Author Event With Barbara Herman
Where: Parnassus Books
When: 6:30 p.m. Thursday, June 5
Barbara Herman’s blog Yesterday’s Perfume recently featured a series of posts about the “odorifics” machine from Harold and Maude. “Maude gives Harold a face-mask attached to a tube that runs from the machine,” she writes, “which begins cranking as he sniffs and describes the smells: subway, perfume, cigarettes. But it’s the scent of snow that stops him in his tracks.”
Herman’s book, Scent and Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume, treats perfume the way Proust’s In Search of Lost Time treats pastries — explaining how personal certain smells can be, and how quickly they can transport you back to a very specific time and place, whether it’s a wedding, a funeral, or a kindergarten hallway. (An idea I’d like to capitalize on: Bottle single-use bubble baths that smell like Dewberry, Love’s Baby Soft and Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific; label each with the year they were created; package the lot as a “Hot Tub Time Machine”; and watch the money roll in.)
Join Herman at Parnassus tonight to discuss her book, and reminisce with the audience about your mom’s pristine bottle of Shalimar or your first boyfriend’s affection for, ugh, Cool Waters.
In anticipation of her appearance tonight, local DJ and perfume enthusiast Ron Slomowicz — who runs his own fragrance blog, notablescents.net, as well as the dance music blog notabledance.com — spoke with Herman on behalf of Country Life. Read their Q&A below.
Country Life: How did you go begin writing about perfume?
Barbara Herman: I left my Ph.D program at UC Berkeley’s Rhetoric and Film department after years there, realizing I simply didn’t want to be an academic. I traveled a bit after that (lived eight months in Saigon, Vietnam, where I was born), and worked as a copywriter and then a women’s pop culture blogger in San Francisco. It was at that job that I began to read perfume blogs and perfume books, and began to collect vintage perfume and write about it. Perfume challenged me as a writer, but I loved attempting to describe not only what it smelled like to me but also to write about the images and associations perfume evoked.
You bring a feminist point of view to perfume analysis. Saying that out loud just sounds strange, since the beauty industry is often accused of forcing woman to aspire to unreachable ideals.
As a former student of rhetoric, I see everything as a “text,” that is, a constructed cultural artifact that is informed by prevailing ideas about gender, race, class, etc. So I “read” perfume as a text — and often one that is often explicitly addressing things like gender, sexuality, class, and even race. So in that sense, yes, my feminist view is: What is this perfume (in its language of notes) and in its visual marketing “saying” to women, and what is it saying about them? (I focus less on men’s scents than I do women’s.)
In sniffing perfumes of the past, and looking at their attendant marketing, I learned a lot. I learned that women in a pre-women’s lib past had a lot more variety in their perfume styles, and often were encouraged to gender-bend (wear leather, chypre and tobacco perfumes) and be explicitly erotic/sexual. I learned that some perfume advertising promised that their perfume could express women's forbidden desires/behaviors. Like this tagline for Max Factor's '50s perfume Primitif, which asks, "Why not let your perfume say the things you wouldn't dare to?” Or invite them to fantasize about sex and romance (Tabu.)
I learned that a perfume like Charlie in the ’70s celebrated the liberated woman in ads and in perfume notes. Its imagery shows a woman in a pantsuit walking down the street alone. Its perfume notes are a combination of sporty and conventionally feminine, but with the gravitas of a chypre base — suggesting that the liberated woman can “have it all.”
And recently on my blog, I posted a “Through the Decades” look at perfume advertising on TV. A couple interesting ones come to mind. In a ’70s Rive Gauche YSL ad, the jingle says, “There she goes, the independent woman … She’s the girl who’s so contemporary, she’s having too much fun to marry!”
And a Chanel No. 5 ad with Catherine Deneuve suggests that perfume can be something that women enjoy for themselves, as pure beauty and pleasure. She says, "I'm often lonely in public. Especially when people expect me to be what I'm not. But I'm never lonely when I'm alone. Because I can be myself. I can daydream all night, or read a book. And eat candies. It's very precious, this time. It goes to my head. Like Chanel No. 5 spray perfume and spray cologne. Chanel: It's one of the pleasures of being a woman." How modern and subversive is that! That perfume is for a woman to enjoy alone. And then, all the ’80s perfume commercials revert to projecting fantasies of marriage and romance.
In short, there’s a wealth of information about how women are perceived/constructed/addressed in perfume and its advertising — if you look for it. It’s about so much more than something women (or men) wear to attract others or to hide natural odors.
How has a historical event affected the smell of perfumes?
In the ’40s, there were many bracing green “masculine” fragrances for women, and I think in part that was because the war brought a lot of women out of the home and into the workplace, so perfumes reflected this new “toughness.” I argue in my book that the virtuality of the Internet, the post-AIDS crisis germaphobia/fear of the body, just to name a couple things, brought about the “clean” trend in the 1990s. The ’90s were a reaction to big scents of the ’80s, of course, but there’s more to it, I suspect. These are just a couple examples of how the zeitgeist affects scents.
What would women of the ’30s or ’60s think of the perfume being made today?
I think they’d wonder why everything was so one-dimensional and synthetic!
You focus solely on vintage perfume — why is that?
I didn’t set out to, and I wouldn’t say that I don’t ever write about modern perfumes. I actually do a lot of perfume copywriting, and write about modern scents for magazines, etc.
But I started out writing about vintage perfume because I kept reading about certain discontinued or reformulated perfumes and how amazing they smelled. So at first I was just curious to smell those particular perfumes. I was struck by how different they were from the current styles (richer, more mysterious, decadent, quirky, etc.), and those differences seemed significant and worthy of analysis. Plus, because of a combination of IFRA regulations that eliminated important ingredients in those perfumes, and the simple passage of time, I wanted to focus on disappearing perfumes. Unlike paintings or music, perfume as an art form is unstable. It will evaporate, change and eventually disappear, unless someone gets really serious about creating a museum to preserve it. (The Osmothèque in Paris has done some of that, but they recreate historical scents.)
So I was compelled to focus on what might not be around in 20 years. There are some perfumes that I was able to get decants of in 2009 that are practically impossible to find now, for example, Jacques Fath’s Iris Gris. Even then, a 1/4ml sample was around $20. I can’t imagine what it’s going for now.
Now that I have smelled as many perfumes from the past as I could, I feel like a better-informed lover of contemporary perfumes. I can smell something modern and be able to compare it to something in the past, see where it’s similar or diverges, or where it exceeds or falls short. Like any art form, knowing about the past helps you understand the present.
If you could bring back any classic perfume, which would it be and why?
That is such a hard question, but the first thing that comes to mind is Guerlain’s Djedi. An incredibly evocative dry chypre, it’s named after an Egyptian soothsayer who could bring the dead back to life. It seems to have been conferred with magical properties, too!
While researching the book, what were a few vintage perfumes that you tried to smell but couldn't find?
Too many to count. Mostly from the teens and 1920s.
With the way perfumes age over time, how do you know if what you are smelling today is what it originally smelled like? How does the smell of a perfume change over time?
Even if really well-stored (hidden from heat and light in a cool closet, ideally), perfumes are going to change a bit, evaporate and get wonky, especially in the top notes. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t found almost perfectly intact perfumes. To make an analogy, just because a painting is missing a corner or faded, doesn’t mean you can’t get a good sense of the painting’s meaning. It’s the same with perfume. I have ’20s perfumes that were unopened, stored really well, that are gorgeous — and probably very close to what they smelled like when they were first made.
Dita Von Teese is a big fan of your book. She has her own perfume line, but which vintage perfume do you think best suits her and why?
I think Dita’s style and outlook are very Marlene Dietrich, a sexy and interesting combination of butch/femme. She plays with gender, either being an over-the-top femme — doing a kind of drag femininity — or donning tuxes and hats. So she’s a ’40s gal in my book: sometimes Robert Piguet’s Fracas, sometimes Bandit.
What do you think of unisex fragrances?
They’re a marketing gimmick. All scents are unisex, in the sense that there should not be a gender to perfume. A unisex scent shouldn’t simply mean “citrusy and clean.” Jasmine should be unisex. Leather should be unisex. In any case, the way people in the real world wear perfume (men wearing women’s scents and vice versa) is happening anyway whether a marketing person allows it or not.
"Scent-free" offices keep popping up. What is your take on this?
It’s my bête noire. I think we’ve become incredibly intolerant of the “otherness” of smells — of smelling perfume, “foreign” food, and the smell of another human being’s body odor (or even our own!). The scientific jury is out as to whether or not chemical sensitivity really exists, at least in the number of people who claim to have it. I think a lot of times people who are simply intolerant of scents are using bogus diagnoses to dictate to others. It annoys me that someone who doesn't like scent can tell me or you that we can't wear perfume to work or even bathe with scented soaps and shampoos! It’s not like I want to smell a person who hasn’t bathed for a month next to me on an airplane, but a little body odor or sweat is natural. Basically, I wish people were more intrigued by scents of all kinds, instead of being so prissy about smelling things!
People sometimes talk about perfumes as smelling like a grandma. What does that even mean?
I think they’re responding to the powderiness of some vintage perfumes, or maybe simply that they are in an older style or with out-of-fashion perfume notes like violet or carnation or even oak moss. It’s harder to overcome the prejudice against older smells, I think, because we process perfume in our guts, so to speak, before we logically evaluate it. But as we perfumistas know, familiarity breeds love. I think it’d be cool if people started wearing vintage perfume the way they do vintage clothes.
After reading your book, how can one start exploring the world of vintage perfume?
My suggestions are in the book! ;-)
