriously. “What are you doing now?” they ask me. A fabulous woman and new Facebook friend reports that she just had oatmeal for breakfast and I cheer. High fiber. Filling. Great protein in a carbohydrate. Astounding cholesterol-lowering properties. I write a private e-mail to commend her and offer my exhortations to carry on in her pursuit of a healthy diet. Would no sooner post this on her Facebook wall than report my plans to head for the bathroom. That was a week ago. Today another new Facebook friend and respected real friend announced to the world that she was off to make a batch of granola. What a coincidence. I, too, made granola today! But is it news? Two oatmeal posts in a week? This seem to be a thing.

I am having a change of heart. Oatmeal is important.

But Oatmeal’s importance is as a grain of sand on the beach when compared to that of coffee. Perfume is pleasure and coffee is the best smell in the world. Some of you have heard me profess oakmoss to be my very favorite smell, maybe even on TV.  Either I’m lying or I have more than one very favorite smell. Please comment on your very favorite smell(s).

Bois de Jasmin, great perfume blog, lists Givenchy Very Irresistible for Men as a fragrance with a coffee note, well, mocha, actually, but don’t hold a little chocolate against them.

Home scenting goes upscale as your new taper exudes tobacco, fig or green bamboo.

We are ever-more-hip to the great mood a good smell can launch and home scenters now deal routinely with our mental health.

Rick Ruffalo, CEO and the marketing face of Yankee Candle, explained the new possibilities to a group of fragrance experts in September, 2008. Fragrance is used to enhance and remember events, to create environments and moods. Florals and musks for romance, vanilla and spice as invitations home, ozone and pine to relax, licorice and cinnamon to promote alertness and lavender for sweet dreams. Yankee Candle has innovated with No-Smella, the new anti-citronella that expels mosquitoes but refrains from competition with the scent of your favorite hot dog, hamburger and sausage. Highbrow stuff.

Last November, I had occasion to watch gifted scent critic Luca Turin’s face as he smelled a votive of Yankee’s Macintosh for the first time. “A date with Macintosh” was in order, he allowed.

Yankee Candle’s flagship store in South Deerfield, Massachusetts, affectionately dubbed The Scenter of the Universe, is a Disneyworld of home decorating products and scent experiences. This winter, you can buy candles in a room where it snows every four minutes.

Consumers express their taste in fragrance with an impoverished vocabulary: “something fresh,” they always say. A sales-clerk will wait on hundreds of customers before realizing that “fresh” is a synonym for “something I like.” Silly girl, she thought you meant the smell of herbs, fresh cut grass, citrus or the ocean. Lo and behold, some heady oriental smells fresh to you. Why? Because fresh is good, this scent smells good and must, therefore, be fresh.

Next time you shop for a fresh scent, perhaps a little soapy to remind you of laundry “fresh” from the dryer, recall this: One of the most popular scents in laundry detergent is musk, a fragrance ingredient formerly obtained from a gland located between the stomach and genitals of the East Asian male musk deer. Musk is used to infuse perfumes with depth and richness while fixing them to the skin and is considered by most to be a sexy smell, not a fresh one.

But the main goal of perfume is pleasure, So if it makes a person happy to say that musk is a fresh smell, why not? I like fresh scents too. Like a nice piece of pizza hot from the oven.