The Grand Perfume Tour to Paris and the South of France via Oman and London is postponed due to client commitments.  Feeling wistful though resigned, took myself in compensation on mini tour to olfaction via Fitzroy and Elena Vosnaki’s blog.

Pure, fake sensation

First stop: Klein’s perfumery in Brunswick Street to play with the Demeter Fragrance Library.  What once looked like a fun, short-lived gimmick — the rows of small, square bottles filled with the simulacra of Dirt, Rain, Thunderstorm, Wet Garden and my personal favourite, Funeral Home — has lasted beyond all prediction. These naïve and simple anti-perfumes have continued to find a market ever since they were launched in New York in 1993.

Their endurance cannot be due solely to the magic of the gimmick.  Some of their customers must have bought them over and over again.  And some, like me, must have come on them after a bout of longueurs with the Chanel crowd, or fresh from an avant-garde disillusion, and felt, finally, here was the answer!  Fragrance as nothing more, nothing less, than pure, fake sensation.

So it was that I found myself buying the purest, fakest sensation scent of all — Baby powder — and winging my way back to puberty in our holiday house at Pearl Beach, discovering boys for the first time and covering myself in Johnsons & Johnsons after a day in the sun.

I suspect too that Demeters is what you get when you realise you’d rather read about perfume than wear it.  And that, alas, is now the state of affairs with me. I’d much rather read a fragrance demolition or a list of 10 best fragrances than get up in the morning and commit to a perfume’s actual physical presence.  Maybe it’s not so surprising then that as the practice of perfume connoisseurship becomes abstracted, the only “perfume” one can stomach is the abstraction par excellence: a cheap, synthetic mimesis of natural phenomena.

In fact, it can’t be too long before the sense of smell, amongst others, starts to atrophy in the face of what Derrida called “the exorbitant privilege of the eye.”  That this “privilege” grows daily as we gain more and more of our information — even our sense information — from the internet gives me pause.

Grasse-hoppers

Second stop on my mini tour was a vicarious trip to Grasse courtesy of Elena Vosnaki’s wonderful blog, Perfume Shrine. Elena writes lyrically, sensually, of the Route de Mimosa (The Mimosa Road), a 130km trip through 8 towns of the region — Le Rayol-Canadel, Sainte Maxime, Saint Raphaël, Mandelieu la Napoule, Tanneron, Pégomas, Grasse, Cannes — in which …

… literally millions of downy flowers fragrance the hills and valleys of this region, rendering it a golden feast for both eyes and nose; the sugar-spun scent of mimosa (an acacia species), persistent and entrancing, mixed with the tannic aroma of cork oaks and dry Provençal herbs.

And of the small resorts of Anthéor, Agay and Boulouris, where …

The bigraradiers [?], full of orange blossoms that are shedding petals like a carnival parade throwing confetti at the gentlest gust of the wind, aromatize the air as we pass, the refreshing, joyous smell a welcoming salutation for weary wanderers.

To read Elena’s full post, click here: Perfume Shrine: Perfumed Pilgrimage: Grasse-hopers part1

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Image: courtesy Perfume Shrine: Black & White Le Nu Provençal, Gordes (1949) by Willy Ronis