Adventures in Smelling Good

[swan_tower]

When I was at DragonCon last year, I picked up a bunch of ampoules of perfume from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab (because Alyc and I were trying to work out scents for different characters in Rook and Rose -- a project that would have gone more smoothly if either of us were a perfume aficionado). Recently, inspired by a friend's explorations of their own stash, I decided I should actually experiment with these: not just smelling them in the vial, but putting them on, seeing what they were like initially vs. later on. (I have learned the term "drydown," and the fact that I didn't know it before is a measure of my ignorance in this realm.)

This is an interesting experiment because I have a very sensitive nose. I can smell alcohol on my husband's breath hours after he drank it -- not in a "hah, I caught his secret alcoholism" way, just in a "hmmm, I smell something; did you have a gin and tonic?" way. I take chicken packaging out to the trash bin immediately after prepping the raw chicken for dinner, because I will pick up the stench from it long before anybody else here thinks the kitchen smells funky. I refuse to smell the milk to see if it's gone bad because if it has, I'm going to be having flashbacks to that for the rest of the day.

What I don't have is the ability to parse what I'm smelling.

I think the musical equivalent here would be if I could pick up tiny whispers of sound, but couldn't tell you what instruments are playing if you paid me. I recognize individual scents, but blend them together and it frequently becomes indistinguishable. I can listen "into" a piece of orchestral music to find what the French horns or the oboes are doing and follow along with them; the first BPAL ampoule I tried theoretically had sage in it, and even after going to my spice cabinet and huffing a container of sage for orientation, I still couldn't find any trace of that in the perfume. The reviews commented on the pleasant mintiness or the warmth of the caramel: all I got was musk. (A gentle musk, probably because it was being mitigated by all those things I couldn't pick out. But still.)

Of course, there's an extra twist in this game, which is that (again, I am told; I know so little about this) individual skin chemistry can play all kinds of idiosyncratic games with the source material. Going back to music, it would be as if some audience members are sitting there going "holy crap, composer, enough with the trombones already" while others are grumbling that their ears never seem to be able to hear clarinets. So maybe the mint and the caramel and the sage just . . . weren't actually there for me? I really don't know.

Which means that this particular experiment is less about "let me explore random bits of the BPAL catalogue!" and more about "let me try to train my nose!" I have less than perfect hearing but a well-trained ear; the reverse is true when it comes to scent. But if one can learn to pick out the French horns and the oboes, I imagine one can also be taught to find mint in a cloud of musk.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/hZTGC0)

Comments

[mrissa]

I feel very lucky because my intense scent focus is inherited from my mother, so the vocabulary has been there from the time I was little. Some of it is completely idiosyncratic vocabulary between the two of us, but when you know someone else who will walk into a room and go, "WHAT smells like BERGAMOT?" it's so much easier.

[swan_tower]

Some perfume vocabulary I nod at and say, yes, I know what that is, even if I can't pick it out of a blend. Some perfume vocabulary . . . I'm not sure any of what I have on hand will teach me what the heck "balsamic" is when it isn't vinegar, but I do want to find out!

[mrissa]

it go spiky spiky in the front

[swan_tower]

<lol>

I suspect that, if I succeed in training myself on this stuff, I will wind up describing things very much like that. I mean, English has kind of an impoverished vocabulary for scent anyway (I don't know if other languages are richer), so you have to lean on weird approaches like that to get anywhere.

[green_knight]

if one can learn to pick out the French horns and the oboes, I imagine one can also be taught to find mint in a cloud of musk

I think you can get better; I have no idea how it works with smell (I am not a scent person).

I am trying to train my visual abilities (which would be so *useful* when making art) and I notice there are two obstacles: one, I often cannot distinguish nuances, and two, I get visual overload to the point where everything blurs and becomes even more meaningless. (I have the same problem with the Wall Of Text of Japanese - word by word, I'm reasonably good at Hiragana and so-so at Katakana, but give me two paragraphs of text and I no longer recognise ANYTHING.) So when people make messy line drawings and then ink over the top, it's a miracle because I struggle to see the shape for all the messy lines.

I would not be surprised if a similar effect existed in smells.

[starlady]

Classical Japanese definitely had a ton of scent language that English doesn't--it's one of the many things that makes translating Genji so hard. (One example: Genji's two sons are named after different ways that scents can waft through the air.)

I wonder if you could partly train it through taste somehow? The two are pretty closely connected.

[alessandriana]

On me, all perfume ends up smelling like sandalwood. EVERYTHING. Possibly even the ones that don't contain sandalwood. I stopped bothering after the fifth time something smelled great in bottle and turned into Pure Sandalwood (tm) after ten seconds on my skin.