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Perfume is to smells what eroticism is to sex: an aesthetic, cultural, emotional elaboration of the raw materials provided by nature.
The ladies of the court, led by Marie-Antoinette, resorted to the only thing that could keep them one step ahead of the commoners, however wealthy they were: fashion. In fact, this is how fashion as we know it came into existence: the latest trend adopted by a happy few for a season before trickling down to the middle classes.
Just a touch of the negligence etudiee that distinguishes chic Parisian women from their fiercely put-together New Yorker or Milanese counterparts.
Perfume needs to be supported by image.
You're not just doing it to smell good: you're perpetuating a ritual of erotic magic that's been scaring and enticing men in equal measure for millennia.
Perfumes are our subconscious. They read us more revealingly than any other choice of adornment, perhaps because their very invisibility deludes us into thinking we can get away with the message they carry.
These scents severed fragrance from its function as an extension of a female or male persona - the rugged guy, the innocent waif or the femme fatale - to turn it into a thing that was beautiful, interesting and evocative in and of itself.
Perfume's advertising relies on the 3 aspiration S: stars, sex and seduction, with a side helping of dreams or exoticism. Descriptions, impressions, analogies, short stories, snippets or real-life testing, bits of history, parallels with music or literature.
Connecting a scent with emotions, impressions, atmospheres, isn't that why we wear it? Isn't it all subjective?
Just because you don't want it in your life doesn't make it bad. And it's not entirely impossible to consider perfumes beyond their "like/don't like" status. What intent does t set out to fulfill? How does it achieve its effects? How does it fit in with the history of the brand or its identity? How does it compare to the current season's offerings? Does it bring something new?
The story told by the perfumer blends with the ones we tell ourselves about it; with our feelings, our moods, our references, our understanding of it. Once it is released from the bottle, it becomes a new entity. We make it ours: we are the performers of our perfume.
Both lust and luxury are coupled in the same Latin word: luxuria is one of the 7 deadly sins. The age-old fear of female sexuality. The lure of beauty, set off by costly and deceitful adornments, could lead men to material and moral ruin but, more frighteningly, suck them into a vortex of erotic voracity. A man's desire waxes and wanes. But how can a woman, whose pleasure is never certain and whose receptive capacity is potentially infinite, ever be controlled?
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