The fishy quality

on taste

1.

Imagine you’re scrappy and smart and serious and strong and (more adjectives). Shouldn’t be too hard.

Keep imagining. It’s the early 1900s. You’re scrappy and smart and cetera. You were born Joseph Marie François Spoturno in Corsica, but you changed your name to François Coty when you got to the city - the city - Paris - because you are a perfumer, because this is the only city in the country, in the world, for you.

Except now you’re pushing 30 and none of your scents have sold.

You don’t want to accept your initial lack of success. On second thought it has nothing to do with want. You simply cannot accept it. You swear up and down: if only my father and mother were rich (and not dead) (both of them), if only more people knew about my work, my art, my life, if only, if only… Yawn. Yeah. Right.

As a last resort you “accidentally” drop one of your bottles on the perfume counter of one of the city’s busiest department stores, les Grand Magasins du Louvre. Now everybody in a 500m radius gets a whiff of La Rose Jacqueminot, whether they like it or not. Turns out they do: your entire stock sells out in a matter of minutes.

This shattered bottle is the start of a multinational business empire which, more than a century later, in the year 2022, will report $5.3 billion in revenue. Not too shabby for the orphaned son of Corsican bumpkins…

But we’re not there yet. First the store will offer you a spot on its selling floor. Women will flock there: women who already adore your work and women who are just arriving, discovering you. You. Coty. That’s what you’ll name your company. (You’re not a writer, not really, despite every lazy biography that will describe you as a “poet of scent”.) You’re a good chemist, maybe a great chemist, and an even better businessman. You invent the concept of a “fragrance set” in order to sell lots of products that all smell the same. You design bottles which feel expensive - cool and somewhat translucent (mysterious!) and slightly heavy to the touch - and yet sit squarely within the price points of middle class moms, and their moms, and their daughters.

“Give a woman the best product you can make. Market it in the perfect bottle – beautiful in its simplicity yet impeccable in taste. Ask a reasonable price for it and you will witness the birth of a business, the size of which the world has never seen.” François Coty, 1904¹

2.

The lifeblood of Substack is espousing pithy unsolicited vaguely meritocratic opinions about success and culture². Little quotes that leave you with a pleasant low-stakes hum like an after-dinner mint. An anecdote like a cut orange: you suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.³ Perfume has very few objective rules so it’s similarly ripe for discussions about taste. But "taste" is an elusive concept which at times feels like a blank check for judgement and snobbery.⁴

Bourdieu says taste is an expression of social power or lack thereof. We distinguish ourselves by the distinctions we make; “to classify classifies the classifier.” When we add “good/bad” “high/low” in front of the word “taste” I become even more suspicious that hierarchies of taste reduce to hierarchies of class.⁵

Nevertheless it is difficult to deny when something is done exceptionally well. Kant says the shared human experience is the aesthetic, that we can all recognize what’s beautiful. This may or may not be true but it’s certainly true that being able to articulate what makes an experience excellent is also often difficult. When we hear “difficult” and “excellent” in the same sentence we are going on a journey.⁶

I know that I want to be wide open to the world, and that I want to be able to describe what I encounter using precise and rigorous words, and that I want to use those words to open the world even wider. Wittgenstein says you cannot enter the worlds for which you do not have the language. In the past I have described certain fragrances as floral or putrid. A fragrance chemist would use neither of these terms. “Floral” is meaningless because flowers come in many smells. “Putrid” refers to compounds produced during putrefaction - sulphides and amines - and should be split into “fishy” and “rotten eggs.”⁷

Ron Winnegrad, the creator of Love’s Baby Soft, Giorgio Armani Armani, and Clinique Simply Clinique, also developed a scent map of “cities” and “streets” which he used to train his students. “If you smell something woody, the first thing you should ask is ‘do I see dirt?’ If the answer is yes, look around for leather or peanut shells or moldy towels; if it’s no, look for pencil shavings or butter.”

It can be difficult to distinguish fragrances which are unusual from those which are confusing or off-putting⁸. Considering that almost every product on the market costs at least $130, no matter how small the bottle or how cheap the formula, it’s useful to ask what do I want out of fragrance anyways. To smell pleasant? To smell interesting?⁹ To attract or impress a potential partner?¹⁰ Sasha Chapin says that all masculine perfumes are referendums on masculinity and all feminine perfumes are referendums on femininity.¹¹ (He wears Dior Homme Intense.) Sontag says “the most refined form of sexual attractiveness always consists in going against the grain of one’s sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.” (She liked the smell of newly mown grass.) In the 1960s this idea might have been radical; in 2024 it smells as quotidian as synthetics in perfume. Few people nowadays are surprised when a woman wears a chypre or a man wears an iris. Maybe it’s time to change again. Maybe in a few decades we’ll still be talking about gender. That’s fun too.

What do I want? To know who I am? Or to discover myself?

3.

Tania Sanchez describes 6 stages of developing taste in fragrances.

Stage 1: Mother’s bathroom

Early adventures splashing on Mom’s Shalimar/ No. 5/ Miss Dior/ Tabu/ Your-Memory-Here with the bathroom door shut. Belief that Old Spice/ Brut/ English Leather is the natural odor that God has caused fathers to emit after shaving.

Stage 2: Ambition and naïveté

Either given a perfume by an adult or inspired to buy one at puberty: a sophisticated thing that embodies an unknown world of adult pleasures and/ or a cheerful cheap spray to wear happily by the gallon.

Stage 3: Flower and candy

Phase of belief that feminine perfume should smell flowery or candy-like and that everything else is an incomprehensible perversion.

Stage 4: First love

Encounter with moving greatness. Wonder and awe. Monogamy.

Stage 5: Decadence

An ideology of taste, either of the heavy-handed or of the barely there. The age of leathers, patchoulis, tobaccos, ambers; or, alternatively, the age of pale watercolors in vegetal shades. An obsession with the hard-to-find.

Stage 6: Enlightenment

Absence of ideology. Distrust of the overelaborate, overexpensive, and arcane. Satisfaction in things in themselves.

This trajectory is helpful and accurate except that it implies easy living at Stage 6. This doesn’t seem to be the case. If anything the opposite is true: many people with finely tuned aesthetic sensibilities are actively unhappy and unable to enjoy art precisely because they have developed particularly discerning palates.

You can have good taste and still not be happy. You can have everything you wanted and still not be happy. There is a painting in Chicago of two Americans standing in front of their house. You’ve seen this painting, even if you haven’t seen it. The house is large and it has a porch. The people are healthy-looking but they don’t look at each other, and behind the painting, nobody speaks.¹²

The dandy is the man dedicated to good taste. Sontag describes him as “overbred.”

“His posture was disdain, or else ennui. He sought rare sensations, undefiled by mass appreciation. Models: Des Esseintes in Huysmans’ A Rebours, Marius the Epicurian, Valéry’s Monsieur Teste.” (Notes on Camp)

The dandy collects bottles of perfume like exes and exes like paintings in a museum. Each fragrance a little effigy of the person he was or wished he was and thought he finally might become. And yet nothing changes, because we don’t change, because the notion of “good taste” is a trap, a tower, in which we are perfectly protected, and impossibly alone.

“Scent A: purchased in such and such a year, hoping to encounter happiness. Scent B: purchased while scent A was almost finished; helped me abandon A. C, marking sudden fatigue with B. D was a gift, never liked it, wore it to make the giver happy. I liked E so much that I eventually purchased F, along with nine of its sibling scents made by the same house. Yet F managed to make me tire of E and its isotopes. Sought out G. Disliked it as soon as I realized that someone I hated loved it… Back to E, which I had always liked. Yes, definitely E. Until I realized that there had always been something slightly off, something missing about E. I stopped using it again.” André Aciman

The dandy’s tragic flaw is Bayesian. He can’t let go of the conviction that he has good taste. He wants revelation, but cannot concede that a “genuine, dizzying uncertainty” - an uncertainty which exceeds even humility - “is the cost of the possibility of paroxysms so potent.”¹³ True taste is formed when we are changed so completely that the quality and content of our appetites are changed. In order for this to happen we must be receptive to the possibility. This happens by giving full, genuine, nonjudgemental attention to the world, which includes you, which includes me, which includes any and every stranger. And each stranger demonstrates their difference from my self and my so-called good tastes by being impossible to predict, domesticate, or assimilate to my preexistent fears and fantasies.

Jasmine Sun: “Once you found a barely touched Marc Jacobs perfume roller in a classroom so you kept it and used it and your then-boyfriend started to know it as your trademark scent so why not just stick with that forever.”

4.

My mother is in some ways¹⁴ a very delicate woman, very sensitive. The only fragrance she likes is unscented soap. My grandfather was a fishmonger. I don’t know what fragrance he liked but he sure smelled like fish. Being her daughter and his granddaughter these were the smells of my childhood and will probably forever be my referents of beauty whether I like it or not (I don’t like it).

He drove the same big van to work and church and everywhere else there is for an old cranky tired Korean man to go. Every Friday he washed it with the backyard hose turned on full blast but the fishy quality remained. I can’t possibly express the extent to which that van stunk so I won’t even try but I will mention that a few times the neighbors called the cops to complain about it. Now the smell of raw fish in warm weather makes me sentimental. Nobody lives forever. Mommy when I’m old I’m gonna smell dead fish and remember being alive with you.

Scent, like music, like the novel, is a temporal art. The perfume you spray on your skin is not the same perfume you smell five minutes or three hours later.¹⁵ “You don’t use up a picture by looking at it, but each time you uncork a perfume, the bit that evaporates is the bit you enjoy, and after you’ve smelled it, there’s no getting it back into the bottle. Everyone who has ever looked at the decreasing level of a beloved and discontinued perfume knows the anguish of the finiteness of resources. Therefore, preservation and appreciation can seem incompatible goals.”¹⁶

Moreover, our perception of the present, however instantaneous, actually consists of “an incalculable multitude of remembered elements. In truth, every perception is already memory.”¹⁷ All my favorite novels are meditations on how to reconcile myself with the fact that I will one day die, and that on that day, and all days after, life will continue, merrily and industriously, for the living. Today I am still young but I remember being young. I remember loving someone. That love has become something else now because I’m thinking of it. Its tenderness broken. Its brokenness tender.¹⁸

My favorite smells are still cheap unscented bar soap, fish blood, and very sweet high mountain air. God that air. You get up and the morning wind has spread its fresh sweetness all over you. We have to take that in, that sweetness that lets us live. Breathe it now and then it’s gone. But still the same as it ever was.

1. i am reminded of the Bell Lab handbook, which IBM, Ford, GE, and RCA all subsequently took inspiration from: modest pay + great facilities + flexible teams + total freedom

2. ooh la la

3. Anne Carson, Decreation. if you have a controversial opinion about Anne Carson please DM me

4. men of a certain social class are fond of saying they don’t like when women wear perfumes that are too strong or sweet. none of the manual labor men i’ve ever known have ever objected to Bath & Body Works Warm Vanilla Sugar Body Spray

5. Andy Kong: “[The linguist] William Labov did this study in New York where he asked women in a rich and poor department store for directions to the hotel, and then sussed out that the rich people said it differently, so you could diagnose their wealth from just a phoneme. I really like this idea, of your voice giving yourself away before you even know it. We’re making better and better ways of diagnosing this stuff though. Your age group, sex, religion are going to be determined entirely from the way your mouse moves towards a “do not track” button. This is arguably good because it is worse data so it’s being touted as privacy promoting, in reality we do not worry about being tracked but rather about being wrongly clustered. Or rightly clustered. Nothing is worse than someone you hurt knowing exactly who you are.”

6. a vector is anything that has both direction and magnitude :)

7. Luca Turin, The Secret of Scent

8. When I was first living alone in the city and going on dates I would take an uber. Often the car would smell like air freshener or it would Smell Like Car and I would feel slightly sick in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Only much later did I wonder whether that slightly sick feeling was indeed nervous anticipation or scent/motion induced nausea

9. Jasmine Sun describes listening to a playlist of unfamiliar songs: do you like music that sounds bad on purpose?

10. Tania Sanchez: “What scent drives men wild? After years of intense research, we know the definitive answer. It is bacon.”

11. Luca Turin, Perfumes: “I think all of us are imprinted at an early age to appreciate one particular kind of loveliness in the opposite sex. I, for one, find the timbre of French female voices irresistible, even though it is clearly a contrivance. If you don’t believe me, be the first to get onto an Air France plane, sit in 2A, and listen to the flight attendants greet everyone, “Bonjour Madame, Bonjour Monsieur,” with that flirty freshness that always borders on insolence when properly done.”

12. American Gothic, by Grant Wood

13. Becca Rothfeld. i know, right. read that essay

14. in some ways

15. “The top notes represent the lighter and most fleeting treble notes, often associated with freshness. The mid notes are a bit like the heart of the fragrance, making a liaison between the top and base notes. The base notes are like the low frequencies in music, they vibrate very deep, slow and for a long time.” The Society of Scent

16. Tania Sanchez, Perfumes. However, this excerpt is only available in the 2008 edition, and not the 2018. If you would like to read the 2008 edition, which contains fewer reviews and more of Sanchez’s personal thoughts, DM me

17. Henry Bergson, Matter and Memory

18. Chlesea Dingham, As if Whatever is Leaving / Is the Prayer We’ve Been Meaning to Come to

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"The Smell" from "The Five Senses" series by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens (1617-1618)