Marcel Duchamp & Georges Perec Write a Faux Fragrance Article in the Afterlife

Image of Grey-Crowned Cranes by Frankie from Germany via Pixabay

Part I: The Article

A novel line of seven perfumes is created by an eclectic perfumer. Each is named “smell” in a non-English language. The olfactive noun appears in calligraphic script on each of the labels with a foreshadowing twist. Ingredients in the formula are procured from the country of origin where the language on the bottle is spoken.

Phonetic transcriptions of “smell” appear in English below a western or non-western word for “smell” on each bottle. This inspires a mélange of phonetic murmurations whenever more than one customer engages with an interactive retail display featuring testers and perfume blotters. Ensuing conversations are convivial and attract curious onlookers. 

The effect is choreographed by design. 

The perfumer considers the challenge of learning a new language from his own experience: “Mouthing a new language in an adopted country is akin to chewing sinewy meat while attempting to avoid notice. In contrast, the sound of customers articulating phonetic translations at the counter is musical, playful and guileless."

The MakeSense line of international “smell” perfumes is built on aromatic materials associated with a country’s landscape and culture. MakeSense has polarizing plans for the next iteration of scents, which arrive at counter on October 31st. The olfactive theme is "disgust and avoidance", and evocative of scent-shunning encounters. 

The perfumer relates the concept in a different light: “Focusing on liking or not liking a smell is about as valuable as arguing about which end of a magnet is more desirable. Opposite poles attract and similar poles repel. This defines a magnet's essence, its potential, its character. And in perfumery, as in life, character is everything.”

Part II: Fictive Truth

Belle Helaine Advertisement for Un Air Enbaumeé
Rigaud Perfume, La Rire no. 88, Oct 9, 1920

Duchamp and Perec don't engage in writing in the afterlife; they play with magnetic fields and randomly break glass in the homes of charlatans that charge money to communicate with the dead. (For the record, the racket made by the invisible Oulipo duo when they're engaged in spirited shenanigans reinforces a charlatan's delusion of power with respect to affecting the beyond. Within three months, they beg to be fitted with a straitjacket.) 

Once in a while, after a glorious mischief binge, the pair are permitted to smell something that each of them misses from their days of earthly existence. Perec misses the scent of a cigarette from a freshly opened pack of Galoises, and the infrathin of its trace in his mouth after smoking. This, despite the fact that smoking cigarettes resulted in an irrevocable trip to a columbarium at Pére Lechaise Cemetery at the age of 45, which offers an extended, albeit ironic, infrathin.

As for Duchamp, he misses the smell of sunlight streaming through a window as it warmed a spot on the wooden floor of his apartment at 33 West 67th Street in New York City, resurrecting the aroma of a bottle of tawny port that the previous owner spilled on the floor a year before Duchamp moved in, which in turn, made Duchamp want to drink the floor on several occasions. Whenever the urge became too strong, he was deterred by a pair of hangry skittering cockroaches.

Part III: Wine Pairing Recommendation

Glass Petal Smoke asked sommelier Jaime Smith to recommend a wine that best complements this post. (No offense to the spirit of Marcel Duchamp and his nostalgia for the sun-warmed residue of spilled port emanating from a wooden floor.) Smith, whose superpower is smell-color synesthesia, chose Pietradolci Archineri Etna Bianco DOC as an accompaniment to this post. The wine's flavor profile varies from one vintage to the next. Fruity, herbal, floral, mineral and savory notes are common. The profile grows more complex as the wine ages (it has an aging potential of 15 years).  BTW: Empson & Company offers a more detailed tech sheet here.

The Meaning of Things Left Inside the Pages of a Book

Still Life with Guitar by Juan Grís (1920)

Once in a while, I find an unconventional placeholder related to memorable text or art in the pages of a book I’ve read. Something that seems new to me at first. Then I remember why I left it there. Beauty in the bricolage of life exists even if life is showing its fangs on the day you find it. Two recently encountered items stand out.

Item 1: Olfactory-rich text in the “Doldrums” chapter of Tristes Tropiques by renowned anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (left) and a light blue-green “Swimming SW6764” paint swatch used as a bookmark (right). The passage is beautiful, fragrant and highly sensorial. I long for a bottle of its perfume after reading it, a sentiment I had when I first came across the passage 12 years ago.

The traveler approaching the New World is first conscious of it as a scent very different from the one suggested back in Paris by the connotations of the word Brazil, and difficult to describe to anyone who has not experienced it. 

At first, it seemed that the sea smells of the preceding weeks had ceased to circulate so freely; they had come up against an invisible wall: thus immobilized, they no longer claimed the traveler’s attention, which was now drawn towards smells that were of a quite different nature and that nothing in his past experience enabled him to define: they were like a forest breeze alternating with hot-house scents, the quintessence of the vegetable kingdom, and held a particular freshness so concentrated as to be transmuted into a kind of olfactory intoxication, the last note of a powerful chord sounded separately as if to isolate and fuse the successive intervals of diversely fruity fragrances. This can only be appreciated by someone who has buried their face in a freshly cut tropical red pepper, after having previously, in some botequin of the Brazilian sertão, inhaled the aroma of the black honeyed coils of the fumo de rolo, made from tobacco leaves, fermented and rolled into several lengths several yards long. In the blend of these closely allied scents, he can recognize an America, which, for thousands of years, was alone in its possession of their secrets. 

But when, at four o’clock in the morning of the following day, the New World at last appeared on the horizon, its visible image seemed worthy of its perfume.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Penguin Classics, 2012, page 78.

Leví-Strauss’ words enter and exit the reader’s mind with the dreamy languor of incense smoke. Transforming the passage into a perfume (an ephemeral creation that triggers and inspires memories) makes perfect sense. The book, originally written in French, was published in 1955. Translations exist, but the same can’t be said for the creation of a perfume based on the excerpt—70 years later.

The second item I found is a pattern made by randomness. A train ticket covering a page of haiku is engaged in a visual dialogue with painting on the opposite page. I didn’t make a connection at the time, as the ticket served as an ad hoc bookmark when the train was pulling into the Larchmont Metro-North train station in Westchester County.

Item 2: A Japanese brush painting titled “Shoots of the Horsetail Plant” by Saitô Shôshû (left) is situated opposite a New Haven line Metro-North Railroad ticket, circa early 2000 (right). The painting, which is next to four unseen haiku beneath the train ticket, uses the same shades of red and black ink found on the commutation ticket. The item on the left is art; the item on the right is art by association. 

I’ve taken the New Haven line infrequently and am better acquainted with the trees, shrubs, plants and long grass that grow alongside the riverside tracks of the Hudson line across from the Palisades. Though I recall specific seasonal views, memories of 14 years of commuting to and from Hastings-on-Hudson and Grand Central Terminal on the Metro-North have merged. 

My mind connects commuting experiences by type versus single experience, unless there's an experience worth recalling that breaks through the monotony of routine commuting. The fact that eidetic memory isn’t common makes sense as it would be a recipe for hell if we remembered everything. One part Sherlock Holmes knack, the other a not-so-friendly invitation into a well-fitting straitjacket with less time to live in the present.

It's interesting how the way we think and remember is reflected in the material things we hold onto. Each item saved serves as a potential catalyst for reminiscence that allows us to organize personal meaning with agency as a witness to our own life. 

This is particularly important when the people who raised us, the archivists of our lives, are no longer here to answer questions about our past that inform our present life. In this respect, meaningful things we save don't leave us empty-handed until we decide that they don't change the fact that unanswered questions are a part of life. 

"A New Day Every Day" (2014) by Sarah Nicole Phillips. The branching pattern of trees (dendritic) is found in nature and appears in the veins of leaves, the pattern of roots, and human arteries, veins and capillaries. The collage is designed using  security envelope papers. 

I've begun collecting security envelopes that accompany bills, the kind with designs on the underside that obscure the contents inside the envelope from being seen on the outside. Common designs include confetti, linen, burlap and crosshatched patterns printed in blue or black ink. Once in a while, a security envelope with an ornamental pattern arrives and breaks the monotony. 

I consider repetitive patterns in nature and stumble across an unexpected find. A recording of Salvador Dalí talking about logarithmic patterns in relationship to the unique spiral pattern of a rhinoceros horn (an obsession of his). 

Then it becomes clear to me. It's not the safety aspect of security envelopes that I'm attached to, it's the meaning of patterns and the way they connect and disconnect in earthly and spiritual ways. It's why I can't help wondering whether Dalí, an artist fond of using found objects in his sculptures and assemblages, left traces of his personal life behind in the pages of the books he owned. 

Notes & Curiosities

It's not uncommon for secondhand booksellers to find personal items inside copies of used books sold by their previous owners. There isn't an all-encompassing word for the items found inside a previous owner's books as contents vary, though most are relics of life experience. Glass Petal Smoke leans towards "personalia" as it complements marginalia. Curious about what people leave inside their books? Begin by searching for "things booksellers find inside used or antiquarian books". 

Note to haiku lovers. The second "find" in this story was located in A Net of Fireflies: Japanese Haiku & Haiku Paintings, translated by Harold Stewart. 

Recommended Reading: The Forgotten Sense by Jonas Olofsson

Interview with scientist Jonas Olofsson, author of The Forgotten Sense

There are many things one can say about The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell—and the Extraordinary Power of the Nose by Jonas Olofsson. Exemplary is the first word that comes to mind as books written by academics don't always resonate with the public; no matter how remotely curious readers are about a particular subject, or how devoted the author is to sharing the latest information about a subject they deeply care about that resonates with others. 

Olofsson cares about the sense of smell and how smell loss has and continues to have an effect on patients who didn't find the support they needed when COVID-19 anosmia took hold in the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic. It's why he wrote the book, but there's more. Smell loss isn't new, but the number of people suffering from anosmia (whether they've recovered or not) is more widely acknowledged due to the pandemic and ensuing variants. It's a silver lining.

This silver lining is entwined with the fact that Olofsson has interest and compassion in amounts that exceed the boundaries of his native Sweden. This is reflected in the book's contents and the informed, conversational tone of the book, which draws the reader in like a good friend. The author bridges research (psychology, neurology and other disciplines) while bringing the reader up to date with regard to what is known about the sense of smell as it relates to health, quality of life and society.

I purchased The Forgotten Sense shortly after it was released in January 2025 (and plan on reading it again after I finish Sun City by Tove Jansson). The reason for the re-read is that books like The Forgotten Sense are rare when it comes to non-fiction books about the sense of smell, and that's as good a reason as any to recommend it on Glass Petal Smoke. Attendees at Smell & Tell: Get Inside Your Olfactory Mind will learn more about The Forgotten Sense at the Ann Arbor District Library on Tuesday, March 11, 2025, where I'll also introduce an analog smelling device called the Smell Rolodex. Ah, smell life...

Notes & Curiosities:

I discovered the video that accompanies this post after finishing The Forgotten Sense. It's a great way to get acquainted with the author, his research and the book. To learn more about Jonas Olofsson's research, visit Google Scholar and the website for the Sensory Cognition Interactive Laboratory, where Olofsson is Principal Investigator.

Are you a non-scientist that wants to master reading articles in scientific journals? The best way to engage with journal articles is to use naiveté as fuel for critical thinking. "How to Make Sense of a Scientific Journal Article" is an interactive tool that lists the components of a science journal article and explains their function/purpose. Simply click on each component (Overview/Abstract and Main Sections, Methods, Results, Discussion/Conclusion, and References) and scroll down to read the contents and learn more. This resource is part of the Know the Science initiative. 

Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau
via Encyclopedia Britannica

An informal, but effective approach to reading articles in scientific journals is a little something I cooked up called Clouseau It!, an homage to Peter Sellers in his role as Inspector Clouseau in Pink Panther films. Apply the following seven steps once you're comfortable reading articles in scientific journals:

Step 1: Investigate the Paper 

Step 2: Interrogate the Study

Step 3: Treat the Paper Like a Suspect

Step 4: Question the Method Used by Researchers 

Step 5: Confirm the Motives Based on Funding 

            (Conflict of Interest)

Step 6: Evaluate the Outcome in Relationship to the 

            Conclusion

Step 7: Look out for Cato Fong

Anatomy of a Tic Tac Orange Mint

The orange flavor of Tic Tac Orange Mints unfolds like the experience of eating an orange out of hand. Flavor chemists want you to think of the real thing even if the candy doesn't have the same form factor as orange fruit. The result? Candy plays pretend, and our brain consciously plays right along with it because candy tastes good, inspires memories and is fun to eat.

Mass-produced candy ensures a specific eating experience every time and that's by design. Candy is a form of comfort and reward across cultures. When you eat candy, you expect it to taste exactly like you remember it. The everyday chaos of adult life is sublimated by candy's constancy. Add a few childhood memories and it's easy to get hooked on candy when you’re decades past being a kid.

The flavor chemistry in Tic Tac Orange Mints is an industry secret, but if you read the ingredient list you can do a bit of flavor sleuthing and decode what you sense, but can't see. Orange Tic Tacs contain: sugar, maltodextrin, tartaric acid, natural and artificial flavors, rice starch, gum arabic, magnesium stearate, ascorbic acid, Yellow 6 and carnauba wax. So, what does this mean? A sweet and sour profile at a quick glance, but there's more.

The first ingredient is sugar (sucrose) and that means sugar is used in the greatest quantity compared to ingredients that follow it on the ingredient list. Sugar is followed by maltodextrin, a polysaccharide that improves texture, taste and shelf life. Maltodextrin isn't sweet on its own. Amylase, an enzyme found in saliva, breaks down maltodextrin, which is absorbed by the body as glucose.  

The next ingredient, tartaric acid, is found in grapes, bananas, tamarind, citrus fruits and wine. Tartaric acid's salt is potassium bitartrate, aka cream of tartar, which can be mixed with sodium bicarbonate to make baking powder. Congratulations! You've entered the realm of food science by investigating a candy ingredient list. 

Pour yourself a glass of wine and congratulate yourself as you toast the wonders of tartaric acid! You've graduated from Sweet Tarts, Fun Dip and Smarties Candy Necklaces, all of which include a combination of malic acid and tartaric acid to create delightful puckering effects that turned you into a candy lover in the first place.

Natural and artificial flavors cited in the ingredient list for Tic Tac Orange Mints are just that. Specific molecular constituents used to shape the candy's unique taste and flavor are akin to a family recipe for pasta sauce. Family members who know the recipe pass it down from one generation to the next. In the food industry, proprietary knowledge and trade secrets are protected by legal and binding non-disclosure agreements. You don’t share them with anyone (it’s a “take-it-to-the-grave” kind of thing).

Ingredients used to flavor candy are natural, "nature-identical", and/or synthetic. Chemical compounds and single molecules that scream "oranges" and those that support the chemistry of orange flavor define a Tic Tac "orange" experience. An example of a supporting ingredient in orange flavor would be a material with a zesty green aroma associated with orange peel.

Gum arabic is ubiquitous as far as food applications go. It’s added to confectionary glazes and is also used as a probiotic. Rice starch smoothes the surface of candy coatings and has additional applications as well. Magnesium stearate, on the other hand, prevents ingredients from sticking to mechanical equipment in the manufacturing process. It's commonly used as a lubricant for tablets. 

Ascorbic acid is also on the Tic Tac Orange Mints ingredient list. You may recognize it if you've read the ingredients label on a bottle of vitamins because ascorbic acid is another name for vitamin C. This doesn't mean that Tic Tac Orange Mints are vitamins, so you can't use this fact to make candy guilt go away or use Tic Tac Orange Mints to raise Linus Pauling from the dead.

Yellow 6 is also known as "sunset yellow" in the language of artificial food colors. Artificial colors are shelf stable (they don't lose their color quickly over time and under the proper storing conditions). This could change as companies like Kalsec, which specializes in natural food color technology, offer stable natural color alternatives.

It's interesting to note that Orange Tic Tac Mints sold outside the U.S. are colorless (they're white) due to rules and regulations related to artificial food coloring. In Canada, for instance, Tic Tac Orange Mints are packed in a plastic container that's tinted orange to signal flavor expectations in the absence of Yellow 6 food coloring.

Carnauba wax (Copernicia cerifera) is the last ingredient in Orange Tic Tac Mints and it's typically used as a coating or glazing ingredient. It's also one of the first ingredients you'll encounter in a store-bought orange (before you get to the cash register where Tic Tacs galore are staring you in the face). Carnauba wax is used in a proprietary form of artificial fruit wax that coats and protects fruit that's packaged and shipped to grocery stores. 

Now that you know the story behind the ingredients in Orange Tic Tac Mints, it's time to do a little sensory evaluation on your own. The experience will tell you a lot about what flavorists do without saying a word. To get the most out of this or any other tasting exercise, make sure you take your time.

If you do the exercise quickly, you'll miss important flavor transitions that define signature candy tasting experiences. Bear in mind that flavor is defined as the intersection between taste and smell. If you are rushing or distracted, you risk having a one-dimensional experience that’s mostly focused on taste (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory).

Go somewhere where you can taste the candy without distraction. The experience goes beyond "sweet, sour, done, now give me another one". Pop a single orange Tic Tac in your mouth and savor it, noticing the sequence of sensations from beginning to end. Do this twice. Once for the ah-ha moment(s) and a second time to embed the experience in your brain as a reference point for future candy tastings. Writing down sensory impressions after the second tasting is a good idea.

Sensory evaluation requires focusing on sensations and memories inspired by the tasting experience. Imagine what chemistry class would’ve been like if sensory evaluation exercises were included in the curriculum. You wouldn't be reading this. You'd be a flavorist working at a lab bench creating flavors for candy. 

Mindfully tasting Tic Tac Orange Mints is akin to a candy-version of an orange from a flavor perspective. A sense of ephemerality sets in when you’re finished, but you can always taste another candy. Is eating orange fruit better than eating candy? Yes, but if you’re hankering for the perfect portion-controlled sweet, candy allows you to connect with flavor and memories, and there’s nothing wrong with that if you indulge in moderation.

Notes & Curiosities: 

 The acid in citrus fruit causes the mouth to water. The same response occurs when 

  you eat something that smells appetizing and tastes delicious. Common descriptors

   for orange fruit flavor are: acidic, citrusy, fragrant, fruity, sweet, tangy and zesty

Tic Tac Orange Mints were launched by Ferrero in 1974. The original Tic Tac mint was called "Refreshing Mints" in 1969 and was changed to "Tic Tac Fresh Mint" in 1970. 

Tic Tacs have nothing to do with the paper and pencil game called tic-tac-toe that's played in a three-by-three grid with "x" and "o" marks. The sound made by the candy as it rattles in the container inspired Tic Tac's onomatopoetic name.  

There is no mint flavor in Tic Tac Orange Mints (though there's a green nuance that is more leafy than minty that shows up in the first half of the tasting experience). The term “mint” is used as an indicator of something a person eats for refreshment and/or mint-flavored mints.

Mindfully eating Tic Tac Orange Mints can be included in chemistry curriculum so that students grow up to be adults with a métier in flavor science.  More information on becoming a flavorist (and/or flavor chemist) is available from the Society of Flavor Chemists. 

If you're curious about the flavor industry read The Flavor Industry: From 1945-1995. This link takes you to the PDF download on the Society of Flavor Chemists website. The publication was put together by the American Sources Association on behalf of the Society of Flavor Chemists.