Twin Perceptions: Color and Scent: Part Two: A Blue Mood

by: John Biebel

 

Many perfume wearers talk about their “search” for a scent. That search could be based on memory of a past perfume, and the desire to smell something new and different that suits them. Sometimes this is reflected in color as well.

 

 

Novelist and playwright Catherine Czerkawska recognized the beautifully complex relationship of scent and color in her narrative poem “The Scent of Blue.” She begins by describing a woman who embodies an enviable confidence and awareness:

“… She wants to be like that some day, longs for self possession. And she remembers the scent of her, musky, mysterious, a heavy, night time scent, like flowers after dark. The scent of passion. The scent of money. The scent of blue.”

 

The narrator of the poem searches for years for that smell, that scent of blue, and in a sense goes back in time in order to find it, back to a dramatic shift all over the globe, to the uncertainty swirling through the years before World War I:
 

“1911 One summer evening a young man observes the way twilight closes the flowers, whose scent lingers on the last heat of the day, the way the light goes out of the sky, painting it dark blue, how soon the war will tear this place apart. How soon all things resort to sadness. In a new century, She finds among jasmine and rose vanilla and violet, a dark twist of anise, like the twist of a knife. First last always …”

She eventually finds the scent: L’Heure Bleue. And although the perfume is not colored blue, it represents everything that blue means to her, and has a new meaning: sadness.

Blue, like many other colors, is bursting with associations and cultural meaning. And blue-colored scents abound in the market today. Think of the dark and mysterious bottles of Andy Tauer, or Bulgari’s BLV Pour Homme. Britney Spears’ Midnight Fantasy is an iconic pure bold blue, and Lanvin’s Oxygene and L’Homme lines are both subtle and pulsating shades of blue. Davidoff’s Cool Water is recognized worldwide as the beacon of ocean, waves and sea spray. What does blue say to us in different cultures, or is there something universal about blue that attracts the eyes and mind? Blue is an apt color case study because it has many perpendicular associations, even within one culture, and yet speaks in similar words across languages. This one color is both bold and receding, confident yet sad.

 

 

Perhaps no artist has realized the power of blue as much as French artist Odilon Redon (1840 – 1914). In his famous “Portrait of Violette Heymann,” he surrounds his subject with a cloud of blue and flowers—an almost mythic vapor of dreams, with flowers embedded, mixing scent and semi-consciousness almost as though we can see into the young woman’s deepest thoughts and aspirations. And although many immediately thing of the painter Paul Cezanne when the color blue is mentioned, Redon uses blue as much to demonstrate fire as water—blue was truly a catalytic agent in his hands.

 

Portrait of Violette Heymann, Odilon Redon

 

Blue is one of those colors whose various shades are readily grouped together. People understand that sky blue, cobalt, indigo and aqua are variations of blue. This is unlike red, for instance, in which variations like pink and magenta are often considered to be a completely distinct colors. This has a lot to do with the way we perceive color both optically and historically, but the associations of blue across cultures are interestingly harmonious. It is often the color of
 

• Uniforms, police; clothing of authority
   
• Peacefulness, solace, emotional shelter
   
• Spirituality, as represented in Hindu depictions of Krishna; or the robes of the Christian mother of Christ, Mary; or the blue calligraphy found in many Muslim mosques
   
• Trust, power, economic and business security
   
• Sadness, depression
   
• Gentle suggestion of secrecy or sexuality
   
• Nighttime, lack of light, quiet, sleep
   
• Masculinity, particularly with babies and children.
   
• Rarity, scarcity, preciousness.  These last associations may be due to the fact that blue does not often occur in nature in edible foods, and that for many centuries, it was an extremely rare and costly pigment to use in painting, and therefore was coveted like precious stones.
  
   

It is rare to find a culture that associates blue with danger, fear or chaos, and this may explain the connection between blue and children. The Western convention of "blue is for boys" has been studied by many: Is it an inherent cultural connection, or just a marketing invention? Studies seem to prove the latter, and the rise of blue and its connection to boys also rose at the same time as mass marketing began to flourish in the post World War II West. ("Why is Pink for Girls and Blue for Boys?" at Live Science)  

 

Sticking with the example of blue, what has marketing done with this color, and how has it affected the color of perfumes? Studies of the relationship between consumers and color abound on the web and in many books on the subject, but ultimately there are two factors in how a person would select a perfume in relation to color marketing: The data of the marketer, and the subjective choice of the buyer. When these two meet, either the signals get crossed, or a lovely marriage occurs. Blue happens to be a universally “liked” color, and so in some ways it has been a safe bet for marketers. 

Let’s look at one stand-out example of a perfumer who deliberately packaged a perfume in different colors and thereby created different reactions. Think of the many moods that are brought to mind when one considers the perfume Je Reviens by Worth. This is a classic floral aldehydic bouquet that has been worn since 1932. It has devotees and detractors, but its blue box is unmistakable: Je Reviens developed a particularly potent combination of two shades of blue and gold on its package, and its name, translated as either "I will return" or "I’ll be back" speaks to the fact that it will stay in one’s memory.

What is intriguing about Je Reviens is that it has played on two colors for the actual perfume in the bottle: gold and blue. The eau de toilette is usually held in a tall, lean, vertically-lined bottle, while the eau de parfum resides in a very thin, circular blue sphere. I recall distinctly seeing these two bottles in a set together and thinking how completely different they seemed—as if they weren’t even the same perfume at all.   Without question, the blue bottle was more mysterious, it felt more precious, like a jewel; watery and deep. It had the same kind of blue-confidence of the taller bottle, but this was more intuitive and private. The color was an instant signifier. This is blue—this is rare.

Since then, Worth has changed some of the coloration of the bottles so that blue is used more liberally, but this particular marketing idea really put the different faces of Je Reviens on the map. Many people to this day talk about the very compelling natures of Je Reviens’ different strengths and formulations. Clearly something has kept it alive for many decades, and conversations about the scent have only grown as the years have passed.

But an interesting question comes to mind when thinking about color and perfume, particularly a potentially bold color like blue—are we reacting to a bottle, or the actual perfume; or, is there a difference? In many ways, the difference is negligible. We are reacting to what we see before we spray it. Some perfumers give us a clear bottle and let us look at the interior perfume, while others disguise it slightly so that we view it through azure-tinted glasses, so to speak. Perfumers like Annick Goutal often use colored bottles to "color" the perfume, like the dark and bold blue of Nuit Étoilée, or the hushed blue-green of Ninfeo Mio.

 

Was it always like this? Historically, perfume marketing has gone through vast changes over the past 100 years. Up until the 1950’s, perfumes from all over the world were usually gold, amber or yellow—very often not colored at all, but just reflecting the natural color of the ingredients. Their presentation was usually in extremely elegant and beautifully crafted bottles. Rene Lalique is considered one of the most important glass artists during this flourishing of the perfume industry, which is usually dated as the decade between 1919-1929. Somewhere between then and now, the beautiful glass bottles became far simpler, easier to produce. As this happened, perfumes began to take on colors.  Did the simplification of perfume bottles bring about the revolution in perfume color? Christine Mayer Lefkowith, author of Masterpieces of the Perfume Industry sees the upheaval of the world due to economic crisis as the instrument of change:

“The crash of the New York Stock Exchange, of October 24, 1929, set into motion a series of economic changes, which would not only dramatically end the perfume industry’s most productive period, but would also have profound long lasting effects which required the industry to change its character … The cost of using skilled artisans or a great deal of handwork for the production of presentations could no longer be justified …  Accountants and engineers would assume greater importance … A great desire for practicality and simplification would allow the Constructivist, De Stijl, and Bauhaus philosophies to gain much more favor in France, and would stimulate the perfume industry’s interest in Modernism.”
 

This kind of uniformity has a particular beauty of its own, as expressed in the scents of Mona di Orio. The bottles have a refreshing and calming singularity to them, and the perfumes themselves are all shades of gold, creating a greater mystery because their package does not betray the contents, despite the fact that we can “see” the inside. Think of the difference between perfumes like Nuit Noire and Les Nombres d`Or Rose Etoile de Hollande—identical visually, but utterly different bouquets. In some way, we almost react to the mystery of di Orio’s sameness as we do to the mystery behind blue glass. Again, we see that perception is a fickle topic with many faces, and color adds even more variation to the discussion.

 

 

The hand of history has played heavily on the very nature of perfume manufacture and how consumers fit perfume into their lives. In part three, we’ll travel along the 20th century’s path toward color in scent, and reach further into the mind to explore how we see color and perceive perfume at the same time.