by Mandy Aftel
For each great love in his life he jealously kept the perfumes used by the various women concerned. By the time he was eighty he had collected eight such perfumes, labeled with their respective names, the years of love which they represented, and the places to which they were linked. “In the wake of these perfumes,” he told me with half-closed eyes, “I relive in a film of memories the delicious romances of my life, when the whole world rotated around one woman, her name and her face, under the spell of her perfume, which now erases time and brings back in all its beauty what by now, as far as reality is concerned, has turned to ashes.”
In memory, erotic scent, which is founded on the specificity of the beloved’s body, at last assumes a life independent of the body. As Casanova observes in his Memoirs, “There is something in the air of the bedroom of the woman one loves, something so intimate, so balsamic, such voluptuous emanations, that if a lover had to choose between Heaven and this place of delight, his hesitation would not last for a moment.” This transcendence reminds us of the transformative aspects of the alchemical process. “The only … alchemist that turns everything into gold is love,” writes Anaïs Nin. “The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love.”
Essences that are considered erotic in themselves fall into three categories116, which I have adapted from the work of Paul Jellinek.
Erogenous: ambrette seed, costus root, civet, castoreum
Sultry (erogenous and narcotic): tuberose, jasmine, tolu balsam, labdanum, styrax, orange blossom
Narcotic: rose, Peru balsam, benzoin, ylang ylang, magnolia, neroli, cassia
It should be remembered that context and proportion are everything, so this list by nature is not definitive. Even the spice oils, like cinnamon and clove—along with others strongly associated with taste, such as vanilla and tea—can be stimulating rather than comforting, in the right company, or to the right nose. So can citrus oils, and herbal essences such as spearmint, rosemary, lavender, and thyme, which are generally considered to create a feeling of control, restraint, and detachment, the opposite of eroticism.
Here are formulas for two aphrodisiac perfumes. The first is based on essences that conjure up a deliciously edible aroma; the second is more blatantly suggestive (and has a lower concentration of essences because of their incredible intensity).
EDIBLE BLEND
15 ml perfume alcohol or jojoba oil
15 drops black tea
10 drops vanilla
8 drops cognac
12 drops rose absolute
2 drops champa
2 drops ginger
8 drops blood orange
3 drops pink grapefruit
EROGENOUS BLEND
15 ml perfume alcohol or jojoba oil
2 drops ambrette
2 drops civet
2 drops costus
8 drops jasmine absolute
6 drops orange flower absolute
10 drops tuberose
2 drops black pepper
4 drops nutmeg
Any perfume can be made as a solid, but aphrodisiac blends are particularly appropriate in this form. They can be rubbed anywhere on the body that you desire, and are readily incorporated into erotic play. You can draw a scent necklace around your neck to encourage nibbling and whatever (and wherever) else imagination suggests. (As Coco Chanel said to a young woman who asked her where to apply perfume, “Wherever one wants to be kissed!”)
Either of the above formulas (or any blend, for that matter) can be made as a solid by the following method: Blend the essences into 4 ml of jojoba. Grate ½ teaspoon beeswax and melt over low heat in a small ceramic or glass dish. Quickly stir in the jojoba mixture. Immediately remove from heat and pour into a compact. Leave to set for fifteen minutes.
Single-note solid perfumes such as tuberose or jasmine are perfect complements to sensuality and desire. Blend around 20 drops of the essence into the 4 ml of jojoba and mix with beeswax as above.
8
Perfumed Haters The Reverie of the Bath
The individual is not the sum of his common impressions but of his unusual ones. Thus familiar mysteries are created in us which are expressed in rare symbols. It is near water and its flowers that I have best understood that reverie is an ever-emanating universe, a fragrant breath that issues from things through the dreamer.
—Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams
117 WATER, limitless and immortal, is the beginning and end of all things on earth. The most changeable of the elements, all ebb and flow and constant movement, it has a hypnotic, ineluctable hold on us. We are drawn to its depths because we see in it our own image. “In his inmost recesses118,” Bachelard writes, “the human being shares the destiny of the flowing water. Water is truly the transitory element … A being dedicated to water is a being in flux. He dies every minute; something of his substance is constantly falling away.” It is the nature of water to dissolve, to wash away, to purify, to regenerate. It lures us into seeing in depth, and seeing beyond.
In art and literature, these soul-searching and restorative properties are most often linked to our experience of water in nature, as in this passage from Moby-Dick:
Let the most absent-minded119 of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever …
Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and make him the own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
The solitary experience of bathing, however, evokes this same aura of mystery and inchoate identity. Immersed in water, we are in a true demimonde, half in the world, half out of it. We are in a trance, a dream, between states of being. The petty cares of the day drift away; even our firm sense of who and what we are dissolves. More than half of what we are, as it happens, is water, and the bath is a reminder that in no respect are we as solid or unchangeable as we habitually think.
Half submerged, we regress, the warm water recalling the womb, the source of life. Our adult sense of self disintegrates. A deep forgetfulness steals over us; we slip the noose of the present and escape into an anonymous intimacy where all is mist and blurry edges. It is as if a welcome emptiness has seeped in through our very pores.
We return restored, as if we have washed clean the slate of daily existence and can begin afresh. “I guess I feel about a hot bath120,” Sylvia Plath writes, “the way those religious people feel about holy water … The longer I lay there in the clear hot water the purer I felt, and when I stepped out at last and wrapped myself in one of the big, soft, white hotel bath-towels, I felt pure and sweet as a baby.” Thus is water equated with oblivion and unconsciousness.
In alchemical imagery, bathing is linked with the breakdown of one state of being in the transition to a new one. Depictions of the mystic marriage of opposites present sun and moon (sol and luna) as a king and queen bathing together; they are being cleansed of their impurities before uniting.
Showers conjure up none of this reverie or association with dissolution and rebirth. They are upright, utilitarian, and efficient. If showers are prose, baths are poetry. But what kind of poetry? Depending on the mood of the bather or the time of day, the bath can stimulate or soothe, prepare us to go out in
to the real world or beckon us to retreat into a dream world.
A morning bath is a stepping-stone from the world of the bed to the world outside. It postpones the clash with harsh reality and cushions us against it, but also gently and insistently propels us toward it. “I was trembling with cold121 and felt only a deep need to soak in very hot bath water, in a rather acid aromatic bath, a bath like those in which you take refuge in Paris on cold winter mornings,” writes Colette. The refuge is temporary; soon we must brave the cold.
The evening bath, however, is the true meditative bath, an opportunity to shrug off the responsibilities of respectable life and slip back into the expansive, vital solitude of childhood—the kind of solitude Rilke invokes in Letters to a Young Poet: “The necessary thing122 is after all but this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going-into-oneself and for hours meeting no one—this one must be able to attain. To be solitary, the way one was solitary as a child, when the grownups went around involved with things that seemed important and big because they themselves looked so busy and because one comprehended nothing of their doing.” In the dark and peace that descend when the day is over, we experience the bath differently, with heightened awareness and greater clarity, just as we do water in nature. As Bachelard observes, “For the soul123 at peace with itself, water and night together seem to take on a common fragrance; it seems that the humid shadow has a perfume of double freshness. Only at night can we smell the perfumes of water clearly. The sun has too much odor for sunlit water to give us its own.”
For all but the very rich, however, the experience of the bath as a place of solitude and meditation is a recent innovation. For centuries, the bath was a great public institution, sometimes accommodating a couple of thousand bathers or more. Ancient Rome represented the apex of the public bath. Wellborn men gathered there to see and be seen, in complexes whose vastness and grandeur rivaled that of contemporary theme parks. In addition to the baths themselves, they housed theaters, temples, festival halls, vast tree-lined promenades, lecture halls, and libraries.
Plan of a Roman bath
Upon entering the baths proper, the bather undressed and handed his clothes to the attendants. He proceeded to the unctuarium, which must have looked something like the shop of an old-fashioned chemist, its walls lined with jars and urns of all shapes and sizes, each containing a perfumed oil or oil-based unguent. These were simple oils, such as rhodium, made from roses; narcissum, from the narcissus; melinum, from quinces; metopium, from bitter almonds; and crocinum, from saffron, which imbued the wearer with both a fine odor and a rich color. The bather purchased them as he could afford them, different kinds for the various parts of the body: one for the feet and thighs, another for the cheeks and chest, a third for the arms, a fourth for the eyebrows and hair, a fifth for the neck and knees. He continued to the frigidarium, or cold bath, for the preliminary ablutions, then on to the lukewarm tepidarium and the scalding calderium. Here, perspiring freely, he scrubbed himself with a bronze comb—or, if he could afford it, had his servant scrape and massage him and apply the unguents to his skin. (Because the water had a high mineral content, it dried out the skin, so the oily preparations were a means of restoring moisture as well as perfuming the body.) At length, he passed on to the labrum for a cold douche, then returned to the unctuarium for more perfumed oils to be applied to the skin.
If the bather was very rich, he might have brought his own preparations from home, custom-blended by his favorite unguentarius, or perfumer. Such perfumers were regarded as high priests of fashion, as much artists as chemists, and they used a great number of ingredients to create unguents and perfumes that were more complex and artful—and infinitely more expensive—than the simple blends found at the baths. Their patrician clients consumed these creations in staggering quantities and treated the perfume shops as informal social clubs where gossip could be exchanged and the affairs of the day debated.
Roman women tended to body, face, and hair at home, thanks to the ministrations of many slaves, who rubbed their skin with fragrant ointments and perfumed their clothing with lavender, basil, thyme, and marjoram. Nero’s wife, Poppaea, took bathing to new levels of decadence, which was not an easy feat in that time and place: she soaked herself every day in ass’s milk. When she was finally exiled, she took fifty asses with her to assure a steady supply.
After quite a while, men and women began bathing together, but it was a chaste affair. Illuminated manuscripts depict medieval bathhouses where naked men and women partake of the waters in a restrained manner. The water would have been perfumed, though, with elderflower, rosemary, chamomile, and rose petals scattered on the surface. The activities in the bath centered around hair—the men got their beards trimmed or their faces shaved, and the women got shampoos. After the bath, the women were rubbed with sweet and spicy essential oils, sometimes with the addition of a bit of musk.
In sixteenth-century London, wealthy women bathed and gossiped together in “stews,” sitting in water as hot as they could stand while herb-infused water was piped in from below. By the eighteenth century, perfumed baths had become popular among patricians and prostitutes alike. They were prepared with milk or almond paste, or even champagne, for its luxuriously stimulating effects. For perfuming and stimulating the genitals, there were two kinds of perfumed baths, a dry one on a bed of flowers in a heated tub, and a real bath in a tub of warm water, to which handfuls of violets and wild thyme were added.
From the accounts, the single-sex baths often sound sexier than the coed arrangements. Women bathing together can create a tone of indolent sensuality or precoital preening, invoking the atmosphere of the harem. Even secondhand, the description of a mid-nineteenth-century Turkish women’s bath124 by an Englishwoman whose husband was stationed in that country is sensual in the extreme: “She described vividly how she was initially hypnotized by the atmosphere, the pall of dense, sulfurous steam that almost suffocated her, the sharp, savage cries of the slaves echoing round the domes, the muffled laughter and whispered conversations of their mistresses.” She recalled “the overwhelming effect on her of nearly three hundred half-naked women, draped in fine linen so wet it clung to their bodies; busy slaves stripped to the waist, arms crossed, balancing on their heads piles of embroidered and fringed towels; groups of pretty girls laughing and chattering as they ate confectionery and drank iced fruit juice and lemonade; children playing together. And later, women reclining on sofas as slaves enveloped them in warm linen, poured essences on their hair, and sprinkled their face and hands with perfumed water.”
Still, being naked with the same sex doesn’t match the erotic tension of men and women bathing together half clad, at least in the image conjured by a description of a visit to Baden-Baden125 in the mid-fifteenth century: “The men wore short drawers and the women loose, low-necked wraps. Walking round the gallery above the woman’s pool, the Italians threw down coins for the prettiest, so that when they bent to pick them up, their gowns gaped open revealing all their charms.”
Solo bathing is an altogether different experience, hearkening back to the rich, painfully pleasurable melancholy evoked by water in nature, as by a favorite sad song. “I always experience126 the same melancholy in the presence of dormant water,” Bachelard writes, “a very special melancholy whose color is that of a stagnant pond in a rain-soaked forest, a melancholy not oppressive but dreamy, slow and calm. A minute detail in the life of waters often becomes an essential psychological symbol for me. Thus, the odor of water mint calls forth in me a sort of ontological correspondence which makes me believe that life is simply an aroma, that it emanates from a being as an odor emanates from a substance, that a plant growing in a stream must express the soul of water.”
The addition of scent is a link to the synesthetic experience of water in nature that has followed the bath into the privacy of the household and into the bather’s consciousness. Perfume heightens the aura of beauty and sanctuary, adds another layer of sensuality that holds you captive. Whil
e luxuriating in a scented bath, you can’t do anything. You begin to breathe more deeply. Your consciousness disperses into the water and the moist, warm air, much as the fragrance does. You become lost in thought, you lose track of time. The scent of the bath wafts up, surrounding you like a memory. A sheen of oil on the surface of the water recalls a childhood fascination with oil in puddles. You see that it mirrors the colors of the rainbow. You watch how it lies on the surface, unable to merge with the water but adrift upon it. You are reminded of your own essential aloneness—separate from the water but immersed in it, in transition from one state to another, here and not here—but it no longer seems a loneliness.
When you step out of the bath, the scent clings to your body. This fragrant veil accompanies you into the waking world or into your dreams, much like a dream itself. For hours afterward, the flow of your body in space releases scent, reminding you of the bath—and of the alchemy of the bath—where all things are possible and none of them need be done. It is enough simply to be.
Here are a couple of bath oil blends. The first is an uplifting, stress-reducing blend of fruity and flowery top and middle notes; the second is a relaxing blend of earthy base notes, 15-ml) bottle, preferably one with a screw-on dropper. In order to make best use of the oils, wait until the tub is full, then add a dropperful (around 40 drops) and swish the water around with your hand.
BATH BLEND 1
2 ml (80 drops) bitter orange
2 ml (80 drops) bergamot
2 ml (80 drops) ylang ylang
