by Mandy Aftel
The same fate awaited rose, neroli, and even ylang ylang, which is that rare thing, an inexpensive floral. Artificial rose oil was touted for its ease of use; it would not become cloudy in the cold, or separate into flakes. It could be relied upon to be “always of exactly the same composition,” producing “a constantly uniform effect”—unlike the varying quality of the “Turkish oils,” which required expertise and vigilance to evaluate, “in view of the attempts incessantly made with new adulterants.” An 1898 Schimmel report unabashedly extols the use of its synthetic neroli oil “in place of the French distillate”:
Our experience32, extending over several years, has fully convinced us that we can justly do so. Continuously handling and studying since the year 1895 a large number and wide scope of various articles of perfumery, in which our synthetic neroli has been used exclusively, we can report the fact that it has met in every respect the highest expectations and requirements. All these preparations invariably have retained their incomparably fine refreshing fragrance, stronger and better than those flavored with the natural oil. Experts to whom we have submitted these products for comparative estimation have, without exception, acknowledged the superiority of, and give preference to, those scented with the synthetic oil.
Of course the synthetics were not of the same quality as the natural oils. Unquestionably they were cheap; they were also colorless—in every way. They were isolated chemicals without the complexity or nuance of the naturals. They were an oxymoron, utilitarian components of a luxurious, sensual product. Having crept into the perfumer’s repertoire, however, they began to dominate it and to dictate the character of fragrance blends.
The most inspired uses of the synthetics were in scents that capitalized on their brusque and one-dimensional qualities. Chanel No. 5 is the best example of this. Created by Ernie Beaux for Coco Chanel, it was the first perfume to be built upon the scent of aldehydes. It represented a complete break with the natural model, which had been kept limpingly alive by Guerlain and Coty33, with their flower-named scents. With Chanel, the connection between perfume and fashion was solidified.
The revolution in packaging techniques ushered in by François Coty completed the birth of the modern perfume age. Born Frances Spoturno on the island of Corsica in 1876, Coty moved to France at an early age. As a youth, he became friendly with a nearby apothecary who blended his own fragrances and sold them in very ordinary packaging. (At the time, perfumes were purchased in plain glass apothecary bottles, brought home, and transferred to decorative flasks.) Coty became obsessed with the idea of creating fragrances and presenting them in beautiful bottles. In his twenties, he went to Grasse, where he managed to work at the house of Chiris, one of the largest producers of floral essences at that time. When he returned to Paris, he borrowed money from his grandmother and built a perfume laboratory in his apartment. In 1904 he created his first perfume, La Rose Jacqueminot, which was an immediate success. In 1908 he opened an elegant shop on Place Vendôme, which was by chance next door to the great art-nouveau jeweler René Lalique. Coty asked Lalique to design his perfume bottles and found a way to mass-produce them with iron molds, having figured out that “a perfume should attract the eye as much as the nose.” He also had the ingenious idea of allowing customers to sample perfume before purchasing it. His testers, signs, and labels, all designed by Lalique, were exceptionally beautiful and helped to create Coty’s extraordinary success.
Perfumery was now a thoroughly modern business, albeit a colorful one that still drew its share of mavericks and bohemians, thanks to its glamorous and mysterious aura as well as the potential for self-made prosperity. Among them were a fair number of women, who could make a name for themselves in this rapidly developing field without the usual constraints that limited their participation in education and professional life. An early pioneer in this respect was Harriet Hubbard Ayers (1849—1903). Born into a socially prominent Chicago family, she married a wealthy iron dealer, Herbert Ayers, when she was sixteen. After the historic Chicago fire of 1871 took the life of one of her three children and uprooted the marriage, Ayers spent a year in Paris, recovering and soaking up culture. Then she moved to New York, determined to establish her independence, and started a business selling a beauty cream called Recamier, which she claimed to have discovered in Paris, where it had been used by all the great beauties during the time of Napoleon. Genuine or not, it was an immediate success, and Ayers soon added perfumes to her line, with names like Dear Heart, Mes Fleurs, and Golden Chance. Although her family conspired to take away the business and to commit her to a mental institution, she eventually emerged to become America’s first beauty columnist and the country’s best-paid, most popular female newspaper journalist.
Perfume vendor, era of Louis XV
Ayers’s heirs were women like Lilly Daché (1893–1990), a Parisborn milliner who arrived in New York City in 1924 with less than fifteen dollars to her name and in short order owned her own business, specializing in making fruited turbans for Carmen Miranda and one-of-a-kind hats for Jean Harlow and Marlene Dietrich. In an opulent green satin showroom, she sold perfumes with names like Drifting and Dashing along with the hats.
Yet another woman captured by the economic and aesthetic lure of perfume was Esmé Davis, who was born in West Virginia to a Spanish opera singer and was herself at various times a ballet dancer who toured with Pavlova and Diaghilev, a watercolorist, a musician, and a trainer of lions, elephants, and horses. Along the way, she studied perfumery in Cairo, and when Russian friends in Paris later sent her some perfume recipes from their collection of antique formula books, she launched a fragrance line in New York with scents she christened A May Morning, Indian Summer, and Green Eyes.
Paul Poiret34 (1879–1944) was the first couturier to create perfumes. His clientele included Sarah Bernhardt, and he employed a professional perfumer who created blends—Borgia, Alladin, Nuit de Chine—that ventured into exotic new territory, combining Oriental ingredients with intense and heady florals. At his fashion shows, Poiret dispensed perfumed fans, which he made sure would be used by keeping all the windows closed. Ahmed Soliman (1906–56), known as “Cairo’s Perfume King,” had a perfumery in Khan el Khalili Bazaar, Egypt’s center for perfume since the time of the pharaohs. Egyptian women, however, were interested only in perfume from France, so Cairo’s Perfume King made his killing off American and European tourists, to whom he marketed perfumes with appropriately exotic names: Flower of the Sahara, Omar Khayyam, Secret of the Desert, Queen of Egypt, Harem. The centerpiece of his shop was an ornate statue of the pharaoh Ramses that poured perfume from its mouth by virtue of a mechanism which had to be wound up every half hour.
Although the perfume business was booming, the direction it had taken had cut it off from its creative wellsprings. Reliance on synthetics eventually led to a shift in perfume structure and its interplay of ingredients. Most contemporary perfumes are “linear” fragrances designed to produce a strong and instantaneous effect, striking the senses all at once and quickly dissipating. They are static; they do not mix with the wearer’s body chemistry, nor do they evolve on the skin. What you smell is what you get.
The decline of natural perfumery was not only a material loss but also a spiritual one. Natural perfumes evolve on the skin, changing over time and uniquely in response to body chemistry. At the most basic level, they interact with us, making who we are—and who we are in the process of becoming—part of the story. They are about our relationship to ourselves, and only secondarily about our relationship to others. “The more we penetrate35 odors,” the great twentieth-century perfumer and philosopher Edmond Roudnitska observed, “the more they end up possessing us. They live within us, becoming an integral part of us, participating in a new function within us.”
Natural perfumes cannot ultimately be reduced to a formula, because the very essences of which they are composed contain traces of other elements that cannot themselves be captured by formulas. Like the rich histories of their symbo
lism and use, this essential mysteriousness makes them magical to work with, in the sense that Paracelsus meant when he wrote, “Magic has power36 to experience and fathom things which are inaccessible to human reason. For magic is a great secret wisdom, just as reason is a great public folly.”
Like alchemy, working to transform natural essences into perfume is a process that appeals to our intuition and imagination rather than to our intellect. This is not to say there is no logic to it, but it is a logic of a different order. Like other creative endeavors, it is intensely solitary. The perfumer’s atelier is the counterpart to the alchemist’s laboratory, which was itself a mirror of the hermetically sealed flask in which the transformation of matter into spirit was to take place—hermes meaning “secret” or “sealed,” and thus referring to a sacred space sealed off from outside influences.
The hermeticism of the alchemical process consists of not just the solitary nature of the work but also its interiority. That is, it can be comprehended only by being inside it, just as we can understand love only by being in love. As Henri Bergson notes, “Philosophers agree37 in making a deep distinction between two ways of knowing a thing. The first implies going all around it, the second entering into it. The first depends on the viewpoint chosen and the symbols employed, while the second is taken from no viewpoint and rests on no symbol. Of the first kind of knowledge we shall say that it stops at the relative; of the second that, wherever possible, it attains the absolute.”
In alchemy, attaining the absolute meant creating the Elixir, that magical potion to defeat the ravages of time. But the process depended on the marriage of elements the alchemist could not perceive. These were the “subtle bodies38” that “must be beyond space and time. Every real body fills space because it consists of matter, while the subtle body is said not to consist of matter, or it is matter which is so exceedingly subtle that it cannot be perceived. So it must be a body which does not fill space, a matter which is beyond space, and therefore it would be in no time,” writes Jung, adding, “The subtle body is a transcendental concept which cannot be expressed in terms of our language or our philosophical views, because they are all inside the categories of time and space.”
In other words, the alchemical quest stands for the attempt to create something new and beautiful in the world, through a process that cannot ultimately be reduced to chemistry. The elements—or, rather, the subtle bodies in them—learn how to marry. As Gaston Bachelard remarks, “The alchemist is an educator39 of matter.” The experience of transformation he sets in motion in turn transforms him. As Cherry Gilchrist puts it in The Elements of Alchemy, “The alchemist is described40 as the artist who, through his operations, brings Nature to perfection. But the process is also like the unfolding of the Creation of the world, to which the alchemist is a witness as he watches the changes that take place within the vessel. The vessel is a universe in miniature, a crystalline sphere through which he is privileged to see the original drama of transformation.”
To the perfumer, then, the Elixir is a metaphor for the wholeness that can be experienced in working with the essences. Sensually compelling in themselves, they come trailing their dramatic histories and so transform the perfumer as she dissolves and combines them—solve et coagula—in the hope of creating something entirely new. If, as Henri Bergson says, “the object of art41 is to put to sleep the active or rather resistant powers of our personality, and thus bring us into a state of perfect responsiveness,” working with scent offers an unusually direct way of arriving there. It allows us to experience life afresh, sets the imagination flowing. But as with any art, we must seek it out and welcome the transformations it allows. As Paracelsus exhorts, “It is our task42 to seek art, for without seeking it we shall never learn the secrets of the world. Who can boast that roast squab flies into his mouth? Or that a grapevine runs after him? You must go to it yourself.”
2
Prima Materia Perfume Basics
Paul [Bowles] was … a great collector of aromatic oils, which he had gathered from his travels—patchouli from Penang, vetiver from Indian root grass, sandalwood from Bangkok, perfumes from Paris circa 1940, Berlin after-shave from the thirties. He would dip a stick of bland-scented incense into the neck of a bottle of oil, light it—the scent exploding from the heat—and then we’d discuss the book or piece of music he’d give me before I took my leave each evening. Paul was a man indifferent to the world at large but addicted to its sensory details.
—Daniel Halpern, “The Last Existentialist”
43 TAKE AN ORANGE in your hands. Press the rind with your thumbnail. You are in the presence of an essential oil—one of the forms in which the scented essence of a plant manifests itself. The odors of plants reside in different parts of them: sometimes in the rind of the fruit, as with blood orange and pink grapefruit; sometimes in the roots, as with the iris and the grass Vetiveria zizanoides, known as vetiver; sometimes in the woody stem, as with cedarwood or sandalwood; sometimes in the bark, as with cinnamon; sometimes in the leaves, as in mint, patchouli, and thyme; sometimes in the seeds, as with tonka bean and ambrette; and sometimes in the flower, as with rose and carnation. And a few scented essences used in perfumery are derived not from plants at all but from the glandular secretions of animals—the civet cat, the beaver, or the musk deer.
Natural essences are the atoms of perfumery, the building blocks with which complex and evocative scents are created. They are, in a sense, substances in their most concentrated but least material form, containing the whole nature and perfection of the substances themselves. They possess a compressed vitality, a bioactive power that cannot be measured by chemical analysis but which manifests itself in their potent effect on our emotions and states of consciousness.
Kirlian photography, discovered by the Russian electrical technician Semyon Kirlian in 1939, is a technique of taking pictures by means of electricity. An object is placed directly on photographic paper or film laid atop a metal plate to which a high-voltage current is applied. This records the energy field that surrounds living organisms, which appears as bright colors or halos surrounding the objects. A photograph of a freshly cut leaf reveals a colorful aura that diminishes over time until the leaf dies. A strong energy field that radiates outward is also visible when pure essential oils are photographed on a blotter strip. The energy field takes distinctive shapes that correspond to people’s descriptions of the scents—heavy, soft, sharp, bright, and so on. The field, which is lacking altogether in photographs of synthetic essences, corresponds to Henri Bergson’s concept of the elan vital—the life force. It is also kin to the quinta essentia, the spark of divinity at the heart of living things that the alchemist, in his never-ending quest, toiled to extract.
According to A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, “In alchemy the prima materia44 or first matter from which the universe was created is identical with the substance which constitutes the soul in its original pure state.” In alchemy, each essence is of two kinds: sap (or juice) and mystery. The sap is the physical aspect, the scented material itself. The mystery, the perfect part of every composite substance, is informed with its virtue, nature, and essential quality.
Natural perfumery materials possess both sap and mystery. They are the concentrated essence of the materials from which they are derived, but they are not reducible to one thing; by their very nature, they are formed from minute traces of various materials, which is why Moroccan rose smells different from Bulgarian rose or Egyptian rose, or, for that matter, why Moroccan rose itself varies discernibly from season to season. In some highly complex essences, such as jasmine, numerous chemical substances, sometimes many hundreds, have been isolated, and still there are many more elements that have not been identified. Synthetics can approximate the dominant qualities of the natural essences, but because of this irreducible complexity, they cannot capture the subtlety or softness of their odors. With all the chemical analysis available, natural substances cannot be pinned down to a formula and replicated in
a laboratory. Only nature can create the smell of jasmine at nightfall.
“Why natural oils?”45 asks Robert Tisserand in The Art of Aromatherapy. “Why not anything that smells nice, whether it is natural or synthetic? The answer is simply that synthetic or inorganic substances do not contain any ‘life force’; they are not dynamic. Everything is made of chemicals, but organic substances like essential oils have a structure which only Mother Nature can put together. They have a life force, an additional impulse which can only be found in living things.”
This perception of the power inherent in natural materials is an old one. Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine who, at the request of Cosimo di Medici, founded an academy based on the writings of Plato and alchemical texts, was a great believer in the uplifting and restorative powers of aromas. In his 1489 Book of Life, which sets forth his theory of emotional, physical, and spiritual health, he proposes, “If you have taken46 the flavors from things no longer living, the odors from dry aromatics, things with no life left in them, and you thought these were very useful to life, why should you hesitate to take the odors from plants with their roots still growing on them, still living, things that have wonderfully accumulated powers for life?”
The power of natural essences derives from their complex histories as well as from their ineluctable earthiness. Holding a vial of essential oil to the light and admiring its jewel-like color, inhaling its complicated fragrance, one imagines the people and places who have known and used it, the history and rituals in which it has played a part. And perfumers, who not only experience the essences but experiment with them, participate in ancient traditions of sorcery, medicine, and alchemy. Working with the distillates of some of the most evocative of nature’s creations—spirits in every sense of the word—is a powerful way of transcending the everyday.
