February 1, 2021 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rachel Syme’s “On the Nose,” a delightful review of two recent books on scent: Harold McGee’s Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells and Robert Muchembled’s Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times. Syme’s opening paragraph is a beauty:

My obsession with perfume began when I was around ten years old, spritzing on layer after layer of my mother’s Anaïs Anaïs and Poison, until I reeked of a duty-free store. It continued through my mall-rat teen-age years, when I blew through my babysitting tips at Bath & Body Works, convinced that I could amplify my personality with a generous dose of Sun-Ripened Raspberry. Throughout my twenties, I collected hundreds of fragrance samples, bought for less than five dollars apiece from Web sites with names like the Perfumed Court and Surrender to Chance. Tiny glass vials of liquid tuberose regularly spilled out of my coat pockets. So when an editor at a newspaper for which I occasionally wrote about hair and beauty trends asked me if I had anything to say about perfume, I told her I did. I assumed that the main requisite for the task was personal experience, not technical expertise; surely I already had the vocabulary for detailing the scentscapes I’d been wandering for years. I knew I loved the smell of violets—their chalky, chocolate undertones. Or I thought I knew. Sitting down at my keyboard, I began to waver. Was it more like talcum powder and linden honey? Or like a Barbie-doll head sprinkled with lemonade?

I’d rate that the best opener of 2021 so far. I love carnal language; Syme’s piece brims with it. For example: “The olfactory world is more private than we may think: even when we share space, such as a particularly ripe subway car, one commuter may describe eau d’armpit as sweet Gorgonzola cheese, another will detect rotting pumpkin, and a third a barnyardy, cayenne tang.”

Syme’s “On the Nose” is a sensuous plunge into the scentosphere. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: Reading Syme’s review, I recalled another great New Yorker "nose" piece – Chandler Burr’s “The Scent of the Nile” (March 14, 2005), a profile of French perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena. Here’s a whiff:

Ellena’s best-known fragrances are Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert, for Bulgari, and First, for Van Cleef & Arpels. Just before joining Hermès, he had created L’Eau d’Hiver for Frédéric Malle’s élite collection, Éditions de Parfums. The scent was inspired by an aspect of the great 1906 Guerlain perfume Après l’Ondée. He said, “The problem—well, you can’t say there’s a problem with Après l’Ondée—but, bon, voilà, it is too opulent. Guerlain is baroque: put this in, and this, and this.” On the other hand, he said admiringly, the Guerlain scent had a marvellous sillage—the olfactory wake that trails behind a wearer of perfume. Someone once defined sillage to me, rather metaphysically, as the sense of a person being present in the room after she has left. Creating a sillage that is potent but not overpowering is tricky. With L’Eau d’Hiver, Ellena said, he wanted to pay homage to the Guerlain scent’s sillage—“but in enlightened form.” He selected elements from Après l’Ondée that were “soft, comfortable, light.” One of these was the natural essence of hay. He took some aubépine, an olfactory blend of finger paint and the wax used to clean linoleum floors, and added it to methyl ionone, a synthetic whose smell suggests iris. He then added a few more ingredients, including a natural distillation of honey. It took him two years to perfect his formula, which in the end contained twenty ingredients—very few, for a perfume. L’Eau d’Hiver smells, delightfully, of ground white pepper and cold seawater, with a touch of fresh crab. And it has a sillage worthy of Guerlain.

If you enjoy ravishing descriptions of scent, as I do, you’ll love Chandler Burr’s exquisite “The Scent of the Nile.”