2016-12-07 The Dry Down #1
Today I smell like a horse. Well, more like the idea of a horse. I am wearing a fragrance called Equus No 8, which came out last year from a small line called YeYe out of Santa Barbara founded by a former haberdasher and a frustrated industrial engineer who decided to get the hell out of New York City and follow their shared olfactive passions to the sea. I currently have several tiny vials of their horse essence (which is really just the scent of tannic leather and cardamom and pink peppercorns and dry rosewood and a pickled, sweaty saffron note which really puts the whole effort right on the razor’s edge of wearable) lying around the apartment, due to a story I wrote in the fall about animal-inspired scents, and they keep magically appearing in my coat pockets and desk drawers. Come to the stables, they whisper. Ignore the fact that your arm kind of reeks of a teenager’s room after an hour. I don’t love the scent on me (I hardly like it; though I can see how on someone else’s skin the spicy undertang of it could waft a carnal strength) but I can’t seem to stop putting it on. The scent is mostly weird, and right now I crave the weird. I feel weird. One moment I’m numb and the next I’m angry, and then scared, and then I let myself feel a glimmer of hope and remember how to put words together, but then I cycle right on back to numb again. It’s been like that for the last month, for most of the people I know and love. Everything feels ridiculous and canted at an eerie angle -- we played ourselves by thinking we lived in a different world, and now that we know what kind of world we really live in (or at least we are being honest about how it has been for a long time), we aren’t quite sure how to wake up every morning and keep walking through it with the same routines. So I started wearing the really bizarro perfumes from random pockets -- aggressively difficult, dark syrups, those that smell like being suffocated by pine sap or locked in a sauna with a dying jasmine plant. I may be coming through the other side of this phase (I’ve started to put on big bliss clouds of gorgeous monsters like Fate and Diaghalev and Chergui in the mornings, before any bleary sense of promise and purpose can evaporate), but eau d’creepy barn just felt like where 2016 ends, where it has dropped us all.
That said, perfume is supposed to be fun. Really! We don’t so much need it anymore, not since modern plumbing was invented and people gained the ability to rinse out their crevasses en masse; modern day perfumery isn’t really about dousing your skin in roses so that no one realizes you smell like a corpse (though honestly, it could be argued that it is still, always, about warding off death, distracting yourself from mortality with sweet neroli blossom). These days, perfume is a luxury item, a frivolous frippery embellishment that no one needs to think about too deeply. Of course, not thinking much about it is why most people are swanning around wearing truly terrible perfumes (hint: these usually come with designer labels), full of haphazard aromachemicals that give bystanders a hedione headache that hurts like a brain freeze. I started overthinking perfume in the way that anyone starts overthinking anything: I fell in love. I smelled original formulation YSL Opium when I hugged a very elegant older woman in a sable coat who would later change my life, and in that moment I remember I wanted to cry; not because I was so overtaken by the composition of it (Opium by Bosch?) but because it triggered a volcano of memory that I didn’t even know was lying dormant. I felt swaddled in comfort and matrilineal wisdom -- somehow this particular mix of castoreum (read: beaver ass) and sandalwood and myrhh and carnation made me feel, in one second, like I was connected to this woman and all the women who came before her. I felt pretty embarrassed about the whole incident. The maudlin swooning, the I never knew! They should have sent a poet! college-freshman revelation of it; but then, most of the love affairs that last begin awkward and stumbling and with an overflow of irrational interest. If the hunger for the new thing isn’t borderline humiliating, it probably won’t stick.
I started collecting perfume at 25 or so, and my current stash is shameful (and still growing). It does not help that I started writing about perfume (roses, animalics, power perfumes) which just causes all those little tester vials to find their way into all my bags and couch cushions (I’ve even found them tucked into books in the shelf). I have an old mirrored vanity for bottles that is so crowded that I have to curate it and rotate losers into the archive; my partner built me a beautiful zebrawood holder for perfume samples and I outgrew it in two days. Oh well. I love it. And I want you to love it. This a hobby that is super private in a lot of ways -- you can’t really talk about it, not in any satisfying way that mimics actually sniffing the stuff (if I tell you that you should wear a chypre with a base of oakmoss and a top of bergamot, it sounds nice, but it will never be as good as that moment you close your eyes and lean into your wrist for the molecular kill) -- but also it is meant for sharing. Perfume is a love language. It is meant to be worn, and spoken about, and then spoken about being worn.
I know this because I when I met Helena, who will be writing this letter every other week (and who has her own letter, and who is one of my favorite writers on this planet), and found out that she was as interested in perfume as I was, there was a cold shock of recognition between us. Here you are, this other human who is into this really specific and strange human thing, let’s discuss. We have since spent long Sundays walking around from perfume shop to perfume shop together; curling our noses at an overpowering oud as a way to start talking about all the things that are bothering us; carrying bottles across the store to one another as a wordless sort of conversation about nothing and everything, a back and forth of this but not this and this? Perfume’s particular connection to memory is one of its most well-known powers, and perhaps for this reason it easily takes on the things we want to share with the people we love, but cannot heave into words. I can’t really tell you why this one particular week when I was twelve mattered, but here, smell this, it’s like the powdered violets in Apres L’Ondee.
Last week, I offered on Twitter to recommend perfumes for people based on their memories. It seemed to work -- so I made a typeform for people to formally submit requests, and have gotten hundreds of replies (I’m getting to you all, I swear!). Contained in this form is some of my favorite writing of the year -- it is so full of detail that it will break your heart. People don’t just want to smell like happiness, they want to smell like “the stick swamp of Maryland summer, when I went skinnydipping and rode home drunk and damp and chlorine-laden against the bare chest of a boy I wasn’t allowed to touch in the daytime.” (PS - I think this smells like Sel Marin?). They want to smell like “sitting in church with my secrets and knowing that though my faith didn’t accept a person like me that someday I would find love.” (I’d recommend Lavs). These aren’t just fragrance requests, they are people learning how to feel again despite our collective numbness cycles, pairing words with the ineffable to remember what they need and want to feel. And that’s what perfume is: a wearable description. It’s a sentence we can put together and then put on our bodies.
That is what The Dry Down is going to be -- some sentences Helena and I put together for you; perfume as a shared language.
In the spirit of new beginnings, here are three fragrances that feel like the start of something. I’m linking to LuckyScent or Twisted Lily (the online homes of two great brick-and-mortar shops in LA and NY, respectively) because you can order samples through them. And you should always, always order samples first. Even the loveliest perfumes can swerve sideways after a few hours and you cannot know without a road test. Also: none of these smell like a horse.
1) Love Shot by Ex Nihilo: This is so sweet, it is almost like it turns you into a big pink swirl of cotton candy. But it manages to do this without being cloying. It’s pure fizz, excitement, when the whole world is a little bit tart and neon and drunk.
2) Coriander by DS & Durga: The snap of a green twig, juniper needles, rolling around in dew. Like rubbing a hole in a frosted window in order to see outside into the snow. Everything new, everything covered in a coat of soft primer.
3) Ichnusa by Profumum Roma: The ripest fig; so ripe it feels like a sin. Warm sun and cut grass and a summer that doesn’t end. For a while, I felt sad when I wear this; it seemed like it was from a more innocent time. But then, maybe we were never innocent, and this smells like a new world we want to make, that we need to make. The fig in this is about to turn boozy and stale. But not yet. There is still time.
xoxoRach