Carnal Knowledge: On Tuberose (HF)
Spring is a slutty season, so let’s talk about tuberose. The very dear friend who originally introduced me both to tuberose and to perfume itself once told me that her mother had said, about Frederic Malle’s Carnal Flower (my single favorite perfume, more on that later) that it made the wearer smell like “she wasn’t going to die wondering.” This phrase is the single most glorious way to call someone a big slut that I have ever heard. Not going to die wondering is exactly what spring is about, the salivating, dangerous impulses that rush into the blood when color and sunlight come back into the world. We want to know everything. Half-constructed plans seem blessed by the dewy early morning, and whispering crushes turn as quickly into full-blown love as a match struck on top of a pool of gasoline. It is an easy time to say yes, to assume it will all work out, to grab selfish handfuls of everything made even the least bit available, making sure there is nothing left about which one might die wondering. It is a season to eat the fruit and get at the knowledge, dripping sticky all over one’s bright-scented hands. It’s a good season for tuberose, an aggressively beautiful, selfish white flower so creamy as to teeter at the edge of counting as a gourmand, a note that smells like wanting more and more again.
I discovered tuberose and its weird white-floral licentiousness not in spring but in the melted dead heart of summer. This same friend who first taught me about perfume had taken me to Aedes de Venustas, in its old location in Greenwich Village, on a blisteringly hot July day. It was the first time I'd been in any perfume store and I only later learned that starting with that location of Aedes - wonderful as it was- was like learning to ski by throwing yourself down a black diamond slope. It was a high-wire act to move around in there, beautiful and cramped and not exactly friendly to newcomers, and I was convinced at every moment that I would turn around gracelessly and break half a dozen expensive bottles.
The only perfume that managed to jolt me out of obsessively worrying about my own clumsiness was Histoires Des Parfums' Tubereuese 2: Virginale. The name, my friend explained, did not refer to the perfume, or tuberose itself, having a virginal smell. Much the opposite. It was meant call up the fact that, during the Victorian era, young unmarried women were forbidden from smelling the tuberose flower because it was believed to have the power to cause spontaneous orgasm. This is, perhaps unfortunately, untrue. But I almost understood it, smelling that one bottle, standing awkwardly and afraid of breaking things, in the middle of summer in that heavily air-conditioned tiny store. I forgot all of these physical circumstances for a minute.
The thing in the bottle smelled like marzipan and like wearing a white linen dress on a hot day. It smelled like people looking at you when you want people to look at you. It smelled not quite like food but like something just to the left of food, like if you could stay forever in the good part of hunger. This particular fragrance is sweeter than a lot of tuberose scents, as it also has cherry and marzipan notes in the mix. Not everyone is going to like it. But, to me, it smelled clean in the way that cleanliness can sometimes feel dirtier, not innocence but a performance of innocence. It was the perfume version of wearing white lingerie on purpose, roleplaying a wedding night without having a wedding. This perfume is subtler than all the other perfumes I’m going to write about in here, but nothing about it is subtle; tuberose never is. If you ever, before you had had sex, thought that once you had sex it would immediately teach you some grand and previously unseen mysteries of the world, tuberose smells like that, that thing that never actually happened to any of us. It smells like a romance novel, but not like when people say romance novel as an insult that just means “like a woman.” (Carnal Flower smells like Charlotte Gainsbourg’s cover of “Just Like a Woman,” though. More on that later.)
Tuberose has been a popular scent in perfumery for a long time; no one could accuse it of being modern (its most famous iterations include Fracas and Poison). If it is associated with virginity, youth, and inexperience, or at least the calculated performance of all these things, it is equally associated, like all white florals, with old ladies. The go-to term when one does not like a smell is “old-lady perfume.” Smelling like, and being, an old lady, is what we all want to avoid, or are told we should avoid as strenuously as possible, in everything from skincare to clothing to perfume. The fear of being an old lady is a thriving industry.
But perfume is always about old ladies - nobody is ever wrong when they call a fragrance an old-lady fragrance, because old ladies are the beating heart of perfume, its whole final meaning. Old ladies are a twin horror: The horror of the body, and the horror of inevitability. We are all going to get old eventually, and one desperate measure against admitting this is to try to name as old everything that is not oneself. The aging female body, in particular, reminds us of the truth of sex and sexiness as things that age, that we do not leave behind having a body, in all its smells and desires and textures, simply because that body hangs around for longer and begins to display on and in itself a record of that time. Perfume is always about the fact and the horror of the body - jasmine, one of the most beautiful of white floral notes, also smells like human shit when it gets concentrated enough, musk is meant to smell like skin, and civet is, or at least once was, extracted from the perineal glands of cats. Perfume is disgusting, and human bodies are too. To age is to accumulate experience and therefore smells, and so when old women wear heavy, indolic, overwhelming perfumes and we proclaim it gross, we are proclaiming our fear of how long they have survived, and how much they have known. Tuberose smells like that, even as it smells flirtatiously virginal: All that knowledge, all that experience. A woman hoarding all her long memories, not going to die wondering.
To love perfume, as I’ve said before and will keep saying, means embracing the part of ourselves that recognizes old women to be not repellant but aspirational, that longs to grow up to be the eccentric window swathed in jewels, telling stories to frighten and entrance her grandchildren. A certain type of perfume should always smell at least 50% like Liz Taylor, a woman the force of whose glamour made her an old lady even when she was very young. Tuberose is a scent that always smells like Liz Taylor, jewels and excess and a mild but constant terror of what’s going to happen next, the way being in a room with a very glamorous woman tilts the world just slightly, drunkenly off its steady axis.
The next tuberose perfume I tried was Serge Lutens’ Tubereuse Criminelle. I have rarely wanted to love something as much as I wanted to love this scent. I was sure it was the one for me. And then I hated it. I hated it so much. I cannot begin to tell you how offensively bad this smells on me. One review of the fragrance I read quoted a commenter who had called it "a fur coat in mothballs, wrapped in plastic... the open-casket funeral of a wealthy great-aunt." This is precisely, down to every detail, how it smells on my skin.
In some ways, this result was not entirely surprising. Tubereuse Criminelle is supposed to be the sexiest sex tuberose of all. I loved the name, the lush, getting-away-with something pose of it, the brashness of its reputation for being tuberose in a dominatrix costume. The liquid in the bottle was a pink that edged into rusted red, like a bloodstain on metal. The copy on the Serge Lutens website read "Baudelaire was right. Let's give the flowers back to evil." I wanted that; I wanted to smell like the idea of it.
This fragrance breaks tuberose down into its essential pieces - a menthol-camphor meant to evoke the menthyl salicylate in tuberose (the tuberose flower apparently emits a strong mentholated, medicinal smell when it is first picked or cut). Lutens’ perfume follows this with a burst of white flowers underscored by a rubbery note (many indolic flowers have a slight rubbery scent, which is pumped up and highlighted here), and then smooths out into a creamy white floral, all tuberose and jasmine, buttery and edged in lush green. Or at least this is what I have heard it does - on me it gets to mothballs and cough syrup and it stays there and does not go anywhere else until I aggressively wash it off my wrist.
Tubereuse Criminelle is not for me, but I can appreciate the genius of what it does, and how what it does points out the particular appeal of tuberose itself. It is an all or nothing scent. It succeeds gorgeously or it fails horribly. Tuberose is the Lana Del Ray of fragrance notes, an over-the-top performance of femininity that seeks both to be beautiful and to expose all the worst, ugliest reactions people have to women who flagrantly want to be beautiful, who refuse to pretend that their beauty is an accident. Femininity, like sexiness, like beauty, is an impossible target to hit. Feminine is always other people. The interior of the experience is failure, because it's set up that way, kept forever out of reach. It only exists in the dissatisfaction of missing the mark. Too much, or too little. Too obvious, or too careless. Vanity, and things that smell like it, can be a defiant expression of frustration: I’m trying, I’m trying very hard, and you’re trying too, and none of us are succeeding because we are set up to fail.
Sometimes tuberose smells like the fantasy that femininity is something at which one could succeed, but sometimes it smells like failure. Its overwhelming, embarrassingly obvious, edible floral waft is the collision of ideal and reality where femininity trips over its own feet. Tuberose perfumes smell either awful or transcendent on me; either like the meaning of sex or like decayed mothballs. There's no in between and no middle ground, just radiance or abject failure, and the pleasure when it succeeds comes from the tension of possible failure, the sense of teetering precariously on an edge too thin for real balance. It almost always smells, in its best versions, a little off, a little too much. High femme beauty is beauty so extreme that at every moment it flirts with ugliness, threatening to tip over into it.
It's interesting to try to explain what it is about tuberose that makes it so sexual. It doesn't smell like a body except for that weird camphor-y thing, and even that doesn't exactly smell like a body but rather like a body's absence, a closed-down house, a decaying room. I find it equally fascinating that when it was banned for young women, it was not prohibited for them to wear it, but to smell it- the problem was not its effect on others and how they might perceive the young woman who wore it, but rather its effect on the woman herself, in smelling it.
No smell produces a spontaneous orgasm, but thinking about the swoony, obsessive reaction tuberose causes in me, I think about the year in college when I worked at a bath and body product store with famously pungent products. I was constantly surprised by the very physicality of smell. Scent can seem ephemeral, like a hovering cloud in the air, but is just as meatily rooted in the mechanisms and sparks of our bodies as taste or touch. There was one particular soap that I wanted to eat, I loved how it smelled so much. I would inhale it like it was a drug, and feel the saliva glands in my mouth activate, the smell bringing my body to life. Perhaps this is what the Victorians were afraid of when they forbade women from inhaling tuberose, this switch flipped by something outside oneself, this physical activation that occurs without one having to work for it, or earn it, or generate it up out of oneself, ripe and immediate as low-hanging rich summer fruit. Smell transports us without us having to specify the destination. Sometimes this is what we want - from love, from drugs, from our own bodies: To be taken over, for something else to decide on the details and the destinations, to be offered an experience wholly not determined by ourselves, to be thrown a surprise party, in all its wonder and horror.
I smelled Carnal Flower for the first time in the absolute dead of winter, on a Saturday afternoon so flat and cold that all the color seemed to have drained out of the world. In my personal opinion, these days are the best ones for smelling perfume - any kind of perfume, not just the scents traditionally associated with winter. The day acts as a blank canvas, and scents are brighter, clearer and easier to find because there is no other noise around them. In winter a perfume can be the whole shape of the day, the only subject in the painting.
Carnal Flower was launched by Malle in 2005, after having taken perfumer Dominique Ropion two years to create. Supposedly it contains, or at least contained at that time, the greatest amount of natural tuberose absolute in any fragrance ever made. Whatever it was the Victorians were trying to keep young women from experiencing, this perfume is the highest possible concentration of exactly that thing, a lake of tuberose into which to dive. I didn’t think I would like it - it seemed so obviously feminine, for women who took care of their nails and wore expensive silk scarves. I did not feel like I deserved it. But what it smelled like, instead, was that pure, transportative physical longing that from time to time smell has engendered in me. I wanted to eat my own wrist; I wanted to smell it until my nose was useless.
It is a huge, creamy perfume, with a cool green edge of eucalyptus that brings out the tuberose and the other florals that surround it (jasmine, ylang ylang, orange blossom). It smells like if a woman who had loved flowery, creamy, embarrassingly girly Bath and Body Works shower gels as a teen had grown up and gotten very rich and very successful and very beautiful and now lived in a penthouse where everything was made of white silk, but still loved hyper-girly Bath and Body Works shower gels just as much as ever. It smells like the way I sometimes still believe that if I were beautiful enough, nothing would ever hurt me again. It does not smell like weather, or like a body, or like anything on which one can put one’s hands. Instead it smells like the way physical desire can, if only for a few seconds, transport us entirely beyond the realm of those concerns, the way that very, very briefly the body can be a way to escape the obligations of the body. It is my favorite perfume. It is profoundly embarrassing and it is the exact heart of what I love about fragrance.
Who we are is never the same as who we picture ourselves to be, as how we write ourselves as a story, and desire is always a vehicle for exposing those dissonances, the gap between how I envisioned myself and what I actually am. I would like to think of myself as loving perfumes that smell elegantly like dirt, dark-colored liquid that smells like forests, scents that smell like the truth and weirdness of the body. Instead, it turns out my favorite scent, far beyond everything else, is a fluffy white flower beloved by rich old ladies, that smells like sneaking off in the middle of a wedding reception to go fuck
But perhaps this loss of control is the hope we grasp with every new bottle of perfume, every sample opened, every visit to a perfume store -- or at least it is for me. I hope to arrive at somewhere I did not plan to arrive, ideally somewhere I did even realize was on the map. The memory work of perfume is as much about the forgetting as the recollection - at times, perfume allows me to recall memories I neither knew I had nor knew mattered to me, to summon up pages that I believed had been written blank, to open doors that had until then blended seamlessly with the wall. When I say that smell is a visceral experience, what I mean is that it is unpremeditated, that I do not get to decide what I react to and how. There is a terror to this, but also a relief, and a giddiness. Buying the ticket, strapping into the roller coaster, throwing my hands up over my head as it plunges down the first hill: Here we go, here is what matters to me, what I am drawn to and repelled by, what I remember, and what I have forgotten. Here is who I am, mapped out by all the things I want despite myself. -HF