Perfume is the culture of the olfactory, the domestication of odors, tethered to an economy of aesthetics and taste, commerce, power, and the sly manners in which individuals are regulated by the assignment of identity within a social order.¹ Ephemeral and elusive, perfume is a losing game at cheating mortality: quite literally the fool’s errand of bottling and retaining that which disperses, ballistically, as molecules moving beyond the reach of our biological instruments by which they are sensed, recognized, and described. As such, the medium of perfumery has long depended on its attachments to arguably more stable signs: written language, for instance, or iconic packaging that may be trademarked while the juice itself (‘juice’ being industry lingo for the perfumed liquids bottled and sold) cannot be legally copyrighted. It’s not only the lack of fixity around scent that recommends a language-based stunt double; scientific research, expounded upon below, shows that while the human sense of smell is powerfully sophisticated in registering the sensation of a particular odor, the untrained nose performs fallibly in identifying what is being smelled. All too easily, we become lost in the cross-referencing of memories, associations, dreams, and desires. All too often, test subjects smell what they believe they want to smell. The introduction of text, then, becomes instructive up to a point.

Renowned French perfumer Serge Lutens has noted with frequency, “While I make no claims of being a writer, perfume forces nuances and, conversely, words define it. The view I have of women no longer provides answers. It must be written. Perfume is a passageway, a bridge built between images and words where we could willingly replace ‘love’ with ‘death.’”²

Perfume is the acculturation of the olfactory into a broader symbolic order, delineated by semantic fields and punctured, er, rather, punctuated by possibilities of meaning. However, in the practice of situating perfumery into the epistemontological project of language, perfume appears to deviate, perverting text into paradoxes and contradictions of not-knowing, challenging a stable episteme with wayward jouissance. The problem of this jouissance is what Jacques-Alain Miller, working from Lacan, parses outside of desire and fantasy, not to mention meaning, truth, and the real:

…There is no truth of jouissance… the truth (and this is my own way of putting it) that lies about jouissance. One cannot say the truth about jouissance. If one cannot say the whole truth, this is because there is a zone, a field, a register of existence, where truth does not apply, and this register is jouissance, i.e. that which gives satisfaction.³

And yet, perhaps a matter of translation, I can no more easily accept satisfaction as an approximation of what is indicated by the nebulous pressure jouissance exerts onto ordered systems—of language, knowledge production, interpretation, and meaning per se. Rather, for my purposes, perfume will function as a materialization for which there is no truth, and in so doing, might serve as a sal volatile by which one is woken to a correspondence between language-apart-from-meaning and this uncertainty beyond desire and fantasy.

Practically any perfume encountered in the market, whether mainstream department store mega-hits or cerebral small batch niche concoctions, is accompanied by a description of fragrance notes, sometimes organized in a pyramid to indicate top, heart, and base notes that transpire across different phases of the wear time, or else listed as a kind of poetic run-on. This note list is apparently, exactly what Miller describes as “a zone, a field, a register of existence, where truth does not apply.”⁴ Because it bears reminding that these notes as they are presented are not the ingredients therein contained. And in essence (ha) they never were. Many flowers have no scent to speak of—the poppy, cornflower, most varieties of orchid, dahlias, to name a few—and still others lack any feasible means of extracting their scent.⁵ The parma violet, for example, while vividly calling to mind its cool, powdery, sweet, and green characteristics for many just at its mention, has always been reconstructed and approximated in perfumery because its blossoms yield nil in terms of usable fragrant oils. Some forms of extraction are possible with varieties of narcissus, but the sheer volume of flowers needed to produce even a trace amount of perfumery material means that it is mostly more cost effective and efficient to use synthetic reconstitutions. For the iris, the blossoms never come into play in perfumery: it’s a rhizome on the plant’s root, referred to as orris, that grows more fragrant as it is dried after harvest and eventually rendered into an exquisite and expensive pomade. Perhaps the finest example of full-on fantasy dictating expectations around scent is the fougère category. Popularized in the nineteenth century, the fougère—meaning ‘fern’ in French—wonders at what a fern might smell like if it smelled of anything. Now a fully formed tradition, a fougère is usually characterized by a combination of aromatic lavender, pungent moss, and sweet hay. From the Industrial Revolution onward, as chemistry provided a massively expanded palette of synthetics, isolates, and alternatives to slow, costly processes of distillation, a widening split became inevitable between what was said about a fragrance and what materially constituted it. But what is indicated early by the fougère and more rampantly today in the note list is that a part of the pleasure in perfumery is this theater of representations populated by well-honed substitution fantasies that precipitate disjuncture in the assumed relationship between representation and represented.

Somewhere between these referents and the resulting juices, as Derrida notes, there is no longer a simple origin, but rather a complicated interplay of desire, substitutions, fictions and non-truths, a split reflection that affects new math of one plus one producing at least three:

Representation mingles with what it represents, to the point where one speaks as one writes, one thinks as if the represented were nothing more than the shadow or reflection of the representer. A dangerous promiscuity and a nefarious complicity between the reflection and the reflected which lets itself be seduced narcissistically. In this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable. There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer a simple origin. For what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its representation, of the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three.⁶

To count them then: we are wrangling a list of ingredients that corresponds factually to (reveals a truth of?) a perfume under question; a list of notes that may diverge marginally or extremely from actual ingredients to articulate something about desire (of the perfumer, of the wearer, of the market, of the society, of the superstructure); and the sensorial experience of the wearer, that is, the very unstable semantic field into which a sense of smell is more or less accurately translated.

If we take the wearing of perfume to be at least in part a struggle for self-expression, sliding along a passageway, as Lutens observed, that might easily exchange love with death, or any number of other pillars within a Marcusian aesthetic dimension, is there a means of assigning meaning to the notion of self that submits to a conspiracy of desire as articulated through the accompanying note list? To what does the wearer agree, and in what does the wearer believe? What comes to be cathected in the misalignment between a range of personal associations, memories, and received identity categories with a text that blends together flowers without any smell prior to their invocation here, not to mention all sorts of other elaborately impossible fantasies and poetic visions, as well as an underlying tug from the power of suggestion?

Take for instance Claude Dir’s limited-edition flanker—a ‘flanker’ being industry terminology for a riff on one of the pillar fragrances in a portfolio, perhaps with the addition of violet or jasmine to a core formula—for the dynasty of Britney Spears licensed perfumes (thirty-three separate fragrances as of 2021) produced by Elizabeth Arden then Revlon after it acquired the brand in 2016. Based on the runaway success of Spears’ first perfume Curious, Dir’s riff In Control Curious was described in the marketing as “sweet and sexy, romantically pink and dangerously black. It opens with juicy notes of loquat fruit. The heart harmonizes midnight orchid, crème brûlée, black vanilla bean and tonka crystals. The base notes are sugared sandalwood and musk.”⁷ Five years prior to In Control Curious’ release, botanists discovered a night-blooming orchid that stoked a fantasy approximating a modern day fougère, as perfumes, body sprays, and scented candles competed to imagine the smell of this so-called midnight orchid, with no basis in any sensorial or empirical experience of the scent of the blossom.⁸ Add to this that the perfume is annotated with “tonka crystals,” when tonka is a bean, and colors like “pink” and “black.”

Brands like Kaya Sorhaindo’s La Folie a Plusieurs fully recognize the artistic license of building a pyramid or list of notes attributed to their fragrances—indeed, the ethos of Folie as a project is its proximity to contemporary, conceptual artistic praxis. Their catalogue cross-references their perfumes with inspirations drawn from film, literature, art, and music. When David Chieze’s Seek, 2019, for the brand was announced, it was as an interpretation of André Aciman’s novel FIND ME, from the same year. Its notes comprised, “lily of the valley, white wine, coffee, pink pepper, ginger, bergamot, tobacco, warm skin notes, dusty bed-sheet notes, musk.”⁹

For auteur independent perfumers like Claire Baxter, the designer behind Sixteen92, the note list is not positioned as a kind of key to identifying the components of the perfume mixture but is rather treated as much as a zone for total creativity as the fragrances themselves or the branding and packaging. The notes attributed to The Vanishing Hitchhiker, a Summer 2018 release, were listed thus: “Soaked lace gown, bare feet on red clay, heavy air and rolling thunder, warm raindrops on a cracked windshield, screeching brakes, a flurry of fireflies, and a single puddle on an empty back seat.”¹⁰ 2017’s Montmartre is described as smelling of “feathered fans, sugared absinthe, silk stockings, faded perfume, new lipstick, warm skin, the smoky haze of hot stage lights.”¹¹ And the 2020 it hurts to look at you: “summer bonfire, petrichor, night sky, lonely manicured lawns, oil puddles in parking lots, fresh hair dye, the feel of his shirt against my elbow.”¹²

Perhaps the use of this elaborately evocative purple prose anticipates how sensitive to suggestion a prospective wearer’s comprehension of a perfume is to its accompanying writing. As I elaborate below, despite Lutens’ beautiful speculation about perfume’s relationship to writing, the translation of olfactory sensory experience into descriptive language proves unstable and unreliable for most of us. Or, once one understands how recurrent certain molecular structures are within a vast aroma-chemical context, the particularizing poetics used by these brands enact an important play of différance, persuading the wearer that they smell this and not that, almond not cherry, coffee not roasted meats. More cynically, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is the tendency for perfume houses to:

…sling words around in a feat of salesmanship that, strictly speaking, tells consumers what[ever] they want to hear, with little regard to how words have developed a historical correspondence to their own meanings… [A perfume may be] superlatively pleasurable, but—as with many in the line—may only have a tangential relationship to how it’s named. More important is to track the trends—the rise in popularity in saying you wear an iris fragrance, for instance, even more knowing the subcultural dialect enough to call it orris—and attenuate them in language in a zero sum square off between veracity and desire. I find myself of two minds about all of this, and is that not, maddeningly, the punchline of the whole enterprise?¹³

That attenuation by which veracity and desire are sorted around a perfume and what it is noted to be moves in parallel to the psychoanalytic problem of revelatory utterance apart from prior knowledge or developed meaning. Paradoxically however far from the reality of the contents of a given perfume’s juice, the note list may nonetheless serve as a temporary holding environment wherein an expression of the position that the perfume is eventually made to occupy—however fragmentary or contradictory or, most of all, in jouissance-like excess of any registered meaning (what could the smell of a flower without fragrance mean, for example?)—is signaled. Continuing with Miller, “Lacan underlined that desire is inarticulable, only to add that it is articulated: it is articulated in signifiers…Desire is its interpretation.”¹⁴ The note list addresses this enclosure of desire performing as its own interpretation. A practice of cathexis is its own most effective analysis. But it would seem the indirectness of a signifier, unbound from some fixed, symmetrical signified, is key: what Derrida called “a certain number of nonsynonymous substitutions” become operative beyond the scope of knowledge in pursuit of truth.¹⁵

One way that the relationships between note lists and ingredient lists—respectively, a more-than-desire jouissance and truth, functionally mutually exclusive—have been brought to bear upon one another is in the recent move in the industry toward greater transparency around what actually comprises these precious liquids. As an emphasis on so-called “natural” or “organic” ingredients as well as ethical sourcing and sustainable practices have become a growing trend among consumers across all kinds of markets and products, many brands have made adjustments in their operations, sometimes advertising their use of recycled materials in packaging or even updating the aesthetics of their advertising campaigns to reflect an abstract pursuit of “authenticity” that has proven as lucrative as it is mindful. The provocative Parisian perfume house Etat Libre d’Orange—which gained notoriety in the 2000s with iconoclastic fragrances like Secretions Magnifiques, 2006, by Antoine Lie, reputed to smell of sweat, semen, breast milk, and blood—released I Am Trash in 2018, a fragrance devised by Daniela Andrier constructed from mostly upcycled byproducts of the aroma-chemical industry.¹⁶ The resulting fruity-floral responded to a call for innovation in the field to think creatively about how waste might be re-imagined as components for fine fragrance.

Even still, most of perfumery remains obscured behind veils of mystique and vault doors protecting trade secrets. This is as much because formulae for perfumes, as with recipes for giant corporate soda brands or Michelin star chefs, cannot be copyrighted as it is to distract from the discrepancy between a list of exquisite flowers whose extractions are more expensive than gold and the cost-effective synthetic substitutes used in most mainstream and even niche perfumes. However, there have begun to be precedents for a policy of full disclosure among a small number of niche perfume brands. Douglas Little’s fragrance house Heretic Parfum emphasizes natural materials and what the brand calls “safe synthetics.” While a list of notes is included in the marketing for each fragrance, a full exhaustive list of all the materials suspended in non-denatured, non-GMO organic sugarcane alcohol is made available for every perfume in Heretic’s line. Likewise, actor Michelle Pfeiffer’s passion project Henry Rose entered the market in 2019 with a mission built on tenets of transparency and disclosure. As with Heretic’s website, Henry Rose not only offers full material lists but helpfully describes the function and purpose of each material. In their latest release, Flora Carnivora, the material Cis-3-hexenyl methyl carbonate is listed as providing a floral violet facet to the overall composition.¹⁷

Certainly toward the end of reassuring the health or ethically concerned, the truth-seeking of these gestures have practical use, but as it pertains to the realm of desire and further what is beyond the ability to mean or want, this kind of knowledge production for the ingredient list widens the gaps around what is knowable from the accompanying note list—namely, the why and how, if not who and when of the inventions enumerated therein. In other words, while the justifications around what goes onto the note list might be shored up with trend forecasting, popular news items, recent scientific discoveries, and concurrent attributions of the zeitgeist, there is, I would assert, an unaccountable element that passes between the inarticulable and yet articulated, and therefore is never fully held within the text but only obliquely signaled to within the pileup of descriptors for what someone somewhere—be it artisan, focus group, perfume critic, consumer, or conglomeration thereof—could direct toward what they as of yet have not fully acknowledged wanting.

Knowledge retains around it a shimmering cloud where to various degrees, knowing and not-wanting-to-know are conjugated. It oscillates, tips back and forth, until, at certain moments, it delivers a flash of revelation. We know but we forget; we know but we don’t pay attention; we know but we put it to one side; we know but we keep postponing; we know but there are so many things that can happen; we know but we might be wrong…In relation to the absence of knowledge, there is this indistinct zone of shimmering….¹⁸

Where else has a psychoanalysis of civilization and its parts better introduced the fugitivity of perfume than here when Miller notes “a shimmering cloud” retained around knowledge, knowing, and not-wanting-to-know! “This indistinct zone of shimmering” is perfume atomized, is the spray suspended on air and inhaled, drawn into the body, further away from either list of notes or list of ingredients. Follow the molecule from cut glass flacon into pump and nozzle out onto air, snagged by breath and drawn into the nasal cavity where soft tissue and specialized receptors signal to the almondine amygdala in the brain. We don’t only sense smell; odor molecules become embedded in the ecosystem of our bodies, entangled as part of us. In the matrix of smelling, the beyond the pleasure principle is mapped across an interior journey, and the contents of bottle, body, and written lists are stacked into comparison. “The outside bears with the inside a relationship that is, as usual, anything but simple exteriority. The meaning of the outside was always present within the inside, imprisoned outside the outside, and vice versa.”¹⁹

For all the intimacy and immediacy that characterizes the sense of smell, it would seem that while the capacity to recognize particular scents is a highly sophisticated aspect of ourselves as biological instruments, an ability to identify (that is, name, that is, language, that is, write it down on a list) odors has been noted by many studies as seemingly unstable and unpredictable.²⁰ Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, numerous studies tested untrained individuals’ abilities to identify smells. One outcome was the distinction between recognition—which tended to yield very accurate responses—and identification, wherein test subjects who were confident they could identify a list of relatively common odors (banana, chocolate, lemon, garlic, cinnamon, etc.) were able to identify less than half of what they were presented with.²¹ One defining issue around identification is what was described as the role of semantic retrieval in odor memory; researchers acknowledged that aligning memory with words affects more than just olfactory identification, and factors throughout childhood development and adult aging impact the particulars of putting recollection into language.

Complexity also, well, complicates. “A characteristic feature of olfaction is that most people find it hard to identify and name common odors, and when odors are presented simultaneously in mixtures, performance is even further compromised.”²² With regard to an overall culture’s “scent literacy,” that is, the means by which an individual or society equips itself to comprehend and describe olfactory experiences, perfume formulae which sometimes comprise hundreds of individual materials (and thousands of molecular components) may constitute some of the most difficult experiences with smell to translate into words.

The absence of knowledge annexed into perfume’s indistinct zone of shimmering is, partly, an inability to (fully) know, at least empirically. Toppling the primacy of either knowledge or experience, those of us perfume-entangled are directed by all of those nonsynonymous substitutions—not the odorless flower, nor aptly described by the chemicals used to fantasize its scent, nor the free-floating descriptors by which desire interprets itself on the page of the note list, nor even satisfaction as a corollary to jouissance—onward, toward. A directionally specific orientation toward a capacity for (if not the guarantee of) satisfaction without a correspondingly distinct teleology: emergent from a climactic failure of both veracity (boring) and desire (insufficient), jouissance asks, but does not answer—does not even remain long enough for an answer to be provided, but instead withdraws, retreats toward the unknowns of the interior, through soft tissues lining nasal cavities, an excess within oneself.

Independent perfumer Chris Rusak has distinguished his line through experimental development processes he shares with his consumers, an ongoing series art and writing collaborations, and an outspoken, queer point of view opposed to the normativities broadly upheld in perfumery as an industry. In 2020 against the backdrop of the onset of global pandemic as well as firestorm environmental disaster across his California base of operations, Rusak released a perfume that was initially only named AEOOJ then, latently, revealed as AEOOJ (LMB) and eventually After Every Ounce of Joy (Leaves My Body). This shifting moniker is one aspect of the experiment Rusak offered wearers: the fragrance was accompanied by “no notes, no ingredients, no influence or inspiration”²³ (what again we might call an “absence of knowledge” “where truth does not apply”). Rusak goes on to explain, “Limited details were hinted, in order to offer collectors the opportunity to experience the fragrance with as little influence or bias before smelling.”²⁴ He has since created a sub-page on his website where those who choose to can learn further details and more about the notes; I as of yet have not visited it. While the final reveal of the full name of the fragrance may constitute one of Miller’s psychoanalytic flashes of revelation from which meaning or at least inferences might be made, I prefer to situate that permutation of the text among the several that precede it. Given the faltering follow through of the much studied and tested human sense of smell, Rusak has contrived an experimental form that relieves wearers of the complex interplay of represented and representation, intercepted by truthy pursuits, desires, or even an indicated direction for that which is past wanting, knowing, or meaning. While I’ve attempted descriptions of my experience of the resulting fragrance elsewhere, I hesitate to do so here. Instead, against the foils of note list fantasists, full disclosure of ingredients, and failing olfactory identifications, I am curious to be with this juice that I’ll just call jouissance, since as a word and concept it persistently defies translation.