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| Image of Grey-Crowned Cranes by Frankie from Germany via Pixabay |
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.”
Notes & Curiosities
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| 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.
