SURPRISE! It's a Dry Down Fall Edition!
We're back (well, kind of)!
Dear Dry Downers,
HELLO! Has it really been a year since we were last together? And what a…year it has been. 2020 has been, well, terrible…so terrible in fact that we decided it was time to (briefly) bring The Dry Down out of retirement so that we could (briefly) take our minds off of this helltime and write about perfumes. Perfume is not necessarily removed from this chaotic year — it is strangely one of the only growth categories in the beauty market, as people are still buying fragrance to wear alone in their homes — but it is a place of fantasy and escape, and we are very grateful for it in a time that is short on imagination. In this edition, we write about perfumes we’ve been wearing this year, and also some scents that are not exactly perfumes: soaps, sanitizers, etc. Also, because we haven’t written one of these in a while, we made this edition a bit longer than usual — save it for your Sunday reading…if you can still remember what day it is (also a tip that Gmail might truncate this email for you — you’ll have to click through to read the whole thing!).
We should clarify that The Dry Down isn’t “back”…not exactly. We are still on a semi-hiatus as we pursue other projects. But we both felt drawn back to this project that we have so loved, and to our readers, who we have so missed, and it just felt like the right time to revisit the letter. Will we do more? Maybe! Who can say! But know that we are thinking about you — and about perfumes — all the time. And we hope you enjoy this little dispatch from our New York apartments, to wherever you are huddled. XO, Rachel + Helena
Bengale Rouge, Papillon Artisan Perfumes- RS
Fall. Spooky season. Autumnal equinox. The Harvesting. Sweater weather. Whatever you choose to call it -- deireadh fomhair, automne, hærfest -- this time of year is both the most overexposed and the most aggressively-defended span of three months we have. Everyone who loves fall (spoiler: everyone loves fall) talks about the season as if they are the only person who has ever crunched through umber leaves in a leather jacket, as if they alone noticed the moment that the sky began to crackle with crisp cognac-scented electricity, as if they have some ancient Celtic secret moving through their veins that allows them to sense the exact day that summer wheat turns into amber waves. People are ceaselessly corny about cornucopias. They (and let’s be honest, we -- I am no innocent in this) ride or die for fall as if it is constantly threatened and not just something that happens every single year. A surefire way to go viral around early September is to post the still from “When Harry Met Sally” where Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal are standing in Central Park surrounded by rust-colored trees; Ryan is wearing a jaunty felt hat and a grey woolen blazer while Crystal wears slouchy corduroys and the sort of oversized brown leather jacket that transitioned from “hot city-guy uniform” to “Dad from Central Casting” sometime between 1990 and now. I’m serious: post that picture, with some banal caption like “Feel like pure shit, just want them back” or “Mentally I’m here” and watch the likes roll in like high tide.
It makes sense that autumn avengers exist; the season comes directly after summer, which is just so obvious in its pleasures: sticky sweet popsicles, cool turquoise water, coconut cocktails, drunk pizza, neon tank tops, neon roller blades, hot asphalt and the smell of smoldering charcoal from two backyards away. After all of this outdoor flamboyance, after all the running through sprinklers and languishing on fire escapes, the indoor cat nature of fall feels practically sophisticated. It is a time when we take to big chairs and teacups again, when we relish inside-only activities like reading novels and binging scary movies and whipping up rich soups before winter lasts too long and breaks us down again. These activities feel suddenly sharp, cozy, almost intellectual. Because they are new to us again, they feel exciting, transgressive, maybe even singular. Apple butter is a revelation! Does it matter that everyone else likely bought apple butter last week? It does not! It is my fall thing, my way of inducing a warm, boozy, grog-like gaslight glow in my heart, my little ritual for welcoming in the time of reaping. The thing about fall is, it is so undeniably the best season that it manages to shoot the moon; it is so universally beloved that people feel moved to create fake fall-haters in their minds and fend them off with Halloween window decals and decorative hay bales so that they can reclaim fall as their discovery.
This “imaginary defense force” phenomenon pops up quite often when it comes to things that are unequivocally good and already dominant; for example, you have whole Reddit forums of people out there defending vanilla ice cream like they swore to protect its honor when in fact it has already won the race. Nobody (lactose-tolerant) in their right mind is turning down a scoop of vanilla with a slice of pie. Vanilla doesn’t need a posse! It is the homecoming queen of ice cream flavors! The fix is in. These are the same people who go to bat for the movie Ratatouille (as if anyone’s heart is so hard that it cannot open up for a whimsical film about a rodent chef) and hot towels right out of the dryer. People are so afraid that their proclivities are basic that they have to rough them up a bit to retain their edge. My friend Avery Trufelman, who hosts the amazing The Cut podcast these days, recently texted me two pictures -- under one, of Alicia Silverstone in her red Alaia minidress in “Clueless,” she wrote “Summer,” and under another “Clueless” still of a hunky Paul Rudd reading Nietzsche next to the pool she wrote “Autumn.” And let’s face it, nobody hates Paul Rudd. Paul Rudd is vanilla ice cream.
“Basic-ness,” as it applies specifically to fall, is a subject of much recent public debate. The opening salvo in Autumnal Basic Studies came in 2014, when Anne Helen Petersen, then still writing for Buzzfeed, published this seminal essay with the subtitle “Breaking down why we're actually dismissive of all things pumpkin spice.” The Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte, which the chain introduced in 2003 (and which has sold over 200 million units since), has become a sort of ur-text for critically reading fall culture over the last decade. The rise of the PSL coincided with the rise of “Christian Girl Autumn” images on Instagram, in which a (usually white) woman with perfect bouncy Pantene hair poses next to a giant gourd, or in an apple orchard, or on a leaf-peeping expedition. These women looked like they were auditioning for the LL Bean catalog: they wore shearling boots and performance leggings, puffy down vests and nubbly sweaters and pert little beanies. They dressed their babies up like chubby witches. They unboxed Yankee Candles with names like “Farmer’s Market” and “Honeycrisp Apple Cider” and gushed about the scent throw on YouTube. Their hero was (and likely still is, despite her political awakening) Taylor Swift, who herself was known to walk around cities cradling a steaming PSL in her willowy palms. I imagine that when Tay released folklore, which is as much of a paean to Fall Energy as anything she’s ever done, the latte-gang had a small series of delight-induced aneurysms. What Petersen argued then, and what still applies now, is that hating Pumpkin Spice was just a coded form of misogyny and class anxiety, that people flung the word “basic” out of their mouths to distance themselves from it like a silent fart. If you can recognize and make fun of basicness, then how can you, in turn, be basic?
I’d like to say we are currently in a better place, culturally, with regards to PSL slander, but the song more or less remains the same. The feminist writer Moira Donegan recently tweeted “Pumpkin spice is fine you just hate women,” and while this was meant to be a cheeky provocation, it’s not wrong. Pumpkin spice is still a punchline, a shorthand for what some dumb bitches like and do. It has also been the BEST thing to happen to the fall-fanciers in eons; now there is a real-live foe, a reason to defend your seasonal predilections. If people hate pumpkin spice (which, I might add, is nothing more than a mixture of nutmeg, cinnamon, and clove), then by golly, you are going to go even harder in the paint for October. At last, an actual score to settle.
If you are a card-carrying member of the Fall’s Angels, and you are so bully on this season that you want to wear Pumpkin Spice all over your body as a sign of affinity, you can do no better than Liz Moores’ Bengale Rouge, an intoxicating gourmand that smells as honeyed and indulgent as a $6 beverage: it starts with a base of tonka bean, benzoin, and labdanum (all rich, gooey resins), and then builds with oppoponax and orris butter and vanilla extract. It’s cookies in the oven, it’s a mohair sweater. It’s crunching around in leaves in Frye Boots. It’s syrupy and steaming, like a cup of hot cinnamon milk. Is it basic? Is it overplayed? That’s up for you to say. Nora Ephron, if she were still around, might write a line about it into a movie. And you’d go on defending that line forever.
Dial Gold Antibacterial Liquid Hand Soap - HF
In March, all I did was wash my hands and think about hospitals. I washed my hands specifically with Dial Liquid Gold antibacterial soap, in its wobbly plastic bottle, on the side of my bathroom sink. I ran through one bottle and fished another out of the cardboard box stuffed into the bathroom cabinet. I worried about whether I would be able to order more.
On March 12th, four days before I got on a plane and came home from a trip to London that was supposed to have lasted much longer, I asked my husband to order as much Dial as the internet would allow him to reasonably acquire. He got 24 bottles, and I flew on a plane for seven hours and tried to think of everything else we were supposed to have bought and hadn’t remembered to buy, tried to calculate if it was already too late now. The logistical parts of doing life have always been difficult for me in an outsize way; in March, I began to feel like that inability made me a threat not just to myself and everyone around me. I was scared and guilty and I was so relieved that all I had to do when I got home was stay inside for 14 days, a set of instructions so simple even I couldn’t fuck it up. I came home and the bathroom smelled like Dial and I washed my hands and my hands smelled like Dial.
Any smell, from poop to cotton candy to Chanel No. 5, is about memory, about the past, about our individual circumstances. Where I loved, who I loved, what I wanted and didn’t get, what I never had enough of, what was forced on me and what was taken from me. “How something smells” is nearly impossible to express in unbiased language - I can say “bergamot,” or “jasmine,” or “laundry,” or “cut grass,” but the specific flower or citrus or detergent or lawn your mind summons up is different than the one mine will summon, and is a record of what has been important to you, and of what has been done to you.
For many people, Dial smells like hospitals. If I were someone else, I would say that Dial smells like boredom and impatience, like grief, like bargaining, like hallways and hard metal chairs, or any number of other things that define hospitals themselves, that would associatively link me to the smell of this ugly orange-gold soap in its dopey plastic bottle with its childlike blue label. But I have been horrifically lucky in certain ways, and I have spent little enough time in hospitals in my life that I do not associate Dial with them. Instead, I associate Dial with getting a tattoo, because it is the soap most tattoo artists I have gone to have recommended using to wash a new tattoo while it’s healing. Before this past March, Dial smelled like the excitement of a defiantly bad choice, like coming home pleasantly thrumming with adrenaline and ordering a pizza before a woozy crash. Dial represents a medical level of hygiene to me not because a doctor told me to use it, but because several tattoo artists did.
But in March and then April, when crisis overtook New York City and eerily silent nights were broken by the stark wail of ambulances, Dial stopped smelling like tattoos, and started smelling like the sum and weight of each indoor day. Dial smelled like a bargain. Do this, and you’ll be ok. Do everything right, and no one else will die. If you follow the rules, you can prevent the losses.
In March, I thought about luck incessantly. I rarely go to the doctor; I have never broken a bone, never been hospitalized overnight since I was a child. I have accompanied injured or sick partners and friends to the hospital, but rarely for anything truly serious and never for more than a single night. I have gone on for most of my life blithely assuming I’m healthy, assuming that because I have been healthy for this long, I will continue being healthy. I had swine flu in 2009 and it was five horrific days that I mostly don’t remember at all, but it never got bad enough that I had to go to the hospital. Luck is the near-misses, the cars that pass too close on the road at night, the shudder of what almost happened, and didn’t. I washed my hands with Dial, and ran numbers in my head: how old my husband was, and how old I was, our overall health, our family histories, our risk factors. I washed my hands and we sanitized our groceries and left our mail outside our door for three days. We bought huge packages of rubbery gloves that made my hands sweat. No one really understood the science of any of this yet, and everything felt like religion, the gambler’s faith in things unseen.
Hygiene began to take on the mythic significance of prayer. Dial smelled like the idea that doing the correct, austere, sensible things in the correct order would keep me safe. Plastic bottles of Dial are so ugly, so stridently anti-aesthetic, that their ugliness seems like somehow a moral imperative, an aesthetic hairshirt. Choosing this particular soap, in this horrible orange color, must mean that I was putting the harsh realities of body and responsibility above the frivolous considerations of vanity. It must mean that I would be rewarded.
These narratives of deservingness are of course as false as they are seductive. We make up stories about merit and justice and earning things in order to stave off the sheer terror of luck. In March everyone performed calculuses about risk, about circumstance, about contributing factors. Who is safest, and who is least safe and why, how to become more safe oneself, and how to protect those less safe. We tried to set our expectations; we tried to establish a ranked map of coming losses. We tried to believe that we could be ready for it, that it was ever possible to be ready for things.
But the unexpected comes for us every day, and grief is always a surprise, even when it seems we should have reason to expect it. Statistics and predictions do not change the horror of luck, the way it arrives as an enormous gust of wind out of nowhere. Loss cuts through calculations of deserving and undeserving, of earned and unearned.
I washed my hands with Dial and I counted the days. I didn’t know what a hospital smelled like. I felt terrifyingly unprepared. I tried to make bargains; I try to build a case based on deservingness, but deservingness is a prayer sent to an empty paper heaven. Dial smelled like the future, and the future was a blank. We were all driving on a road with so little immediate visibility, holding our breath and hoping for no sharp corners, no headlights in the opposite direction suddenly bearing down on us.
I ran out of Dial sometime in late June, after New York’s numbers had come back down. I went back to using Mrs Meyer’s basil hand soap, which felt far less like a Calvinist prayer over the bathroom sink. The lockdown in the city had eased, running out into a green summer where communities of the lucky, those of us who had held our breath across a long night and arrived at the other side, gathered together in the streets. Much of my life moved outdoors, and my hands no longer smelled like Dial.
I ordered more bottles of Dial recently, having meant to replace them ever since the last ones ran out. When I washed my hands, it smelled like March, a time that I didn’t even fully realize had yet receded into the past, rising up in smell like a furious ghost. Dial didn’t smell like hospitals, but it also no longer smelled like tattoos. It smelled instead like the handful of weeks I spent in my apartment, being very lucky, and holding my breath, and waiting. It smelled like the low chant of desperately repeated action, like trying to run the numbers on an unknown future.
Swedish Dream Sea Salt Hand Sanitizer (and a brief history of Purell) - RS
Recently, a friend who works in advertising told me that that hottest new client to hit Madison Avenue this summer (or whatever Madison Avenue currently exists in the digital ether that is endless Zoom pitch meetings and bitchy Slacks channels about copywriting faux pas) was…Purell. Everyone in town wanted the account. In the middle of a pandemic, landing Purell -- one of the only products to actually thrive on the market this year, alongside other precious, rationed goods like Clorox wipes and Charmin two-ply -- would be like landing Budweiser during the Superbowl. It would be like signing Zales at Christmastime, or Nike during the Olympics. If it was 1969, Don Draper would be wooing several people with fatty porterhouses and creamed spinach and weaponized charisma in order to seal the deal. As my friend was telling me about the Purell frenzy, however, an obvious question popped into my head: Why? Why on earth would Purell, who before the Coronavirus hit, already controlled 25% of the hand sanitizer market share, need to advertise at all? Purell has the kind of rare brand recognition in which the name has come to stand for the entire category; the way that “Coke” sometimes just means whatever soda is in the fridge, and “Kleenex” sometimes just means any tissue that you can sneeze into, “Purell” is more or less synonymous with sanitizing goop writ large. It has become a verb. For longtime hypochondriacs, it has become a totemic, almost mystical comfort blanket. You see it in the entryways of most supermarkets and public libraries and hospitals. You see it scattered around airports and art museums, in those ingenious little dispensers that look like parking meters and shoot fluffy, foamy alcohol into your palms with the gusto of a college student shotgunning Reddi-Whip. If you know about hand sanitizer at all, you know about Purell, not least in the midst of a plague. So why spend ad dollars now?
As it turns out, Purell has never really focused on the direct-to-consumer sell before. It wasn’t exactly their main game. Their glory zone was business-to-business marketing; convincing supermarket chains and nursing homes and shopping malls to buy and dispense the stuff. They were a bulk supplier first, and a soap-aisle contender second. Sure, they were happy for people to impulse-buy little squirt bottles of the clear, odorless gel at checkout counters and pharmacy windows; they did decent business with parents of sticky-fingered toddlers and over-anxious types who keep a mini-bottle of the stuff dangling off their keyring at all times like a gooey rabbit’s foot. Purell is perennially popular with shoppers during cold season, when it takes on a sort of mythological significance, a sort of mental force field against whatever malade might seek to undo your plans. But Purell never really had a front-facing strategy that involved millions of people scrambling to get their hands on bottles all at once, at least not one that relied on creating that kind of buzz themselves.
For a brand like Purell, Covid-19 was a kind of deus ex marketing situation; they were simply in the right place at the right time, even if that place was a tragedy of epic proportions. When the pandemic began, there was a run on hand sanitizer like it was liquid gold. From March to July, sales of sanitizer shot up 465%, selling $200 million worth of product in just three months. This should have been Purell’s time-- and it was, just not when it came to the general public. Because Purell’s main clients were already hospitals and health care facilities, they focused heavily on getting first responders the sterile ooze they needed in a time when both PPE and sterilization supplies were becoming scarce. This was a worthy priority, but it ended up creating a consumer vacuum; bottles of Purell started to disappear from grocery store shelves far faster than the company could replenish them. Those people who were lucky -- or conniving enough -- to score a supply in the early days of the pandemic began to re-sell them for exorbitant prices online, until retailers began cracking down on exploitative gauging (you all remember the man in Tennessee who gobbled up 17,000 bottles of Purell to try to make a fortune and ended up with a garage full of goo he had to donate to healthcare workers? He was the main character on the Internet for a whole day, but 2020 has had so many villains this year, it’s hard to keep up). Purell knew they had a unicorn on their hands, but they simply could not predict the tsunami of demand that this year would bring. In one report, a spokesperson for Gojo Industries, which makes Purell, said that they started running their factories twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week in March, and that by July they were churning out more than double the amount of sanitizer than they made last year. You can now find Purell again -- even if it is hovering at an inflated rate of around $6-8 a bottle on most retail sites -- but the gel’s temporary absence was not without its consequences. In the brief window when Purell was more valuable than saffron, hundreds of other brands, many of which had not made sanitizer before this year, rushed in to fill the void. Now, sanitizer is one of the most robust, most crowded categories in the health/wellness business, with hundreds of new varietals debuting each week. In essence, Purell lost their homecourt advantage and perhaps even their monopoly, or at least their monopoly on the public imagination, which might be just as detrimental. And so, they now have to push the stuff through television spots and magazine spreads, just like everyone else.
What you should know about Purell is that it was once an underdog; it is comfortable in this position. In 1946, the married couple Goldie and Jerry Lippman of Akron, Ohio founded GoJo Industries (a combination of their names) as a result of their experiences working in factories during wartime. Goldie, for her part, worked at a rubber factory and noticed that men would use harsh benzene to strip the carbon black from their hands, but that this left their palms red and raw (not to mention what the benzene did to women’s hands, which was destroy their softness and their manicures). Together with Jerry, who worked in aircraft manufacturing, she decided that there had to be a better way to remove grease than by dipping your knuckles in toxic chemicals (and we later learned that benzene, a main component of cigarette smoke, is in fact quite carcinogenic). So the couple worked with a chemist at Kent State to develop a gloppy, but skin-friendly, substance that caused tar to slide off the hands. The couple, who were living with Goldie’s parents, mixed the first batch in their washing machine and kept the goo in old pickle jars that Jerry bartered from restaurants. Jerry first sold the product, called Gojo (which still exists to this day) to auto shops, and it was a slow starter. There is a fascinating story about the history of all this in The New Yorker from 2013 should you want to read more, but this is my favorite anecdote: “Jerry hawked it to automobile mechanics by going from garage to garage. Before shaking hands with a prospective customer, he would conceal a glob in his palm. The victim would pull his hand back in horror, but then discover, as he wiped it off, that he could see clean skin, sometimes for the first time in years.” Can you imagine a mechanic in the 1950s being non-consensually gooped by a traveling salesman, and then discovering he actually liked it?
In any case, as the New Yorker story recounts, Goldie and Jerry’s nephew, Joe Kanfer, took over the business, and in 1988, helped develop an newfangled invention called Purell, an alcohol-based insta-cleanser they intended to market directly to doctors and nurses. It didn’t sell well. “Nobody bought it,” he said. “The salesman would squirt some into a customer’s hands, and then they’d talk and they’d talk and they’d talk, but people couldn’t get their minds around it. They didn’t know what it was for.” When consumers did begin to embrace it (as previously mentioned, it really caught on like wildfire with the health-anxiety community), medical professionals started to issue tsk-tsk warnings in the press. They worried that Purell would replace hand-washing, which was far more effective at killing germs. But again, Purell triumphed, as studies began to emerge proving that keeping the stuff in army barracks significantly cut down on cold and flu outbreaks. Soon it became standard issue, not just at boot camp but in preschools and Elks lodges. The Purell story: a real roller coaster! I want the movie! It is almost as thrilling as the development of the windshield wiper! Almost.
What I’m saying is, Purell has been down before. They’ll ride this out. But in the meantime, there are hand sanitizers galore to choose from, and many of them smell very good. Purell’s whole thing is that it is odorless, like a fine vodka. But not this new crop. No, these sanitizers are for sniffing, baby. Ironically, some of the first companies to convert to sanitizer production in March and April were Parisian perfumeries (Givenchy and Dior, to be specific), but their sanitizers did not smell like anything. Perfume is made out of an alcohol base, so it was quite easy for factories to make the switch, and they did so in the dark early days, when we were more or less in austere wartime mode. As such, their offerings were plain and spartan and unscented; Dior making a sanitizer that smelled like Poison or J’Adore would have just been tacky.
Fortunately, companies realized that while we may not be done with the virus for a long while, we don’t have to completely deprive ourselves of pleasure when it comes to staying on top of it. By mid-summer, dozens of sumptuous new sanitizers appeared: there’s Megababe (bergamot), ByHumankind (grapefruit), Lather (lavender), Blackbird (hinoki), even Byredo made a ($30, lol) sanitizer out of Bulgarian roses. Craft distilleries began to sell chic sanitizers that looked like tiny airplane cocktails, and Etsy sellers became as industrious as Goldie and Jerry with their early pickle jars. I’ve tried dozens of sanitizers now, and it has become one of the main ways I experience scent.
I bought a bottle of this delightful Sea Salt Sanitizer at a bodega in August, furtively grabbing it while masked and separated from the cashier by plexi-glass. I knew of Swedish Dream -- you often see their hand soaps in twee gift shoppes and the sorts of fancy food stores that sell “provisions” -- but I had no idea how addictive the sanitizer version of their sea salt scent would be. It isn’t clean, not exactly. It’s more funky and marine, like crunched up oyster shells. It smells almost buttery, like movie theater popcorn. I love it, and I spray it on my hands about twenty times a day, especially because the smell evaporates within seconds. I know that Purell is going to try to win me back, and I wish them luck in the effort. But I cannot see going back to the unscented, convent life. As long as I have to be as obsessive about hand hygiene as Ahab was about his whale, I want to smell like a sailor.
Buen Camino, Chronotope Perfume -- HF
Buen Camino is, according to its website, based on creator Carter Weeks Maddox’s experience of walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela when he was twenty-three. “By the time I was within 200 miles of my finish line,” he recalls, “I'd shattered bones all over both feet, caught a wicked blood poisoning that turned abrasions into infections all over my body, and withered to a weight I'd not been since middle school. […] Buen Camino gathers scents from this last stretch of Camino when my health was at its all-time worst.”
The fragrance is meant to recreate this memory out of jagged pieces — the dust of the road, churches and herbs, antiseptic and asphalt and sweat and grime, the decaying body, and the almond cake he shared with his father who traveled to Spain to care for him — and it is hard to forget the description once you’ve read it, vivid in its material body horror. It is impossible, now, to know how my experience of the scent was or wasn’t influenced by knowing the story behind it.
But smell is also a reminder of the essentially self-centered nature of our emotional lives. It is possible, and enticing, to imaginatively enter somebody else’s memory, even a painful and grotesque one, through the dress-up game of scent, cloaking ourselves in borrowed experience. But our own memories push through and assert themselves. Smell is about what we carry, and what we cannot leave behind. No tried-on costume can fully overtake the lived associations that spring up from one fragrance or another.
The cinnamon-almond pastry note at the opening of Buen Camino is overwhelming, to the point where it is possible to assume this will merely be a big, sweet, tooth-rotting gourmand. If that kind of scent is something you hate, you might dismiss it here, assuming it’s not for you. In the opening, the blast of sweetness smells to me like the cinnamon toast my mom used to make when I was home sick from school as a child. This is not something in any way characteristic of either my mom or my childhood— the memory seems implausible enough that I question whether it actually happened. It’s a memory of unlikely kindness, and that unlikeliness makes the smell feels queasy, like looking for the catch, like wondering what will be owed.
But then that big pillow-y cinnamon note is swallowed up into dust and immortelle and lavender and whatever that thing is that smells like churches. It is overwhelmingly churches, churches churches churches. Specifically, what it smells like next, after the opening settles down, is the experience of visiting a huge, cavernous church somewhere ancient and stepping inside as a firm non-believer, drawn only by aesthetic interest, vague curiosity, and the desire to sit down. Inside the church, everything smells like dried flowers and candlewax, like incense and smoke-rusted metal and old paper and faith and prayer and the kind of fingernail-desperate hope that turns into belief in things unseen. The smoke-stained ceiling arches so high above you when you sit that you can’t see where it ends, as though you turned you neck backward and gazed up into the infinite, welcoming void.
Churches have an ingenious way of holding and correcting temperature. If it was too hot outside, it is cool in these stone walls; if it was a bitterly cold winter, inside here it is surprisingly warm. It’s comforting in the same queasy way of getting too much of what you want and not knowing when you will be called to account to pay for it. You sit and you gaze upward and you look around and dozens of small candles, precarious prayers sent up to smoke, blur your vision, and you wonder if you were wrong. Maybe you might believe in something above and beyond yourself, after all. Maybe everybody following hymns and traditions into these large rooms on Sundays was right after all, and something exists larger than you, infinitely knowing and infinitely loving. It feels like that moment a few sips into the second drink when something unlocks at the back of your throat and you could believe in anything, when it seems warmly possible for every unspoken wish to come true, when the room and the people around you turn welcoming and words come easy. Faith feel like that half-drunk assurance in this enormous room in this unfamiliar city with aching feet on a hot day, until you stumble out of the smoke and the drowsiness and shake your head in the sunlight. Back on the street, back in the ongoing day, you feel in a small way both sad and relieved to be clear-eyed again, to live only in the known pedestrian world, unencumbered by miracles.
Maddox calls Buen Camino a scent about pilgrimage. Imagine the idea of pilgrimage set free from the oppressive history of the church, and then consider that being free from something does not mean not having to carry it. The drowsy, swooning comfort that a sense of the infinite offers is ripe to be taken advantage of, and it is no surprise that so many people are in one way or another abused by the church, by the mechanism that promises that everything asked of you is in service of an infinite love. It is tempting to look for the thing that asks you to hurt yourself in its service, that promises that suffering is the natural road to grace and that pain raises us up toward the bright light in which we are all forgiven. To live without this belief, though, is a tragedy too, a sundering from a grander world in which the ceiling is not just the ceiling, but a channel to immortality, and death is not just death, and nothing is lost, and nothing need be grieved.
It’s grandiose and inexplicable, in the manner of a church sermon, to try to claim that a bunch of dark-yellow water in a bottle that you can buy for $145 (there’s also a sample for $10, or a set of all of the brand’s fragrances for, $30, I extremely recommend ordering this, I could easily write an essay of equal size about the other two) smells like loss, and like faith, and like the harsh collision of the two, the desire for miracles and the refusal to bear their cost, the oppressive weather that returns when one casts off comforting delusions. Maybe it just smells this way to me, or maybe I was simply too influenced by reading the story in the website copy.
But I think it’s the combination of delicate, comforting, lavender and cinnamon with the harsher smells of dust and bodies and asphalt, and how all of these are wrapped up in that big, heavy, old-church smell, that does it. Something like what a church might call grace is possible in the pedestrian, secular world, the one where our feet hurt, where our stomach bothers us, where our bodies make awkward noises, where we’re hungry even though we just ate and we want the things that will make us feel bad and we have to walk home and deal with where to put our clothes when we take them off and as we wash our hands and use the bathroom we notice everything that isn’t clean even though we just cleaned it yesterday. But it is much more difficult; it is where the smell of cinnamon meets the smell of asphalt and wounds, and where we have to carry both at once. The body is very real, and not explained away by sermons, or redeemed by any life beyond this one, here, where skin smells like skin and love smells like cinnamon but often like peeling scabs, too.
The weird thing here is that Buen Camino smells like of all of this but it is also the most wearable scent I’ve tried in years, and almost immediately became the one I reach for every day without thinking about it. Both comfort and trauma are always there, though, coming along for the ride, sometimes smelling like lavender, and sometimes smelling like decay, and sometimes just smelling like cinnamon toast someone made for you because you’re sick. The largest things are sometimes often the simplest things, too. I recommend this wholeheartedly, if you like cinnamon, or fougeres, or strangeness, or the smell of old churches. Try this if you are looking for something that will transport you, and something that will root you in your own miraculous, decaying body.
Bergdorf Pour Femme, Roja Dove (sample size) - RS
I have a very small vial of a very ridiculous perfume that has brought me great joy in this time. When it first came into my possession, I thought: I will never, ever wear this. It’s a whole three-ring circus of scent; I can’t even tell where to look. Dove (who if you have read The Dry Down before you know is a recurring character around these parts; he is Queen Elizabeth’s official perfumer, and we have nicknamed him “Glamour Panther” because he wears velvet smoking jackets and huge carnelian rings and looks not unlike John Malkovich’s decadent character in “The New Pope”) made this limited-edition scent a few years back to be sold in only one store in the world, Bergdorf Goodman, on 5th Avenue and 57th Street in Manhattan. Bergdorf’s is where Dove has his U.S. headquarters, but it also boasts one of the most robust, well-curated perfume departments of any department store on earth. Walking through it can make you feel sick, or high, depending on how you feel about smelling hundreds of fine fragrances in one thick cloud. Bergdorf’s perfume department sits in the basement of the store, which makes the floral fug even more deadly and concentrated; it smells like a greenhouse down there. It smells like a powder room on prom night.
Bergdorf Pour Femme (there is also a companion masculine scent called Bergdorf Man that is more or less just cloves and tobacco, so we’ll set that aside for now), is an attempt to capture this aromatic cacophony. It smells like every perfume that already exists coming at you all at once, like someone accidentally knocked over your vanity and smashed all the bottles and oops, now you have to move. The ingredient list is a maximalist joke: bergamot, jasmine, gardenia, heliotrope, orange blossom, rose, muguet, tuberose, violet, benzoin, castoreum, cedar, musk, oakmoss, olibanum, patchouli, pink pepper, sandalwood, styrax, vanilla, tonka. I mean, what isn’t in this perfume? Do you think that daffodil oil is sitting at home alone crying and thinking “I don’t care, I didn’t want to be invited to the party with all my friends anyway! This is my night to do a facemask and catch up on Selling Sunset!” I mean, nearly every essence on earth was invited to leap into this bottle and dance around. And the perfume…reflects that. It smells like an older woman in an elevator who doesn’t realize how powerful her scent is because her nasal receptors are starting to dull; she just douses her neck and goes, not realizing that she is trailing an operatic aria of fragrance with her to the supermarket. It smells like an elegant aunt hugging you after her travels abroad, her pashmina ripe with the florid air of the Duty Free store.
What I am trying to say is that this perfume smells like being among people, maybe even too many people. It is a packed subway car of ideas. In another time, I would not deign to wear it, except maybe to the ballet (remember the ballet? I rarely even went, but quarantine has me out here believing I was a regular ballet attendee in the Before). It is just beyond overdoing it, to put this stuff on in public. And yet, we are not in public right now. Perfume has become, these past months, a private pleasure only. Is it ludicrous? I think it is the opposite. We are constantly checking our sense of smell (how convenient and frightening, for us olfactory thinkers, that Covid-19 breeds in the nasal cavity) and are stuck at home with our own funk. Why not wear the enormous perfume, when there is nobody to offend, no stranger’s nose to curdle, no way to even break up most days besides sensory punctuation? I find that putting on Bergdorf makes me feel...something, which is about all I can ask of any perfume at this time. And it reminds me of my fuckaround GlamourSundays when I used to go to a movie at the Paris Cinema (RIP) and have tea in the Plaza café (now temporarily shuttered, RIP) and swan around the Bergdorf’s basement sniffing and sniffing and never buying anything. I did this about twice a year, and I never thought twice about it. And now, I can’t do it at all, and I don’t know when I will be able to again. It feels like such a luxury, to be back in that basement, that I can’t even imagine that I will get to return. But this perfume reminds me that other people are out there, beyond my windows, and one day in the future there will be a day when I am grateful to be trapped in an elevator with this scent, the lingering evidence of a stranger who has not practiced restraint.
All of the Perfumes You Already Own, Really Every Single One, All of The Samples and The Bottles too - HF
For the last six months, my husband and I have both put on fragrance every day. It started with finding out that one common indicator of Covid-19 infection was the loss of one’s sense of smell. We would put on perfume and breathe it in as a test, to make sure we could still smell it. Being able to smell was a relief, like taking our temperatures and seeing them read out to a normal level. We can smell our own wrists and each other’s wrists and say yes, we’re ok, we’re safe. We grabbed whatever bottle or sample was nearest; it’s not like there was an occasion or outfit to which to match it. Sometimes it was the big, weird, uncooperative ones that we rarely wear; sometimes it was comforting old favorites. We didn’t even look at which one it was before we sprayed it on. What would it matter, why not a tiny surprise?
We have kept doing this even long after the novelty and immediate, spiky fear has worn off. It has become a habit and, more than that, it has become a game, a small burst of playfulness in a deadly serious time. Perfume is playing dress up, just like getting dressed up in an outfit to go nowhere, full hair and makeup and a dress I maybe wouldn’t wear outside anyway-- too formal, too flamboyant, too slutty-- and no shoes, because I don’t want to annoy the downstairs neighbors or mark up the floors.
I can’t recommend any one perfume for this, because that’s not the point. What I can recommend instead is rooting through all your drawers and trying on any and all scents you already own as though they were costumes. It is finally a time when owning too many perfumes seems to have been a brilliant move rather than an overenthusiastic error. Thomas puts on Bruno Fazzolari’s Lampblack, and it smells like a grown-up, mysterious, smoothed-edge version of Cool Water and I think about how the first night I kissed a boy, in eighth grade, is also my first memory of a day when the fact that it was spring really mattered, when the turning over of cold weather into green rebirth seemed like a miracle. I wear Roja Dove’s huge, buttery, ridiculous white floral Danger and feel like a countess out of a romance novel, dripping imaginary diamond bracelets, I waft over to the couch and sit in its bejeweled halo while Thomas and I look at other people’s cats on instagram. On rainy days both of us wear Chris Rusak’s near perfect woody-citrus chameleon Timbre, which on me smells like the idea of a fall day, a big sweater, like that feeling when you hold a warm mug in both hands, and on Thomas smells like an orange grove somewhere far away, a washed-clean vacation coastline, an out-of-office email. Both of these versions of it feel like an escape, and both lift us from the anxious mundanity of the present moment. I wear Tudo Azul, one of the purest summer scents I know, and it smells like the way Jacob Riis beach looks in other people’s instagram stories, sand and skin and radiant bodies, friendship and desire equally abundant, equally easy to parse and to make peace with. I put on shorts and a bikini top even as it gets colder out, and I stand in our windowless kitchen and get my hands dirty cooking and pretend I have just come back from a long day running around outdoors. I wear Jazmin Saraï’s Ma’re and watch the sky change in the morning and think about how close this big, narrow, dirty city is to the ocean. I listen to the loud riot of birds and smell the salt and neroli and cedar and cuddle into the same sweatshirt I have been wearing for four days, and imagine I’m at a bonfire near the water in California on a lushly grey day an hour before the sun starts going down. I wear Diptyque’s Philosykos, and its cocoa-butter-slick green fig and candy sweetness seems indecent, stinking up my living room, shockingly unsuited for the present moment. It’s too much; it smells like being on a crowded subway on a hot day when someone wearing too much perfume gets on, or it smells like the times I have realized, with much greater horror, that I myself am that person, and that everyone in half of a subway car righteously and correctly hates me. A crowded subway car is a thing I have spent a great deal of time either complaining about or trying to avoid, and now I miss it with the sharpness of dehydration under my tongue. I wear bright perfumes that smell like getting up early on a Sunday, and soft ones that smell like crisp white linen shirts, and dank ones that smell like hiking through a mile of mud.
Perfume has no utility except transportation, playing dress up in all our own living rooms, trying to even for a few moments lift ourselves by means of fantasy. Fragrance is wigs and glasses, Halloween costumes, stupid and silly, distracting, a break from the world and from ourselves, a performance for an audience of two, or of only one, saturated inside our secret rooms and our hiding places, all day long in the marinade, but throwing open the windows when the breeze comes.