Perfume Diary: Fake Air (HF)
Summer is a questionable time for smells, a time when things rot and stink and betray themselves. Cold no longer masks what is dying, what is past its prime; all the secrets leak pungent into the too-bright daylight. It's a difficult time for perfume. Here at the Dry Down we like to rebel against the accepted wisdom of summer scents, drawn toward grimy, dank ouds, sticky, resinous woods, and big, slutty florals that stink up the hot days. If summer is here, then let it sink in, let it be as disgusting as it really is, let's wallow in its all rot and bad manners, the street corners that smell like trash and the insidious block-long sillage of roses.
But this year in particular, I've had to admit that there's something to be said for the desire to smell like a cleaner version of nothing, to aim oneself in opposition to the ceaseless stink of summer. Perfumes brands constantly release scents that claim to smell like nothing, like skin, like yourself only very slightly more so. What all these perfumes seek to do is a thing out of the reach of perfume, and one essentially antithetical to it: To not add smell but subtract it, to scrub off the wearer’s skin and dirt and rot and history until we smell cleaner than when we started. But perfume is an additive. Wearing perfume, even the subtlest, most skin-close selection, is making the statement that one wants more. More of oneself, more smell, more reaction, more stimulus. The only thing perfume can do is exaggerate, and even its version of cleanliness or freshness is an exaggeration. Perfume is always extra in every sense of the word.
I got a new air conditioner this summer. It's loud. The cats hate it. The sound is a living anxiety, rendering every moment spiky. It's wasteful and annoying and fake. It drowns out conversation. Despite its cooling properties, it has little or nothing to do with the breezes that cut through the heat outside and feel like a religious idea of mercy, or with the relief on the days when the hour or so before dark scrubs the heat out of the sky and makes the outdoor world bearable and loving again. The air-conditioner is none of those things. It is static and unnatural. It is very, very cold, though, and can render at least one of the two rooms in my small apartment actively chilly within fifteen minutes or so. Summer is about seeking air-conditioning, or it is for me, anyway. It is the season when I long for malls and movie theaters and the noiseless permeating industrial chill of the gym. I think I've said before that air-conditioning in summer feels like love, but it doesn't: It feels like flattery. It is utterly false, and it is heavenly.
Thomas usually leaves the house before I do in the morning, and as he’s about to leave I often ask him what scent he's wearing, even though it's always the same one (he's much better at committing to a signature scent than I am). But the fragrance that's become his summer perfume, Acqua di Parma's Colonia Pura, is so refreshing that I want to comment on it as though it's new, even when what I love about it is its familiarity. The listed notes start with bergamot and orange and petitgrain, and supposedly melt down into jasmine and narcissus and coriander, landing finally at cedarwood and patchouli and musk. But I barely smell any of the heart notes, except a lurking undercurrent of the cleanest possible jasmine, and a gentle woodiness surrounds the top notes right from the start. It's all citrus and fresh clean rooms.
When I think about what I would want my ideal fragrance to smell like, digging through more and more abstract ideas - walking home at 5am, the first morning in September when you smell autumn in the air, an airplane gate waiting area after you're checked in and through security with several hours to spare, certain blurry photos of my mother in the 80s before I was born - one of the things on my list is always air-conditioning. I want a fragrance that smells like the artificial heaven of air-conditioning, its immediate relief, its refusal of the weather, its quick-drying effect on skin. Colonia Pura smells like air-conditioning, like a mall or a movie theatre on a hot day, like the welcome blast of cold air, not actually fresh, but gorgeously performing an exaggeration of freshness. - HF