Scent and beauty
What is a beautiful scent?
This differs, obviously, person to person, region to region, culture to culture, etc.
I heard this term “The French make love and then take a shower, the Americans take a shower then make love" from the legendary Michael Edwards (inventor of the Fragrance Wheel and the world's largest taxonomised perfume database) on Emma Vernon's podcast The Perfume Room (episode 138). I once had a boyfriend who didn't naturally have body odour (this is a genetic pre-disposition prevalent in many east-Asian people) so he found people-smells offensive, including my own body odour (I'm differentiating this from skin-scent). On the other hand, I had another boyfriend who laughed at the idea of me being “smelly" because his opinion was that my female body odour paled in comparison to his; for him, mine was a pleasant smell no matter how strong I personally found it.
As for me, I wished one was more smelly and the other less. Certainly we associate the scent of skin with sex, or love, or I suppose I should say intimacy in general. And what are the French famous for? That's right.
I asked prominent Sydney florist and co-author of the immensely popular Leaf Supply book series Sophia Kaplan to visit me at the Ethics Centre Lab. I wanted to ask her about the role of scent in floristry, and the flower supply chain.
Do people ever request scented flowers? I asked. “Not really,” she explained, “the main focus is the look. But I do try to put scented flowers in the bride's bouquet, so that when she encounters that smell again, it'll remind her of her wedding day.”
Ah, the magic of the olfactory time stamp.
“I think people are doing it more and more,” she said, referring to purposely having scented flowers on tables. “They know that scent is important at a wedding.”
And what of the supply chain? Had she found visiting flower farms easy enough? Was there any secrecy around flowers, such as magical hybrids, or miracle fertilisers? “Actually, there seems to be a comraderie between the farmers where they help each other out - a disease went around last year and they were all sharing tips and ideas to help tackle the problem.”
“And sure, I can go and visit a farm if I have a relationship with them, or a good reason. The more old-school farmers might be a bit suspicious if a stranger turned up out of nowhere but the younger ones are posting their produce on social media and even selling directly to customers.”
So, it's just perfume farms then, with the smoke and mirrors; despite sharing many of the same flowers. Sophia suggested my next project should be going around to Australia's perfume farms and comparing them as a micro-industry. Great idea! Who's in?
And what of the overpowering-smelling flowers? The Asiatic lilies, for example? “Ah yes, it's common practice to pull the stamens off those. And the other day I picked up a load of jonquils - the white ones with the double-flowers - and the scent filled up the car to point where it started smelling like, almost, urine, or something.” White flowers and the smell of a used toilet means she was picking up on the Indol molecule. White flowers particularly, although it also exists in most scented flowers, have high doses of a molcule that is also in our faeces. Without it, flowers would smell drab and clean and a bit screechy, like detergent. It's common perfume practice to add a little extra Indol to really give flower scents a “headiness"; that intoxicating feeling. Too much, however, and you may as well put your head in a toilet bowl and inhale. One time I took one too many close-up sniffs Serge Lutens' Fleur d'Oranger (which, by the way, is my favourite orange flower perfume) and I could no longer detect the floral part at all - it was like sniffing a scat.
I gave Sophia a whiff of Indol and asked if that was the smell that was bothering her in the car. “Oop, that's the one.” Which just goes too show that you can indeed have too much of a good thing. In fact, after I infused the ethical scents into the artwork (to be painted over in a couple of days), I asked the staff if the aroma wafting out of the Lab bothered them in their office. They assured me that it did not, that it smelled “divine", “lovely", etc… whereas I, on the other hand, with the raw materials infused into my hair, clothes, skin, and general existence, feel entirely stalked and vaguely violated by these supposedly pleasant scents. It's time to go home for the day.
