Twin Perceptions: Color and Scent: Part Three: Black Lily

by: John Biebel

Our current notion of perfume today is mostly based on the formulation created in France ages ago, that of the three-stage perfume with an opening, a middle (coeur) and base note. This has meant a Eurocentric view of perfumery: Most of our bottles say “Made in France;” most invention, quality and product still finds its roots in the city of Grasse. And yet as one studies the development of perfume and color, we continually find Europe looking to the East for inspiration. Sometimes this is a legitimate homage to the very ingredients that come from the east, and sometimes it’s a more fanciful idealization of what the West thinks the East is, but whatever the case, the influence is there and continues to evolve. Perhaps this is no more evident than with the use of the color black.

Black Square on a White Ground,  Kazimir Malevich, 1915

 

Black is a color of mystery. Many argue that it is, in fact, not a color at all; that it obscures color. Art students are often taught the mantra “Black is not a color, it is the absence of color.” Some artists are so insistent on this notion that they do not like to use paints bearing the name or categorization “black.” They’ll instead opt for the incredibly dense “Payne’s Gray:” a dark blue-gray that comes as close to black as one can get without actually being “black.”  

 

 

Historically there seems to have been a merging of ideas that led to this aura of mystery around the color black in Europe. In the west, black has strong ties to death and mourning, but also with sophistication and gentility. These associations remain unchanged to this day. Victorian England had a fascination with black, which mirrored its near obsession with death and the macabre. Black dresses, black jet jewelry, window boxes of velvety black pansies: This was the color of an England whose influence was spreading rapidly over the globe through its colonial empire.  

 

Imagine then what it must have seemed like to the early Victorians when objects from England’s occupation of Egypt began to filter their way into London, Paris and Berlin. It’s easy to see how apt these artifacts were for their time—dark, elongated dogs with gold bands on their necks and hieroglyphics; gigantic black granite heads of ancient pharaohs; slender, elegant sarcophagi in the shape of black cats. Is it any wonder that these relics fascinated the imagination of the West?

Though there are extremely few perfumes with a true color of black, the color is often part of the mystery that literally surrounds scents: Black bottles. In stark contrast to today’s love of clarity and light, perfumers in the late 19th and early 20th century were fascinated by dark bottles and dark ingredients.

Examples of mysterious black perfumes from the period abound: L. T. Piver’s “Scarabée” is an Egyptian-styled jar in the shape of a scarab beetle with perfume so dark as to be nearly black to the eye. (photo fromhprints.com) One of Spanish perfumer Myrurgia’s early creations Maja was bottled behind black glass. Perfume house Raffy offered a black sphere of perfume called “Encens Oriental.” The theme of Egyptian objects and black bottles grew more intensely upon the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922. Without this remarkable find, perhaps we’d not have such beautiful creations as Jovoy’s scent Gardez-Moi, held in a timeless black opaque glass bottle in the shape of an Egyptian cat.

Peter Greenaway’s sometimes shocking and always beautiful 1989 film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover had something interesting to say about the color black. The chef talks poetically about the rarest of foods, and that these foods are black: truffles, caviar, perfectly aged olives. This is true of the black smells, too. They are not common, they come to us from unusual sources. Black is the smell of dark ink, which is usually derived from soot and charcoal, or from squid from fathoms down in the ocean. Ink has a curious and deep smell, something like dirt and ozone or that famous “just before an electrical storm” smell that many people and animals react to so strongly. Black is the smell of black lilies, nearly impossible to capture as an essential oil; the scent of deep and resinous black currants.

It is the smell of caviar: that oddly clean but briny ingredient made so famous in Thierry Mugler’s perfumeWomanity. It’s the scent of the darkest pepper berries fermented in the sun, the blackest tea leaves, the rough seed pods of black cardamom. And in every case, these elements are of eastern origin, whether from the closer east of the Caspian Sea (caviar) or the further reaches of Madagascar (vanilla pods) and beyond.

Black perfume still fascinates and calls forth the mystery of lands outside Europe. A perfume like SoOud’s Burquaoperates like this on multiple levels: the black bottle of deceptive simplicity, the element of ink in its composition, the interplay of the name Burka with an actual woman’s burka or black robe. Nasomatto’s Black Afgano sits in a devilishly sleek glass bottle, colored black from the inside, topped with what appears to be a charred wood stopper. This cannabis-inspired perfume delves into blackness as theory and experience: Hashish, a black cloud, smoke and resin, burning incense. Nasomatto and SoOud understand the potent metaphors inherent in the color black. There is a secret, some danger, even subterfuge and political intrigue behind this darkest of colors. Other perfumers have pushed the paradoxical side of black as a color in scent.

Think of the cognitive dissonance behind perfumes like Lubin’s Black Jade (which is in a white bottle), and Keiko Mecheri’s Datura Blanche (which is in a black bottle). Black’s natural pairing of white has also proved to be a potent metaphor in perfume.

Black is a word often used to discuss race, usually when speaking of races within diverse western countries. Jazz music, the sound that emerged from black America, completely changed the world’s sound landscape in the early 20th century. France in particular was utterly fascinated by the emergence of jazz as it made its way across the Atlantic from the United States. Josephine Baker, jazz singer and dancer, first appeared in Paris in La Rèvue Negre on October 2nd, 1925, and France was forever enchanted. The art deco movement, which was highly influenced by artistic traditions of the East, now welcomed this African-American woman as the face of “the exotic” in Europe, and she was held in high esteem by writers, artists, and perfumers. Jacques Guerlain created his epic floral and spicy chypre perfume Sous le Vent for Baker. Baker offered an accessible door into the mystery of blackness that Europeans before had only known as conquerors and colonialists.

 

The African continent is vast, and holds precious and unusual elements of perfume making: Frankincense from the Boswelia tree, Karo Karounde, Myrrh, Civet, Muhuhu(or African Sandalwood) and Egyptian jasmine. It’s no accident that the idea of blackness as an identity was embraced by writers and intellectuals in France in the 1930s under the collective name Négritude: a philosophical school best known by it’s founding poet member Aimé Césaire. They sought out a common black identity as a reaction to the oppression of French colonialism around the world. It’s fascinating to read Césaire’s poetry: This man, who went on to become the Prime Minister of the island nation of Martinique, wrote vivid, often aggressive poems about personal identity and politics, and yet in his exploration of blackness, so many sparkling examples of color and scent emerge. In his poem “Mississippi” he describes a flagrant sky 
under the calm ferocity of the immense geranium of our sun; in “Forfeiture:" "…right there pushing between the paving stones the furious blue eucalypti." Though some may say that Europe only saw the surface of “blackness” as defined by race, Césaire and so many other groundbreaking artists, such as those of the Harlem Renaissance, laid the foundation of the idea of blackness as it spread around the world and came into its own later in the 20th century.

 

 

The black bottle, the black smell—some may say that this has more to do with “hiding” a smell than coloring it. This is a fundamental component of color perception. Is it always about sight? Do the signals between color, taste and smell sometimes get mixed up? Some people do see smells and smell colors, and this phenomenon is called Synesthesia. A fairly sturdy definition of synesthesia can be had from Wikipedia: a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. A common example of this is the case when people experience colors as smells, and vice versa. Synesthesia is a fairly rare trait, but those who experience it give us an interesting view into the way our minds parse information. Writer Joanne Harris, author of the best-selling novel Chocolat, is a synesthete who says she experiences colors as scents. Although synesthesia can take many forms of cross-signal cognition, its existence reminds us that our neural experience in the space between smell and color is complex, and doesn’t have distinct boundaries. This begs the question: Would a perfume in a black bottle smell the same as one in clear glass? That question is very hard to answer, but perhaps a better question would be this: Would we perceive those two smells the same? Studies say the answer is “No.”  

 

 

A classic demonstration of this is the wine test. In the past, wine tasters have been given wines to describe, as they usually do with the vocabulary that critics use. When white wine has been colored red, in nearly every case, these white wines are described as if they were red, using all the common red wine adjectives, red wine metaphors and references to red wine production methods. And what is different? Nothing but the color. Wine is a good example because it is appreciated as much for its scent bouquet as for its taste.

 

Scientists have not yet determined exactly what is at play here. Is stored-up visual memory influencing smell and taste? Are we reacting to certain deeply set ideas about how colors should taste and smell to our palette? Marketers in the US saw a mass revolt due to a miscalculation about color perception in 1992. This was the year that gave birth to “clear” products. Everything from beer to cola to gasoline was not only marketed as being “clear,” it was physically clear. All these products looked identical to water. The trend had a lifespan of about twp years, and then the public rejected it outright. To many, there was something unnatural about a flavored drink that had no color, a fermented beverage that was see-through. It was, in fact, the very opposite of black: It removed every bit of mystery. Clear, which was supposed to convey simplicity, just looked artificial. Certain clear perfumes have done very well in the market, and so it’s not a completely negative idea in the scent world, but generally speaking, clear scents convey certain specific ideas. A clear scent is usually successful if it holds a transparent, uncomplicated perfume.

What many people craved during the “clear” years (or perhaps they didn’t realize they craved) was the mystery of the complex. When considering the color black, we’re often reminded that black is about density. One never travels to black in one step, but rather arrives there in stages. It’s been remarked by many botanists that black flowers are usually flowers of extremely dense color—deep burgundy, purple, brown or green. It’s similar to the evolutionary process of baking, and the chemical reaction that sugars undergo as they change under heat. Their colors become richer, darker, eventually turning black if left to burn. Many black perfumes embrace this complexity and density of scent. Lalique’s Encre Noir is a thick, smoky vetiver and cypress smolder; Mon Parfum by Paloma Picasso (which bears close similarity to the originalPaloma Picasso perfume) is an historic chypre encased in black. It is a massive bouquet of sultry flowers tempered by the lovely sour-sweetness of oakmoss.

 

 

Many perfume houses create a black “flanker” edition to express the darker sides of a scent, such as Guerlain’s Shalimar Black Mystery, or Yves Saint Laurent’s La Collection M7 Oud Absolu.

By today’s standards, the black jet beaded handbags of the Victorian era can seem incredibly maudlin and old-fashioned. Black as a color has had its fair share of associations with heaviness and oppression. Black crepe ribbon was, for many years, hung over doorways in Europe and the Americas after a death in a house, and to this day many men keep a black tie in their closet specifically to wear to funerals. And yet black still denotes something very special. It can convey mystery and confidence simultaneously. A wonderful black perfume is Tom Ford’s Black Orchid. It is black on so many levels: A black name; black ingredients of truffle, vanilla pods, incense and currants; and a sleek black bottle. And yet the perfume is so much more—at one turn floral, at another gourmand, but all resonant and darkly rich like the distinct note of chocolate. Would Black Orchid smell the same if it were in a bright red bottle? Of course it’s a theoretical question, and we need not answer because the choice was wisely made for us.

 

In part four of the series Twin Perceptions, we’ll continue on our path of the eyes and nose, but we’ll turn up the heat, literally. Cool colors like blue and black tend to recede in space, but the warm ones come right to the forefront. We’ll explore the power of temperature as it relates to color, scent, and the mind.