I Love You, Perfume People

There's something that occurred to me as I was walking around today, smelling my perfume, a pungent leather chypre, as it radiated off my skin in the humid Atlanta air. I felt a lot of things: pleasure, curiosity about how the scent was changing, and, more than anything, a desire for everyone to have this type of experience with fragrances. I've been into perfume since 2021, with the hobby taking up progressively more and more of my time, but every so often the sheer delight of it hits me anew. It makes me wonder why some people still go around unscented. It makes me think about what perfume is to the people who don't engage with it at all.

Since I started being a little more public about my interest in fragrances, I've gotten a shocking number of messages from friends, acquaintances, and anonymous social media followers who want insight into how to “get into perfume.” I say shocking because I really don't consider myself to be particularly well-spoken or well-educated about perfume; I've been babbling about it online with genuine, unpolished newbie zeal. The questions I get range from asking what I, personally, enjoy about perfume, to where to buy perfumes, to how to navigate different brands and review sites. I even had one person ask me politely how and where to apply perfume on their body and how to tell if it had worn off. 

These questions have a ring of familiarity. They remind me of how people tend to ask me questions about fine art (you know, all those expensive objects that live in museums), another topic that I guess I talk about so much that people assume I know something about it. I don't know how to answer art questions any better than I know how to answer perfume questions, but I think they're interesting all the same. They're educational about the asker's state of mind.

I find that people approach perfume questions and art questions with the same tone. Their questions belie a sort of curious, uncertain hunger, from which a genuine engagement with the artform itself is actually pretty absent. I get questions about “how to look at art” and “how to apply perfume” from people who don't even know if they like art or perfume yet. But they want to like it, and perhaps more pointedly they want to be the type of person who looks at art and wears perfume. I find this interesting. One thing people don't say is that they want to smell good: for themselves, for others, or for any reason at all.

Last weekend I was sitting in a circle of new friends; on the table in front of us were twelve perfumes, some classics like YSL Opium and L’Heure Bleue which I'd never tried as well as a few niche selections. When we were introducing ourselves, the question of why we were interested in fragrances came up, and my answer, besides the fact that I find olfactory art to be thrilling and fascinating, was that I wanted to spend more time around “perfume people.”

It got a laugh, but everyone knew what I meant: perfume people are a type of person. And, if there's one thing I've learned over the past few years of exploring fragrance as an art, it's that I love perfume people. You can be a perfume “enthusiast,” of course, without being a perfume person in the way I'm describing, the same way someone who claims to be an avid music lover can actually mean they collect every single Taylor Swift vinyl variant. That's one way to do things. But the perfume people I'm talking about aren't the folks who enjoy speculating about the future value of a Guerlain flanker or flexing their wall of designer department store fragrances.

What are perfume people, then, as I use the term? In the broadest sense, I find that perfume people tend to be artistically oriented but highly interdisciplinary. They tend to be pragmatic about the financial realities of art-making (of all kinds) and realistic about how semi-permeable the membrane between art and money has to be in order for art to keep happening. They tend to be good with words; many of my favorite perfume people are writers, and all are readers. Any of them can hold their own on a podcast, and many host their own podcasts. Some are DJs, some are musicians, nearly all are eclectic and enthusiastic fans of music in some capacity, regardless of genre. Some are painters or gallerists, some are aromatherapists or community healers. Very few are influencers, and the ones who are still have a streak of old-school blog culture in them; most are still writing long-form articles or couching their suggestions in thoughtful research even though it's not fashionable to do so.

I wonder why this is, why perfume people are the way that they are. I think partially it's because perfume lends itself to being social and curious, to asking “What do you think?” and “Did it work for you?” and “What does it remind you of?” Perfume is also about the body, but not how your body looks. It’s about the body simply as something unique to you. There’s also the depth of knowledge perfume as a hobby can unlock. The archive of perfumes, past and present, is so massive you can rarely hold a conversation with a perfume person and not walk away with a new-to-you scent recommendation.

Even at this scale, the archive still sometimes isn’t enough to contain what we all feel when we smell perfume. I’d imagine that the interdisciplinary sensibility found in perfume people probably stems from the fact that talking about fragrances requires conjuring imagery from a diverse range of sources in order to really cut through. Scent is abstract, but it evokes many things, and invites us to explore other types of art as we chase those evocations. Perfume people go down these paths recklessly and enthusiastically, on both sides of the perfume process: for example, I have seen perfumers who release whole albums of music (as in John Biebel’s January Sound Project) or name perfumes after Cocteau Twins deep cuts (I was absolutely giddy checking out Filigree and Shadow’s website), and I've also had extensive discussions with friends who are not perfumers but love fragrances about what songs feel like certain perfumes to them, or whether a project like MF DOOM's Special Herbs could be considered the sound equivalent of a perfume organ. And it's not just music. Often a conversation with a perfume person will start with perfume and go a million different places: memory, literature, food, orientalism, commodity culture.

All of this seems to be in the DNA of perfume people today, but I don't think it's a new phenomenon, even though communities of thought about perfume are certainly facilitated by the internet and social media. When I think “interdisciplinary,” I think about artists like Brian Eno; it is no surprise, perhaps, that in 1992 he wrote a short article about perfume. To me it’s worth a read.

In typical prescient Eno fashion, he spends most of his time here singing the praises of the uncertain and intangible nature of perfume. Looking back at the period in which he was writing, you have to imagine culture as a series of micro-ruptures between past and present: not one singular revolution, after the dismantled optimism of the 60s, but something peopled by those intangible rhizomes of resistance and retreat that created the foundation for how we all do culture now–for better or worse. I see “1992” and think about how detached, literary postmodernism had to swallow a searing dose of political urgency during the AIDS crisis, or how a growing awareness of alternative histories and the realities of global imperialism could coexist comfortably with an increasingly disengaged suburban youth culture and Reaganite conservatism. In other words: it doesn't surprise me that what interested Eno about perfume was how it mimics the relativity and plurality he was already observing in culture:

“So, just as we might come to accept that "coriander" is a name for a fuzzy, not very clearly defined space in the whole of our smell experience, we also start to think about other words in the same way. Big Ideas (Freedom, Truth, Beauty, Love, Reality, Art, God, America, Socialism) start to lose their capital letters, cease being so absolute and reliable, and become names for spaces in our psyches. We find ourselves having to frequently reassess or even reconstruct them completely. We are, in short, increasingly uncentered, unmoored, lost, living day to day, engaged in and ongoing attempt to cobble together a credible, at least workable, set of values, ready to shed it and work out another when the situation demands.”

Spoken like a true perfume person. If there's one thing I love about Eno as an artist, it's how he has always engaged with the idea of the contemporary, how he has always tried to really be attuned to what was happening in the world and bring it into art. To Eno, at the time he was writing, adopting perfume-thinking was a way to speak to what was already happening, a way of re-articulating the deconstructive impulse that art institutions in the 90s were still dragging their feet on embracing:

“The point for me,” he concludes in his article, “is not to expect perfumery to take its place in some nice, reliable, rational world order, but to expect everything else to become like perfume.”

That's a fantastic sentiment, and a great quote. Walking around like I was today, wishing fragrance magic on the world, I wondered if an echo of Eno's desire to have all art be more like perfume was what I was feeling. After some reflection, I think it's something different. It’s more about wanting to connect with people. I found myself thinking back to all those questions from friends and strangers. I considered the level of painful insecurity you have be operating on to ask another person how to tell when perfume has worn off on your own body, as if getting the answer wrong will exclude you from something. As if your body is not good enough to figure it out.

There's a lesson in there somewhere, a way of marking where mass culture might be heading in its relationship to art. Eno's position presupposes that people are able to engage with art at all. In our current moment, we’re faced with a crisis of detachment from the arts which even he couldn't have predicted. Thirty years out from Eno's declaration that everything should become more like perfume, I sense that the average person would not be scandalized by the dismantling of rigid thought he calls for. This is not because average person has a strong, profound relationship to monolithic ideologies of art and life, but because they are very far away from anything to do with art as it integrates into their own lives at all. To feel the pleasures of deconstruction, you have to stand on a construct as it trembles. Many people don't even have their feet on that ground anymore.

I think a lot of people sense this. And there are explanations: defunded humanities education, isolation, the increasing importance of identity (such that until you feel confident identifying as an art lover, you can’t start to love art). A million other things. From those of us who are seeing it all unfold from an art lover’s position, often the response to this difficulty is to take a sharp turn into misanthropy, which I suppose makes sense. If you live the art life, it can be frustrating to see how less devoted people maneuver that landscape, taking the most basic suggestions from influencers (I'm back on Twitter after a long absence and people are, shocker, still very mad about BookTok), or only buying what people sell them. I get frustrated too. But I just don't know if that's effective, or generous, or a good way to live, in the long term.

So what's the solution? Well, first of all, I think it pays to be empathetic and acknowledge all the anti-intellectual and social forces that work against a person who isn't confident in art and to meet them where they are. But I think the other solution is that we all start to behave more like perfume people. That we talk to people about art the way that perfume people do.

Social media culture and our ever-narrowing field of paid jobs and careers in the arts says that it benefits a person to be highly specialized, to have one concrete position or "thing" that they do. We’re expected to be marketing team and agent and artist all at once, and yet we’re also supposed to build an audience who can expect to go to us for one topic and one topic only. Of course, we still need professionals, artisans, people who can master skills. Many of my favorite perfumers are singular in this regard. But most of us don't and can’t achieve this type of singular focus, and when we mimic it, we just get rigidity without the benefits of savantism. That rigidity tends to trickle down, to make newcomers even less likely to branch out.

For example, I suppose I could lean into the perception a handful of people have of me and try to make a name opining about art. I guess I could start telling people exactly what and what not to feel. I could add my identity to that mix and double down, validate my opinions with some mix of personal politics and force. In the same vein, I could probably give the people asking me fragrance questions a starter guide with a list of scents they have to love. It would probably sate the curiosity and uncertainty that some people have, but my knowledge is limited, and I don't think it would cure the base issue. I don’t think it would empower them with the tools of analysis or show them a path to discovery.

I love fragrance as an art. I really do want everyone to explore it. But the point, for me, is not to expect perfumery to dominate the conversation about art, or for it to gain popularity with everyone in the same way. Instead, I hope that we all might become more like perfume people, every day, with whatever art that excites us. I hope we can let a lot of bottles sit on our shelves at the same time, invite people to discover things for themselves and have reactions that take their bodies, their memories, and their other passions into account. I want us to support small artists in their work, and for us all to admit that sometimes buying a $200 bottle of something magical does make a difference, and that it shouldn't be a signifier of anything other than your appreciation for what's in that bottle. Above all, I want us to acknowledge that our identities are not a tagline or a collection of things we’ve bought, and are made up of notes and accords and communities and conversations. I want everyone to feel this way, to trust their senses but also know that we all smell (and smell) differently. In reality, we're already living like perfume people most of the time. It's just a matter of embracing it, and inviting others to do the same.