Exhibition Notes: Sniffing Around

[Visited 24 February 2024]

The smell of frankinse, oud, musk, rose and orange blossom has intensified as the afternoon has progressed. This is from a few drops of oil on my palms at the end of the exhibition, Perfums d’Orient at the Institute du Monde Arabe. What does it mean that my two most pleasurable experiences while I’ve been in Paris have centred on perfume.

A few weeks back, I attended a touristic mini perfume making workshop at the Fragonard Museum. It was at 9.30 in the morning, and I had a cold coming on, but still had enough sense of smell to be in some kind of olfactory heaven. 

I’ve always loved perfumes. I have an early memory of coveting a tiny bottle of violet perfume that was in a gift shop up the road from our mower shop (our shop that smelt of two stroke petrol, grease and dirt). I finally convinced my mother to let me buy it. I can remember the sweet old lady smell of violets, that according to my memory, was reasonably faithful to the smell of the tiny purple flowers that appear in my garden ever spring. 

As a teenager I wanted fancy perfumes, and would save up my money  for them, my desires stoked by a friend who was much richer and more fashionable than me. I still remember the thrill of buying a bottle of the perfume called Paris, in a department store in Melbourne.

Even as I became less concerned with mainstream life I still loved my fancy perfumes. Whole eras of my adult life can be conjured by the smell of my perfume at that time, although most of my favourites don’t exist any more. But still, to smell (of) the right perfume at the right time is something that quickens my being in the same way a piece of amazing music or a perfect poetic phrase can. 

I actually tried to make perfume in my twenties using the enfleurage method. I love freesias and back then there weren’t any freesia perfumes* and so over several weeks I gathered baskets full of them from Rookwood Cemetery where they grow wild (never picking from graves only paths). I laid the flowers on muslin soaked in almond oil, changing the flowers every week. At the end I squeezed out the liquid and it smelt like the essence of hamburger. I had cuts on my hands from being a bar tender and it inflamed them further. I suspect freesias may need a different method of extraction. 

At the Fragonard mini perfume workshop I learned that some flowers are “silent”. While they smell amazing you can’t extract the scent from them. It simply disappears. Lilac is one of these. Despite this, lilac is the Fragonard signature scent for the spring season. They have come up with a recipe to replicate the smell: top notes of lemon, blackcurrant and linden; heart notes of hawthorn, heliotrope and gloves; base notes of vanilla, musk and violet. As I mixed my vial I tried to favour the top notes as I like things citrussy — fresh like water — but it’s still a bit musky for me. 

However the musk that remains on me from the “oriental” perfume is different. It doesn’t make me think of musk sticks or hippies, but of something deep, golden and burnished.

Even writing the names of individual scents excites me — the words shimmer or even rumble. And obviously I’m not alone as the museum is packed. They have invented crazy implements — air puffers, and petal swirlers — to sample the smells of frankincense, myrrh, oud, ambergris, musk, night jasmine, saffron, damask rose, orange blossom and remarkably it never becomes overwhelming. Its also fascinating that some of these ingredients that make the sweetest of smells have less than sweet origins: ambergris from the digestive tract of a spermwhale; musk, of course, from the scent glands at the less endearing end of deer.

While perfume can be easily criticised for its decadence, Parfums d’Orient illustrates how it has been an integral part of human culture since the Sumerians and Egyptians. In Judaic Christian religions it continued this ancient role as a holy vehicle, with incense used for conjuring holy atmospheres to sensorially connect us to god. But even though perfume maintains a vital role in Muslim culture, it’s not used for holy purposes, rather it is considered a gift from god for the pleasure of man and so its decadence becomes cultural integrated. 

As we shuffle along looking at ancient objects, bottles, vials and texts, treated to ingeniously and subtly delivered wafts, I notice that the couple I’ve been behind for most of the show are getting rather amorous, particularly after we’ve been through the frankincense section. He holds her round the waste, nibbles her ears, steals kisses. They are quite conservative looking people and so this shift in mode and mood is noticeable. Perhaps the exhibition anticipates this as the final room concentrates on the role of perfume in the boudoir.

I leave alone yet thoroughly satisfied if a little giddy. My pleasure is such that I wonder, despite the fact that the market for artworks around smell already has some wonderful contributors, if should I really begin to explore this territory. But then I remember the pleasure it brings, and think that maybe, for once, it’s OK to love something and not try and make art from it. Perhaps with this, I can just let it be a treasure rather than a tool. 

* Perfumer Joe Malone makes perfumes with freesia in them now, and while they smell very nice, they don’t smell of freesias in my opinion.

Image: Depicts the Egyptian tradition of wearing a cone of perfumed wax on the head.