Amy on Perfumes

I love when a connoisseur discusses one of her favorite subjects.

Here's Amy on perfumes...

(And Amy, I never heard that Beckett quote! I'll trust you and not Google it lol. I tend to believe it because wasn't he cavalier even when he won the Nobel Prize? Just continued on his vacation with his wife or something. One of my favorite (non-book) Beckett quotes was when he talked about how one of his favorite things to do in Paris is watch the rats swimming in the Seine. So typical!)

Diane Ackerman has authored many wonderful non-fiction books as well as poetry. I know you know this, Amy, but I'll mention it in case somebody else is looking for a good read. I think I've only read one, but a different one. She's had great success with those. I bet she gets taught a lot in universities as a great exemplar for non-fiction and expository writing.


Amy writes...

Thinking of Baudelaire happily stewing in his own effluvia reminds of the quote from Samuel Beckett, "All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante."

I can't claim "frag hags," they've been using it at Makeup Alley for years. The Urban Dictionary entry dates back to 2006.

Speaking of nasty scents in small quantities--this seems very important to classic French scents in particular, that _pudeur_. In the 1700s they actually used to add small amounts of baby poo to perfume formulas. I shit you not.

But yeah, many perfume notes are nasty in large quantities, particularly the animalic notes, civet in particular (Calvin Klein's Obsession for Women uses too much civet IMHO--smells like orange creamsicle and ass), but also cassis (smells like pee) and oakmoss (like musty seaweed).

I may have read that bit about the baby poo in the "Scent" chapter of _A Natural History of the Senses_, by Diane Ackerman. Either way, a lovely read, that.

Scents are hard to describe. We borrow terms from our other senses--taste, sight, feel, hearing--so we have sweet scents, bright scents, sharp scents--and perfume has "notes" and "chords."

There's quite a lot of crossover with taste, though, since we need our noses to taste properly.

If I think of one good proper word for a scentophile, a perfume connoisseur, a fragrance aficionado, I'll be back with that at least. A perfumer is sometimes called a "Nose." But the person obsessed with smelling them, the collector, the educated consumer? I've either forgotten or we need a new word.