Perfume is Pleasure

Unless you do your part and comment, this post will generate more heat than light. While waiting for the experts to show up, I shall attempt to compensate with intrigue for what I lack in knowledge.

I want to know: Why do so many people not look at you like you’re crazy when you say that something smells “green?” Galbanum, cut grass, vetiver, oakmoss, lavender and basil have fragrances we consider to be green.

Color and scent, what’s up with that?

Grass is green, but does that make its smell, when freshly cut, green indeed? Cool, fresh and airy, the sky, the sea, blue, of course. Dry wood, brown; moister, mossy varieties, add a touch of yellow.

Estée Lauder’s Cinnabar and Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium were packaged very effectively with touches of a warm brick red, evocative of an item you might find somewhere more exotic than New York.

Are we simply reinforcing sensory associations linguistically, or is there an intrinsic physical color to the smells?

Forgive me, the reference to synesthesia was a red herring; I am not above pandering to search engines.  Richard E Cytowic, author of The Man Who Tasted Shapes, in his online article: Synesthesia: Phenomenology and Neuropsychology, admits:  “It is rare for smell and taste to be either the trigger or the synesthetic response…I have found no other in which sight evokes smell; and…I have found none in which smell itself is the trigger.”

But maybe I will stumble onto some truth about scent and color by accident. In the worst case, the fiction is a pleasant diversion.

Robert Tisserand, in the classic tome, The Art of Aromatherapy, asks: “What are scents if not invisible colours? In Krippner and Rubin’s The Kirlian Aura it is suggested that if the sense of smell is connected with electromagnetic waves, one might expect the skin to be sensitive to odors. This is not as farfetched as it may sound. We know that the skin is especially responsive to essential oils, but much more impressive is the fact that some people can see with their skin.” He goes on to talk about Rosa Kleshova, whom the Soviet Academy of Science certified as capable of reading newsprint with her hands and elbows, and describes the ordinary Russians who are trained to distinguish colors by touch, with red being sticky and yellow, slippery.

How does this relate to our conversations about perfume? I covet your thoughts.