Scent and Subversion (37 page)

In our deodorized age, we’ve also lost our appreciation for our imperfect, bodily, and ultimately human smells. That loss of appreciation for our own scent, which turns into repression and censorship, reflects a disembodied, virtual, mechanized relationship to the world that divorces us from our senses.

The Internet Age coincides with the disappearance of animalic/bodily notes, and it is as if we, too, by participating in the virtual, have become disembodied. Animalic perfumes open up a sensual olfactory world, reminding us to appreciate our human smells, and in this context, then, animalic notes do more than symbolize sex. They remind us of our bodies, that is, they remind us that we have them. As one commenter writes in a blog post about the category of “skank” perfumes, “As evolved as we’d like to think we are, I think we all still have that animal attraction in us to bodily smells. And it’s not just for their transgression; I think they offer comfort at a deep instinctive level. Musks, for example, aren’t simply dirty; they’re reassuringly intimate, like a big warm hug.”

So what are the four main animalic notes, and what do they smell like?

More like a mongoose than a cat as it is often referred to, the civet, native to tropical Asia and Africa, is a nocturnal animal, about three feet long, with a spotted body and ringed tail. Perineal glands located in its abdomen and divided into two sacs create a pungent cream that for centuries has been used in perfume, medicine, and even food.

So what’s so special about civet? It takes a lot to wrap your mind around the idea that an intensely fecal-smelling cream obtained from the perineal glands near the anus of the
civet animal could have been one of perfumery’s most prized animal ingredients. But when civet, the substance, is diluted and added to more evanescent fragrance notes, it rounds out or “bouquets” them, as perfumers describe it. In
Essence and Alchemy,
natural perfumer Mandy Aftel writes, “There is no ingredient with which civet does not blend beautifully. It prowls through a blend, transforming each of its elements and giving the whole extraordinary depth.”

A tincture of civet (the absolute dissolved in alcohol) could even be described as a perfume on its own, deliriously complex as all natural odors are: at once humid, fecal, earthy, radiant, floral, and for a moment, even grape and berrylike.

In the famous case of Jicky (1889), Aimé Guerlain decided that rather than make civet lurk in the shadows of the perfume’s famous bergamot, lavender, and vanilla notes, he would have it dart around front and center. As perfumer Roja Dove writes in
The Essence of Perfume:

Civet was once harvested either by killing the animal and removing the civet gland or by scraping the cream from the animal while it was alive. Although some extant civet farms claim that harvesting civet is not cruel to the animal, animal rights groups have argued that—between the cramped cages civets are often forced to live in, the taunting that some harvesters inflict thinking it will result it a greater yield of civet, and the inevitable pain caused when their internal glands are scraped for civet—there’s no way that natural civet can be humanely harvested.

Natural civet was largely replaced by synthetic civet starting in the 1960s and 1970s, but even Chanel admitted that it still used natural civet in its iconic classic, Chanel No. 5 until 1998, when they switched to synthetic civet. Although it lacks the depth and complex floral radiance of real civet, synthetic civet smells remarkably authentic.

For centuries, ambergris, thought to be an aphrodisiac, has been used in perfumes and as flavoring in food, wine, and tobacco. Before 1,000 AD, ambergris was part of northwest Africa’s imperial trade. It’s said that the first mention of ambergris in history is from Chinese writer Pen Tsa, who imagined sleeping, drooling sea dragons as its source, calling it “dragon’s spittle perfume.” Louis XV used ambergris as a spice in his food, and Queen Elizabeth used it to perfume her gloves.

Ambergris, (“gray amber” in French), a solid, waxy substance prized for its haunting scent and fixative properties in perfume, starts out in the irritated stomach of sperm whales. Because the bones and beaks of the squid and cuttlefish that comprise the whales’ diets are indigestible and sharp, its stomach secretes a substance to protect itself. The whale eventually excretes this gelatinous, black, fecal-smelling lump full of bones and beaks, and although it was once thought that the whale vomited ambergris (something no one has ever seen, apparently!), scientists now speculate that ambergris might actually be excreted along with feces. Sperm whale expert Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, delicately explains the reasoning. Fresh ambergris, he says, “smells more like the back end than the front.”

During its time floating in the water and exposed to the sun, air, and saltwater, alchemical magic happens. The foul-smelling ambergris oxidizes, begins to change into a silvery gray or yellow color, and by the time it washes ashore, it has transmogrified into olfactory “floating gold.” In fact, ambergris can be more expensive than gold, the best stuff fetching up to $50 a gram to gold’s $30. The longer ambergris has been floating around, the better it smells, according to ambergris broker Bernard Perrin, because ambergris, he says, “ages like a fine wine.”

Those lucky souls who have gotten a whiff of the gray lump of waxy, oxidized sperm whale excrement have practically written poems about it. “It always reminds me,” Christopher Ash rhapsodized in
Whaler’s Eye,
“of a cool English wood in spring and the scent you smell when you tear up the moss to uncover the dark soil underneath.” Fragrance chemist Gunther Ohloff chose a series of adjectives to describe ambergris: “humid, earthy, fecal, marine, algoid [algae-like], tobacco-like, sandalwood-like, sweet, animal, musky, and radiant.”

I have a tincture of ambergris on my hand right now, and unlike the other natural animalics, it’s subtle, delicate, and I would even say aloof. Ambergris is animalic, of course, but unlike civet, castoreum, and musk, which are the brutes of the animalic world, roaring in your face and ramming you with their antlers, ambergris projects a gentle, soft eroticism as if from afar. It’s a paradox: both earthy and tantalizingly ethereal. It smells rich, smooth, and slightly sweet, with a hint of tobacco and earth.

Like all base notes, ambergris both imparts its own peculiar scent and exalts the smell of other notes in a perfume composition, making them “rounder” and joined together more harmoniously. Its powers of pulling together the other notes in a perfume are beautifully described by one perfumer on the Italian retail site that sells sustainably sourced animal note tinctures and kits, profumo.it:

Perfume writer and scientist Luca Turin experimented with ambergris’s ability to amplify the power of other perfume notes. In the comments section of the same website, he described spritzing Yardley’s Lavender twice on each hand, but adding ambergris to one hand and not the other. The result? “Like switching from little speakers to big electrostatics,” he marvels. “Small wonder people value the stuff.” I’ve tried a similar experiment, and he’s absolutely right. It’s as if a flat image suddenly turns into a pop-up book on your skin, materializing and highlighting every note and contour.

According to experts, only around 1 to 5 percent of sperm whales even produce the substance that will become ambergris, and others say that when they do, very little of it is found washed ashore. There is no international restriction on the import and export of ambergris, mainly because ambergris is said to be the only natural animal scent that is found rather than obtained by killing or hurting the animal. But Cropwatch, the self-proclaimed independent watchdog for natural perfumers, says that only 4 percent of ambergris comes from beach finds; 96 percent, they say, comes from the slaughter of whales.

Because ambergris is, and always has been, expensive, real ambergris has rarely been used in perfumery. It’s said that Coty Chypre had it. Creed has long maintained that their
costs reflect the use of real ambergris, for example, in the wonderful, yet discontinued Creed perfume Angélique Encens. And even though Dioressence was said to have been the love child of ambergris residue on perfumer Guy Robert’s hands with a knock-off Miss Dior soap he used, it’s doubtful real ambergris was in the mass-market formula.

Enter synthetics. In 1820, French chemists Joseph-Bienaim Carentou and Pierre-Joseph Pelletier isolated, described, and named
ambrein
as ambergris’s primary odorant. (Not to be confused with
ambreine,
an extract of the
Cistus ladaniferus,
which is richly ambery.) By itself, ambrein is odorless but contains the compounds that will oxidize to produce ambergris’s characteristic scent. In 1977, B. D. Mookherjee and R. R. Patel identified nearly 100 volatile substances in ambergris, describing them evocatively as “ozony-seawater-metallic”; “moldy-animal-fecal”; “weak tobacco”; “sea water”; and, of sensuous Ambroxan, “moist, soft, creamy, persistent amber with velvety effect.” Wow. Make that a double, please!

There are a number of synthetic ambergris substitutes, for example, Ambrox by Firmenich. Within the past year, scientists have been isolating and “growing” substances that smell like ambergris. Researchers from the University of British Columbia have identified a gene in balsam fir trees that could lead to synthetic ambergris production, and Firmenich researchers Laurent Daviet and Michel Schalk have isolated the DNA from clary sage, the plant that produces the two enzymes needed to create Ambroxan, putting it into E. coli bacteria and growing it in a bioreactor.

We move from the dreamy caresses of ambergris to the thuggish beauty of castoreum, a byproduct of the beaver fur trade and an indispensable note in leather and chypre fragrances like Bandit, Aramis, and Paloma Picasso Mon Parfum.

From the twin castor sacs on the abdomens of North American and European beavers, castoreum is a yellowish cream that both male and female beavers secrete, along with urine, to mark their territory. After the castor sacs are removed, they are dried and aged for two to three years to mellow out castoreum’s initially harsh scent, which German chemist Henri J. Hoffmann has described as “… sharp and burning with a creosote or tar-like note, reminiscent of the ‘glowing’ odor emanating from birch tar or Russian leather.”

In many ways, castoreum is the most animalic of the four animal-derived notes, as it truly smells—underneath its surprising fruit facets—like a pungent animal hide. When diluted in alcohol to form a tincture, castoreum smells musky, fruity, and smoky, the last facet in part due to a chemical that is also in tobacco—tetramethyl-isoquinolinone. So fruity is the scent of castoreum, it has been widely (though not transparently) used for quite some time as an FDA-approved “natural flavor” in raspberry and strawberry candies,
ice creams, and yogurts. This goes to show just how complex animalic scents can be, that on the one hand, an ingredient like castoreum can enhance the flavor of raspberry in a soda, and in perfume, impart an intense leather accord.

Prized for its intense odor and ability to exalt the fragrance of other scents, musk, which comes from the Sanskrit word meaning “testicle,” has been used in perfume for thousands of years. On its own, it has a dark, intense scent, “an oily warmth between fruit and animal,” as writer Stephen Fowler describes it. But when diluted and mixed with other notes, its animalic funk recedes without disappearing, highlighting and warming those notes while providing a sensuous background texture, like a lamp turned on that bathes a room’s décor with its golden light.

Musk comes from a small, antlerless deer found in India, Pakistan, Tibet, China, Siberia, and Mongolia. In the early summer, liquid drains into its musk sac, which is in the deer’s abdomen above its penis. In the fall, this liquid ripens into a red, pastelike, and extremely odoriferous musk that the deer sprays, along with urine, to mark its territory and attract females for mating. When the musk deer was killed for its musk, a small hairy sac the size of a golf ball was removed and either dried or soaked in hot oil. Afterward, the extremely odorant red paste would turn into black musk “grains” that look like coffee grinds. Those grains were then diluted in alcohol to create a tincture that was then used for perfume.