Scent and Subversion (36 page)

Wawrzyniak is clearly indebted to Sissel Tolaas’s pioneering 2006 work for MIT, “The FEAR of smell—the smell of FEAR” exhibit. But her project, although clearly inflenced by Tolaas’s body-odor work, differs in several ways. First off, Wawrzyniak was both the sample provider and the chemist performing the extractions using chemical washes to remove impurities from the gathered essences to extract, as they say in perfumery, the “absolute.”

“What we did is different from what Sissel does,” said Wawrzyniak. “She uses headspace technology, and we did hands-on essential-oil extraction. I really wanted to do that
whole process and learn about it.” (She enrolled in a summer program in Hunter College’s chemistry department in order to get access to the chemicals she needed to do the extractions.) Second, it was her body whose smells would be on exhibit, which she describes as making her feel very vulnerable.

“The process itself,” Wawrzyniak told me, “required this level of intimacy between myself and the people I was working with … I had to bring in my stinky, sweaty T-shirts, greasy hair, and tears, and I had to work with these three twenty-year-old chemistry students—boys from Hunter College! I had to have no shame left.”

The students got to know Wawrzyniak so well that, one day, they remarked that her sweat smelled like chocolate; interestingly, it was during the ovulation phase of her menstrual cycle. In acts both clinical and intimate, they removed extracts from T-shirts she wore to bed several days in a row, and other T-shirts she wore to Bikram yoga. And in the most dramatic extraction—of Wawrzyniak’s tears—she would listen to Polish folk music her father brought back from her native land that would prompt her to cry, which she would do into a sterilized bottle for half an hour! Afterward, she would seal it up and jump on a subway to get to Hunter so that they could extract what small portion they could from this precious fluid.

“I was basically a living, walking extraction sample for the whole summer, because I would collect my hair and cry into vials,” she said. “I still have jars full of hair in my room because I don’t want to stop collecting my hair. I had to sleep in a T-shirt for five nights or go to Bikram yoga class in it and then put it in a sterile Mason jar. Then I would go straight to the lab and wash it in ethanol to get all the sweat out, evaporate all the water and ethanol off, and be left with the essential oil of my sweat. It was pretty cool.”

The extracted essences were not enough for a month-long gallery show, however, so Dawn Goldworm and Yann Vasnier stepped in to offer … their noses. After smelling the extractions, and supplementing them by actually sniffing Wawrznyniak, they came up with synthesized replicas that would eventually be part of the gallery show by puffing out of the scent chamber.

In addition to subverting the way women have been represented in art for centuries, Wawrzyniak’s project is also fascinating if situated in the history of perfume. There was a time when animal scents were used as “olfactory corsets” to highlight the body’s similarly erotic, disturbing smells. As that fashion waned, the mania for soliflores (single-note perfumes) took over, and heavy, animalic scents redolent of bodies (animal and human) fell out of favor. Animal notes that recalled the body remained in the base notes of perfumery for a period, but almost completely dropped out in the 1990s, in favor of transparent, clean, and ethereal oceanic scents. Unwittingly, Wawrzyniak, with the help of her Hunter College students and Goldworm and Vasnier, returns the body to perfume’s trajectory.

I had the opportunity to smell the scents Goldworm and Vasnier collaborated on together. They’re not commercially available but rather scented the “Smell Me” installation. It’s fascinating the way in which one can smell hints of twentieth-century perfumery in what is an attempt to replicate a specific woman’s homely and bodily smells. In the same way that some of Sissel Tolaas’s reproductions of men’s anxiety sweat reminded me of certain twentieth-century perfumes (namely, Germaine Cellier’s Bandit), Wawrzyniak’s scents—reconstructed as they were with perfume notes—were perfume-like and yet also naturalistic, recognizable body odors. Her hair smelled warm, lightly green, spicy, sebum-y, with a hint of gardenia. Her Bikram sweat smelled like musty peach and coconut, a not-unpleasant scent of stale, dirty clothes that need to be laundered. Night sweat had a delicate floral top note with a pronounced cocoa and nut scent in the base, and her tears smelled like black pepper with a light, transparent floral aspect. The body’s perfume isn’t so unlike perfume after all.

Goldworm’s assessment of Wawrzyniak’s extracted essences reads like poetry: “Overall, being a vegan, her body smells very wet and sweet, like lactones and coconut water, with an infusion of fresh green notes and spices … Her nightshirt smell is deep and warm like a small, delicate animal in hibernation … Her hair smells like a memory from my childhood.”

Wawrzyniak’s project brings perfume’s modern history full circle. The body comes back to perfume
as
its own perfume. Although these scents made me appreciate bodily smells more, they also made me appreciate the way in which perfumery has been negotiating with the body in a fascinating dialectic, from the beginning. We can run from the body, but we can’t hide.

For those of us weaned on years of desexualized, clean scents, the idea that a woman would wear a perfume that enhanced her “not so fresh feeling” might sound scandalous, if not downright deranged. Although animal scents in perfumes largely fell out of favor after the 1980s, there are signs that a love for all things ripe in an otherwise odor- and germaphobic society may be making a comeback after almost two decades of the Rule of Clean.

Just as the pendulum swung from florals to animalics and back in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, perfume lovers have begun to tire of polite office scents and perfumes redolent of fruit salad.
Sex and the City
actress Sarah Jessica Parker, in what may be described as a tipping point moment, vowed a few years ago to create a fragrance with a “palatable” body odor note. “I really like B.O.,” she said about her next perfume’s inspiration, “I think it’s sexy.” The name behind the successful mass-market perfumes Lovely and Covet also raised eyebrows when she proclaimed her love for the smell of skunk spray and dirty diapers.

Parker is jumping on the animalic perfume bandwagon that was already initiated in the twenty-first century by perfume brands such as Serge Lutens (with the Christopher Sheldrake–composed Muscs Koublaï Khän from 1998); L’Artisan Parfumeur (with the Olivia Giacobetti–composed Dzing! from 1999); and Frédéric Malle (with the Maurice Roucel–composed Musc Ravageur from 2000). But as novel as it might seem for Parker to out herself as a skank-o-phile, a love for bodily or animalic smells is actually as old as perfume itself, and it seems to recur in generational cycles.

Before they were replaced with synthetic ingredients from the 1970s, the animal-sourced ingredients civet, musk, ambergris, and castoreum served multiple roles in vintage perfume, and with the exception of ambergris, which originates from the intestinal secretions of the sperm whale, all of them came from or near the sexual glands of animals.

Like all base notes or fixatives in perfume that have a heavier molecular structure, animal notes anchor perfume’s more volatile top notes and middle notes, making fragrances last longer. They also help to enhance or “exalt” the odors of citrus, herbs, and florals that comprise top and middle notes in the same way spices enhance the flavor of food. But in their least analyzed function, animal-derived base notes contribute to vintage perfume’s complexity by adding subliminal, “dirty” bodily smells that prompted perfume writer March Moore of the blog PerfumePosse to coin a new scent category: “skank” perfumes.

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, before it was understood how disease was transmitted, it was believed that plagues were the result of the “odors of pestilence” in the air. Strong essential oils, including the excremental odors of civet, musk, ambergris, and castoreum, were carried in pomanders (containers with aromatic substances), worn on gloves, and applied to skin. The logic? Fight the “odors of pestilence” with even stronger odors! These animal scents were also worn as perfume by nineteenth-century men and women, and the inclusion of animal notes as fixatives (to make perfume last longer) carried over into the twentieth century.

Although perfume is often thought of as something worn to hide body odor, it also functioned in the past to emphasize bodily smells. In the twentieth century, before Western culture became pornified and graphic displays of sexuality became the norm, perfume was an adornment that helped women to express sexuality in an invisible, subliminal, and hence, socially acceptable way by emphasizing bodily smells with animalic perfumes.

This olfactory corsetry, redolent as it was with the scents of animal secretions, hides, and fur, reveals a vision of femininity that was complex, evolved, and erotic. Women’s prefeministera lives were more constricted than our own, yet in the olfactory realm, the average woman had a wider and more complex array of scents to choose from: she could smell like rubber, moss, and leather (Bandit); tobacco (Habanita); and flowered fur (Chanel No. 5), for example—that is to say, masculine or sexual, according to the codes of perfume language.

Animalic notes and their historical/cultural significance in perfumes are, of course, problematic. For example, animalic perfumes are vestiges of an age when overtly sexual perfumes were worn by women whose sphere of influence was largely confined to the
home. In a fascinating post on the original Robert Piguet perfume Baghari, an animalic perfume from 1954, Marie-Hélène Wagner of the perfume blog The Scented Salamander explains that to smell sexual, disturbing, and animalic worked for women in the past, but not so much now:

Animalic perfumes remind us not only of how much narrower women’s options were in the past, they’re also relics of a time when it was more socially acceptable for animals to be abused and killed for adornment. The musk deer population was almost eradicated due to perfumers’ lust for musk, and the civet endured—and still does endure on a smaller scale—having its anal glands painfully scraped for civet paste.

My interest in vintage animalic perfumes, then, isn’t uncritically nostalgic for the conditions in the world that produced them, nor is there a wish to return to the way those perfumes are made or to the second-class status of the women who wore them. My interest is in trying to examine what the disappearance—or reappearance—of the animalic style of perfume represents. As much as it signaled a particular kind of problematic femininity, and certainly a disregard for the well-being of animals, it nevertheless had other important functions worth analyzing.

What have we lost in our present deodorized age, an age in which strenuous attempts are made to eradicate all signs of our animal nature from the olfactory sphere? A world in which scent is banned in some places, certain unwashed bodies are not welcome in spaces
once meant for everyone, and in which the ruling style of clean and fruity perfumes signals a kind of olfactory arrested development?

One answer to that question might lie in the relationship that women used to have to perfume, which, once upon a time, was not even considered a proper topic of polite conversation. Although Wagner describes Baghari as “seductive,” which implies an object of seduction, she then goes on to say something seemingly contradictory, but richly suggestive: “It [Baghari] is a profoundly seductive perfume,” she writes, “because it seems to want to please no one else but the wearer of the perfume first and foremost.” Elsewhere, she says of the older, animalic Baghari, that, “It is a much more self-centered fragrance in terms of its moral makeup.” These quotes suggest that animalic perfumes, although created for seduction, also provided a specifically feminine space of fantasy and pleasure, represented by the 1950s Tabu ad in this book that featured a woman lost in daydreams in front of a romantic painting. This space held more than the erotic; it was also a space for aesthetic appreciation, introspection, self-love/self-reflection, or “self-centeredness,” as Wagner describes it, in an era when feminine self-regard and perfume were both taboo.