Sight Unseen: The Power of Scent in the Dark

by: John Biebel

In the past few years, it’s become more common for me to buy a gift of fragrance for my brother at Christmas time. He’s one of those rare individuals who isn’t completely invested into scents the way so many of us are, but is completely open to experiencing the huge array of offerings out there. And yet, he also knows a thing or two. He knows, for instance, that some scents are just not for him. He may not have developed the vocabulary that some of us in this realm have obtained through our writing and research, but he’s intuitive and thoughtful, the way that he is with many things.

As the years have passed, and I began to write more seriously for the fragrance world, my brother Edward (and by extension, my sister-in-law Keri, as well) have often had little vials of this or that put in front of their noses to smell. Keri will admit to some sensory blockers, since having asthma will sometimes prevent her from really enjoying certain smells (and some can actually trigger an attack.)  Edward, however, has a solid “nose” and has evolved from a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down reaction to a much more nuanced view of fragrances. This is of particular interest to me because, as an artist and a writer, I know that I’m a bit more attuned to these things: It’s an important gut-check to “hear it straight” from someone with no biases, and who hasn’t been influenced to think that this costly material or that rare recipe should, by its very rarity, receive respect. His opinion on a scent has more than once made me rethink my own initial reaction. It’s this kind of common sense approach that we writers can sometimes lose in our own attempt to unravel the mysteries of the nose.

I was finishing up a series I’d been writing for Fragrantica about the interplay of color and scent, and also thinking about what I might buy my brother for Christmas when it suddenly dawned on me: Why not let my brother choose a fragrance for himself, so he won’t be disappointed? And as much as I liked this idea, I could tell that something else was evolving in my mind. Thinking of the research I’d been doing over the past year about how sight and smell are linked, I wondered what it would be like if he made that choice based solely on smell, and nothing else? I knew I was onto something because this is exactly the kind of thing my brother would enjoy. His analytical brain would love the ‘blind study’ nature of the test; his historical mind would love conjuring up thoughts about each one as be tried them. I told him about the idea and he was definitely on board. I ordered some new empty glass vials with sprayers, and set about defining some parameters for the project.

The biggest challenge, of course, was obvious: What scents should I send him? This was particularly tough because there were many things to factor in. We live in an era of designer fragrances, niche fragrances, historic perfume houses and new players on the block, experimental scents and classic compositions. There are thousands from which to choose. I had to make some initial decisions to narrow the field. The first and easiest rule was to keep out anything that I knew he just wouldn’t like. Surprisingly, this actually didn’t weed out very many scents, since there aren’t a lot of scent families that are totally “off limits”. One particular scent note had to be kept off the plate, however, due to Keri’s adverse reaction, and that was pine. This was proved most acutely to my brother during their first Christmas together as a couple, when he gleefully brought home a fresh Christmas tree, only to be met with Keri’s watery eyes and coughing as she tried to cope with the resinous smell pervading the house. So, no pine. What next?

I decided that part of the exercise should really be about providing interesting scent experiences for Edward, but also with quite a variety, so sometimes I was looking for a good example of a type to represent a family of scents. I thought about these different scent “types”, and what sorts would appeal to him. Soon I was thinking about: Amber, Incense, Green, Oriental, Gourmand, Eau de Cologne, Woody, Oud, Citrus, Leather, Chypre. I started typing and made a very long list, far too long to be practical. Some realistic considerations came into play—how many samples should I send him? What would be too few, too many? Were there certain perfume houses that generally had offerings more suited to his tastes?

I thought about it for a week and discovered a problem. There a few gaps in my own exposure to scents that needed to be filled in order to approach this diplomatically. So, I sampled some perfumes that I’d not smelled before, or hadn’t smelled in a long time. For example, I love wood and leather based perfumes, but I don’t have many of them, so I needed to familiarize myself with some of these again. I kept a note-taking app open on my phone and would update it with thoughts “from the field” as I went along. After a while, the list was still extremely long, and more selections had to come off.

One way to narrow the list was to think about notes. I, for one, love lavender-based colognes and perfumes, but I wasn’t sure this was the same for my brother. So, not without some wincing and internal argument, I took them off. I also had to be excruciating in my honesty. Was I putting something on the list because it was a personal favorite, or because I really did think that Edward would enjoy it? This question is tougher to answer than it appears at first. As a writer in perfumery, I’d hope to be as objective as possible, but there is no denying the fact that we are just naturally drawn to some smells more than others. This objectivity was one of many valuable lessons I drew from this exercise.

The list was still unmanageable at thirty separate samples, and it begged the question: When would my brother find time to try all these out? Ten seemed too small; how could I possibly narrow down a sniffing experiment to just ten scents, when there is such a vast array available? I finally arrived at the number twenty. To some, this may still seem too large, but it took into account the fact that I knew my brother was interested in the idea, that it was still mid-November (giving him enough time to do this well before Christmas). There would be enough time for a full day’s wear for each, and to feel sure that they’d been given enough of a chance. For our purposes, this seemed right.

The next steps were more or less technical; making sure I had access to enough juice for the scents I’d picked, getting some clear glass vials with spray lids, and then going through the process of decanting, numbering, and creating a master list for myself to match the numbers with the names. The only things that could possibly influence my brother in the process, besides the smell, was a small bit of color (or lack of color) and a number. I was careful not to number them in any special order, group them, or even to specifically randomize them. But as anyone who’s worked with mathematics or computations knows, randomization is really quite difficult. “A random number is a number generated by a process, whose outcome is unpredictable, and which cannot be subsequently reliably reproduced.” (randomnumbers.info) So, whereas there are any number of “randomizer” apps out there on the web these days (using different algorithms to create randomization) I decided to just start labeling 01, 02, 03, etc. Yes, sometimes, I can over-think these things. After bundling all in bubble wrap, brown paper and a box, I found myself at an automatic postal teller that weekend in New York City at Grand Central Station, sending off the package for the Midwest. The project had begun.

Edward decided that it would be best to organize his thoughts through some digital means, so he started a Facebook page where he tracked what he wore over the twenty days of the experiment. He created some interesting rules, and also defined compelling criteria. Each scent would get a rating (1-5 with 1 being the lowest score, 5 the highest). He’d also give each fragrance a solid day’s wearing, a written reaction, response from his wife, and a code name. After some coaxing from me, he also added one last variable: the reaction of his cat. Needless to say, the cat was mostly interested with the box that it all came shipped in, rarely interested in the scents themselves. I enjoyed the fact that my brother more or less defined the project for himself—making his own rules, criteria, variables, and methods for judging. It really was something of a “happy accident” that he was not only such a willing participant, but was so actively involved, to get the most out of the experience as well.

From the very start, I knew this was going to be a fascinating exchange of ideas. It got to a point at which I really looked forward to his daily postings, having to often quickly compare the scent of the day against my master list so that I knew exactly what he was wearing. Some evenings I’d look ahead and say to myself “Ah, so THAT’S what Edward will be wearing tomorrow ... I wonder if he’ll like that one?”

My brother is a creative thinker, so I knew that he’d find some very unusual neural paths and visual imagery to bring to these scents. But what I didn’t quite expect was just how powerful this would become as a tool for memory. Soon the daily updates took on an almost poetic feel as he reached new places is his brain to describe what he smelled. Some of the passages were extremely thoughtful. Of Serge Lutens Jeux de Peau, he wrote: A nice complex smell. There is mystery and adventure in this one, almost some roguishness. A fascinating scent... The cologne for a wealthy Victorian youth that has been ensnared by "foreign" vices.

Some other scents did not fare so well:

It was nice but not really special. I have to admit I make hard judgments about this cologne. It’s like this scent has a memory-erasing function.
 

Some days, his reactions were very visual and narrative. For Comme des Garçons Zagorsk, he said:

The smell of an old library. with a cup of tea … maybe Earl Grey, or black tea with lemon. There is also an antisepticness. Maybe the smell in Jean-Luc Picard's ready room, in Star Trek: The Next Generation, or the impeccably clean study of an early 20th century metaphysics professor.

Other scents were mixed—where he reacted to different aspects: notes, sillage, longevity. 

Of Amouage Journey Man, he wote:

Strong and mighty, spicy and woodsy. I picture Ron Burgundy wearing this.

After wearing this scent for most of the day, he came back with some further impressions:

Persistent. It is a bit overpowering. It's a very manly scent … This has the half-life of uranium 235. I still smell it as I type.

What intrigued the most was when a scent seemed to create a connection for him:

A whiff of spice, maybe some cinnamon? Maybe it’s the newly fallen snow outside. But I think of Christmas.

For another he wrote:

Hints of maple, pepper, caramel and other scents. Complicated, but very pleasant.

Of course the idea of blind testing scents has been done before, particularly since the web has made it more and more feasible. Chandler Burr, perfume author and former perfume critic for The New York Times, began his Untitled Series in 2012. He presents limited edition bottles of perfumes that are labeled only with identifying code numbers and accompanied by his “critical assessment.” The scents are therefore presented to the world completely free of the contextualization that product marketing usually wraps around them. He reveals the actual names of the perfumes after a few months have passed, and the wearers have had some time to experience them on their own merits.

Our project was also becoming an opportunity for me to understand how scent language evolves when there is little to actually help move that language forward. If we read that a scent has a base of patchouli, will we indeed smell patchouli? Will our minds seek it out, and if we don’t detect patchouli, what could our response be? Do we feel we’ve been misled, or do we think that this is one of the most unconventional uses of patchouli ever devised? Of course there are no clear answers to these hypotheticals, but they’re important questions to ask, since we, as perfume consumers, know more and more about what we wear than ever before. Perfumers, sales associates, bloggers, all agree that we are some of the most informed scent wearers our history has known. Yet still, we are somewhat in the dark when trying to unravel the connections between scent and cognition.

Something particularly fun about the project was how scent descriptions almost always shifted to narratives. Scent tells stories. As Edward worked his way through the twenty samples, his reactions were always based in experience, but then backed up by imagination. This may seem like a curious method of analysis, but to me it makes a lot of sense. In his 1 – 5 rating system, he got through fifteen of the samples before he hit on his first Number 5. I think there was something of a revelation there. That day, he posted a video clip from the film Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factoryand a key scene in which Mr. Wonka presents his lickable wallpaper, saying that the snozzberries taste like snozzberries. Veruca Salt, the obnoxious rich girl, exclaims mightily that there are no such things as snozzberries, to which Wonka replies:

 

“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams …”

This was a crystallizing moment. What we imagine becomes real—if you can taste the snozzberry, then it exists. This was Edward’s snozzberry moment.

I’d invited a few close friends (and perfume admirers) to observe some of my brother’s musings on his facebook page as he was posting, and I think we all breathed a sigh of relief that he’d at least found ONE scent that was really for him. There had been a concern in my mind that perhaps none of them would hit the mark. As the days went on, I wondered again about randomization, because it looked like I saved a lot of the best ones for last. We hit another scent that rated Number 5, and a few 4’s near the end as well. Some of the best showings came about in the last few days of the project. Keeping with the spirit and fun, Edward chose bronze, silver, and gold winners, and a few honorable mentions for good measure. I tried to find a thread that linked them, and perhaps there was a bit here and there, but they are all distinctly different scents. Did any trends emerge? A few: I miscalculated about woody aromatics—they are not quite the thing my brother gravitates toward. He quite clearly likes ouds and roses, which are loves of mine as well. Amber seems a big hit, but not across the board. Citrus and lemon-based types rated higher than expected, and with one exception, the medal winners and runners up were all unisex. It was reassuring to see that my assumptions were challenged. Some scents that I expected to place very highly did not register for him, usually because they were not strong enough; while others were surprise hits. It proved that there is only so far that one can predefine the “space” that scent occupies—it actually has to be worn and experienced, where neural challenges can be made by the wearer and it can become “theirs.” Is this in fact what we’re after, in a roundabout way: a kind of ownership, or sense of coming “home?” Home can take so many forms, but maybe it’s more about recognition, unlocking a past visual or memory that can transport us back and also drive us forward.

The gold winner of the contest wasImaginary Authors Cape Heartache. Edward had this to say about it: First impression: Burning leaves, a late autumn afternoon, a bit of malt with a hint of smokiness. It’s warm and strong, but not overpowering. It smells of old New England woods, the home of my heart. Second impression: An earthiness, the smokiness fades a little, almost a gentle smell of berries. This is complex and wonderful. This may be the one! This one will be hard to beat. It feels like the right cologne.

And it was here that he hit upon a formula that seemed to encapsulate what worked best for him:

The interesting thing I have discovered is it not that the scents are good or bad, but rather if they are they right for me. There have been some scents in this experiment that have been very nice, but just not right for me. I see it as the below formula:

Scent + Duration + Body chemistry + Memory/Mystery/Imagination = Final result.

In a few days time I’ll be flying out to Iowa to visit with Edward and Keri, and I’ll be delivering the winning scent for Christmas. He’s actually going to get the silver medal winner as well, since he was such a good sport to sit through all this spraying. But present or not, we’re both so much richer for this experience.

THE WINNERS

Gold: Imaginary Authors Cape Heartache
Silver: Annick Goutal Ambre Fétiche
Bronze: Histoires de Parfums 1969

 HONORABLE MENTIONS

Byredo 1996 Inez & Vinoodh
Annick Goutal Sables
Serge Lutens Jeux de Peau

  SOME OTHER SCENTS THAT PLACED WELL IN THE EXPERIMENT

Diptyque 34 Boulévard Saint Germain
Parfum d'Empire Corsica Furiosa
Comme des Garçons Hinoki
L'Artisan Parfumeur Al Oudh

The Biebels, left to right:  Edward J. (left), father Edward W. and John.

Images: Cologne Boxes: Spigoo; Zagorsk and Untitled: Luckyscent