Why should anyone want perfume?

Perfume gives pleasure. It's as simple as that.

It gives pleasure to the woman who wears it. It gives pleasure to those who pass her by -- or stop.

Sometimes we make too much of perfume. We demand excellence in the graphics and packaging. The bottle's shape must be pleasing (even though it's just paper and glass and has no scent itself!) The brand and associations, the company or the personality, the advertising and "perfume reviews." It all gets into our head and we THINK. But perfume wasn't made for thinking. In thinking we lose the pleasure.

Try it. Make a Zen exercise out of it. Study the perfume alone.

Use it. On a smelling strip perhaps. And then forget it. Until the scent makes itself know, after you had forgotten it was there.

Then you're smelling the perfume. The perfume alone, and it gives pleasure.

Is it pineapple?

I'm working on a fragrance for men. It has passed the first test; several people liked it. So now my job is to refine it so that lots of people like it and many people love it, love it enough to buy it. But that's not my story today.

My story today is about how we smell and what we recognize, or fail to recognize, in an odor. In my new fragrance for men I wanted to add a “fruit” note. This would be an experiment for me. The idea had been suggested by a friend. But I wasn't making a bubble gum perfume for little kids. I wanted a note that would work with adult males and find favor with their wives or lovers.

Going through my inventory of “fruity” aroma materials I found myself rejecting one after another. This was too obvious. That didn't smell quite right. Finally I found one that had promise, an aroma material I had not worked with before.

So what does this note smell like? My own instant reaction was “pineapple.” But when I shared this view with a few others who had smelled my trials they were puzzled by this description. Apparently it didn't say “pineapple” to them.

This gave me pause. Was I smelling pineapple or did the aroma somehow trigger a memory that suggested pineapple? I wasn't sure. So I tried to imagine what a pineapple should smell like. We only buy pineapples a few times a year and working backwards, from the thought of pineapple to the aroma of pineapple didn't work at for me at all. It seems that “pineapple” -- the concept of a pineapple -- didn't trigger any intellectual scent recollections.

Ultimately my curiosity got the better of me and I went to several fragrance house catalogs to see how they described this aroma material. I was startled by what I found. One after another they all described it's odor as “pineapple.”

Now this response I had tells me something of the nature of perfume. Perfume -- aroma -- scent -- can penetrate the brain lightening fast ... faster than the brain can reason. Scientists explain that how scent is one of our most immediate reactions. My “pineapple” note was proof of that to me.

And this reaction -- this way the brain has of seizing on a scent and responding to it without thinking ... flashing “P I N E A P P L E” in big letters for me instantly in a way that I couldn't explain -- shows the power of perfume ... the power to get inside someone's head with scent. The reaction is immediate and unreasoning.

The perfumer's challenge is to find the notes to unlock memories -- memories so strong, so immediate, that before the person can think, the scent says “You want me! You must have me. Buy me now!” It's all that simple.

What should a men's fragrance smell like?

If you were a perfumer working for a large fragrance house, you would know exactly what a men's fragrance should smell like. It should smell like something that women -- and men -- expect it to smell like. It should have a familiar smell that says, "men's cologne," to both women and men. How do we know what smell says "men's cologne" to both women and men? We simply look, for reference, to the hundreds of men's colognes that have already -- over the past 200 years -- been put on the market. Today they define what a men's cologne -- and all men's fragrances -- should smell like.

It wasn't always that simple. There was a time when a perfumer could create what he thought was a men's fragrance only to discover that it sold very poorly to men but was fast becoming a favorite with women. I'm thinking of Aime Guerlain's Jicky (1889).

On the other hand, Coty's Chypre (1917) was a woman's fragrance. Yet from it arose a modern, highly popular style, of colognes for men.

Today it is unlikely that any new, mass market intended fragrance for men will take us in a radical direction. Yet where is it written in stone that men must smell of citrus (bergamot), lavender, or oakmoss? It's simply what we have come to accept; what we are used to.

But suppo9se a perfumer tries something different and creates a Blackberry or a Toxic? How would Michael Edwards categorize these? will it take men 40 years to adjust their smell prejudices before these become a new, accepted, men's fragrance styles?

A Tale of Two Women

As I was slapping some Toxic on the other morning, my wife "admitted" that originally she had not cared much for Toxic but her feelings toward it were changing. "It grows on you," was her comment. I've long felt the same way. The more I encounter it, the more I enjoy it. As I've said before, it's like a work of modern art that starts out as a scandal but, with time, become mainstream, perhaps even classic.

Yesterday I learned that my wife wasn't the only women who has found that both Toxic and Blackberry can grow on you. I received an email from a customer I had recently met face-to-face at our 2010 5-Day Perfumery Workshop with Steve Dowthwaite. This customer had used both Toxic and Blackberry and, when we met face to face, made some funny passing mention of them. But then, in our email conversation after the workshop, he told me that he did use them and that his wife was finding that "they grew on her."

Two women don't make up a mass movement. I'm not holding my breath waiting for Coty, Estee Lauder, or Elizabeth Arden to come begging me to let them market my men's fragrances. But I do believe there is a future for men's fragrances that lies outside the parameters of what is currently accepted.

After all, shouldn't a men's fragrance be interesting? Shouldn't it stimulate the imagination? Shouldn't we strive for more than just "meat and potatoes" fragrances, even for men?

What if, in striving and creating, our creations for men are a little out of sync with our times? So we make a little less money. It's vanity perhaps but I like to think of Toxic and Blackberry as being ahead of out times ... but not so far ahead that some bold men will not take the trouble to enjoy them.

Perfume as Art :: Perfume as Commerce

I am sometimes torn trying to pull myself away from developing perfumes of my own and concentrate on BUSINESS, looking over my (many) resources and focusing on putting them to work to MAKE MONEY.

The great majority of people in the fragrance industry are focused on MAKING MONEY. This is a JOB for them and they go to work to bring home the bacon.

But perfume creation itself is, or can be, an ART. And those who are artists with smells follow their inner muse regardless. WHAT they create is of more importance to them than what they GAIN through their creations. Some, most likely, have never made enough money in the SALES of their perfumes to pay the cost of the raw materials that went into developing these fragrances. They hardly notice.

In both worlds there are the extreme personalities -- those who are so focused on commerce -- or on art -- that they can't appreciate or relate to those on the other side of the fence. But when you take a closer look at MOST of the people on either side -- art or commerce -- you'll find that they aren't so enclosed in their own worlds as you might think. The "artist" perfumers, for the most part, understand the need for money. Without it they can't pursue their love of perfume making. And the "nicest" money for many would be money from the sale of their own fragrances. This money is (or would be) more than just utilitarian. This money is the public's vote of appreciation for their fragrance creations.

On the commerce side, most of the successful men and women in the business are successful because of their love for fragrance. They are people with taste who know the difference between the great and the mundane.

But the crossed relationships go farther. The commercial side DEVELOPS cool new aroma chemicals, aroma chemicals that open doors for creating beautiful new fragrances, fragrances unlike anything the world has seen (smelled!) before.

On the commercial side these aroma chemicals get USED, they get out in the world and thus they INSPIRE the artist-perfumer to think in new directions and, where possible, acquire some of these new materials to make use of them in his or her own ARTISTIC fragrances.

Likewise the artist perfumer is often inspired by the MARKETING ideas developed by the commercial people. Some of these ideas can be morphed into marketing tools for the smaller companies and individuals. Artists are not stupid people.

And of course we see the reverse. People in the commercial world feed off ideas developed in the artist world. After all, ultimately we are all presenting our products to the same great public.

Buy by the box

What are we buying when we buy perfume? An image, a vision of what it will do for us. A box, the attractive packaging that surrounds it. A scent, the fragrance itself. What are our priorities?

There was a time, when markets were smaller and a company's own name meant something, that one bottle design might be used for one scent after another. The bottle, by its shape and design, helped identify the source -- the company behind the fragrance -- and brought credibility to the fragrance itself.

I was reading a designer interview in a fashion magazine the other day. I won't mention the designer's name as a friend works for that person. But the designer, late in the game, had launched a fragrance for the house and spoke of it with great pride. Its creation was, of course, shepherded by the designer.

But also of course the fragrance itself was created for the designer by a well known (in the fragrance industry) perfumer working for one of the top five international fragrance giants. This is how designers get "their" fragrances. While they can create the graphics for the box and suggest the graphics for the bottle (although this is usually done by bottle designers), there is nothing they can do to "design" the fragrance except attempt to describe, in words, what they think they want and then to say "yes," "no," or "maybe" to the samples that are presented to them and perhaps, in words again, suggest modifications. "Designing" a fragrance is a matter of aroma chemistry, of mixing molecules, of sniffing and balancing one chemical ingredient against another. It is not a graphic or visual process.


Now look at the buying decision again. Clearly the first step is to be attracted by the star power of the designer. If you've never heard the name, the fragrance becomes just one more out of dozens of new fragrances competing with a hundred plus older fragrances. So being attracted by the name is point number one.

Next, before sampling the fragrance, you see the box. The more interesting the packaging, the more favorably disposed you are toward this new fragrance before you've had a chance to smell it.

Now smelling the fragrance would be the logical next step, IF you are already attracted by the designer's name and the fragrance's packaging. And at this point we hit a stumbling point. Is a sampler bottle available? If it is, is it clearly marked so that you can be sure that what you are spraying is in fact your designer's perfume? I've noticed at perfume counters that bottles are often unmarked and not at all in the shapes of the standard bottles for the fragrances they represent -- probably to prevent theft.

Finally we look to see if there is a test blotter we can spray in case both our wrists have already been sprayed with a competitors' offerings. Here, quite frequently, if we do find a test blotter, it will be labeled for a competitor's perfume.

Now that we have gotten all this out of the way we try the scent -- the perfume itself. But can the scent -- will the scent -- drive us to open our wallets and withdraw the all important credit card and make the purchase ... while the sales person, if she hasn't yet rushed off already, is still be trying to sway us toward another perfume that she has been encouraged to promote.

Do you see by now that it's not the scent that is making the sale? The scent merely tips us to pay or not to pay but the tipping point has been reached by other means.

Every so often a perfume does hit the market that is so compelling that we have to sample it and are likely to buy, by the reputation of the fragrance itself. It happens perhaps once in five years. Or maybe once in twenty.

Aromatherapy, Aroma, and Perfume

While "Aromatherapy" is a modern term, there have been efforts to back trace its roots to traditional Chinese medicine and perhaps even aboriginal healing arts. Today's Aromatherapists generally maintain that Aromatherapy is about using essential oils for therapeutic effect and sometimes cross the line into naturopathy by suggesting that the healing power is in the oil itself (or the interaction of oil and human body) rather than in the aroma of the oil.

Laying aside the technical disagreements among Aromatherapists as to which practices are "genuine" and which step outside the bounds of "true" Aromatherapy, I think it is pretty obvious that AROMA can have a mood changing, therapeutic effect but if this effect is due to the power of the aroma, it makes no sense to me to think that therapeutic effects can only be achieved through the use of essential oils or so-called "all natural" materials.

I often find myself spraying or dipping a test blotter with a perfume I have created, sometimes even a commercial perfume I have purchased, and placing it in a holder in front of me on my desk. Why? For harmony and tranquility. To make me feel better while I am working. To "elevate" my mood. And this is clearly a therapeutic effect -- aroma plus therapy. From perfume.

Perhaps my love of perfume is based on the same principles as those of the Aromatherapist, although clearly we accomplish our goals through differing methods. I tend to go for "whatever works" rather than "this is how we must do it."

Funny thing. I think my approach to aroma therapy (separate words) is closer to that of the ancient healers of China. I suspect that the BEST of them were not so rigid about following rules and formulas but instead made great use of their insight into the full range of methods and materials in the world around them to heal -- and, for the best of them, this personal knowledge of materials and methods probably died with them leaving only the rules and formulas to future generations.

Aroma is a powerful communications tool that can bring our spirits into harmony or set them in disarray. Aroma can draw others to us, or repel. But the power is in the aroma itself, no matter how it has been achieved.