Back in 2021, I read an interesting Twitter thread by philosopher C. Thi Nguyen:

If you’re looking for some weird esthetic exploration to fight off the COVID boredom blues, can I recommend: avant-garde perfume.

Sorry, what kind of perfumes?

As a guy, I have never concerned myself with perfumes; it is not that I look down on perfumes or scents (I enjoy a good essential oil or the smell of baking bread as much as anyone), it is just that I have mostly aimed to not smell bad to other people and am satisfied if they do not remark on my odor, favorably or not. If I smell like something boringly conventional like Axe or Irish Spring, it is all the same to me.

(I have, in truth, spent far more time thinking about how I smell to cats & dogs or wild animals than to my fellow humans: whether I am upwind, how they flinch at the slightest residue of gasoline or gunpowder, the Flehmen response of a cat distressed to suddenly smell foreign cats on me, the varying responses of cats & dogs to earwax from different animals, the possible effects of cheek rubs vs other spots…)

…But I am a little bored. Tell me more.

No, really. First: 1. Not all perfume is cloying mall crap. There’s world of indie, experimental weird-ass perfume. 2. It’s cheap.

Elaborate.

…there is this whole world of weird, fascinating, unexpected perfume. Perfume that smells like burning leaves on an autumn afternoon. That smells like a dairy farm. That smells like a distant Tuscan town in winter. Like the coming snow. Abstract scents. One of my favorite weird scents: “Room 237”, a scent that is based on the creepy room from The Shining. It is weird, unsettling, synthetic, fascinating.

I have never in my life thought of “what if someone made a perfume based on a horror movie?” I am now very curious.

But where would I get something like that? I definitely don’t have $50 or $200 to blow on a bunch of random weird perfumes just to smell a few times—as intrigued as I am to learn that this is even a thing, I do know that a bottle of perfume is usually not cheap and will last a long time, and I doubt any of my local department or cosmetics stores would be stocking perfumes like Room 237 for me to take a spritz of.

Second: perfume is actually cheap as hell to explore. Bottles are expensive, but LuckyScent offers $6.22^$5₂₀₂₁ samplers of any perfume. A sampler bottle is actually 10–20 doses. I have bought zero whole bottles in my life. It’s actually one of the cheapest esthetic realms.

What‽ So there’s actually an Upton’s-tea-like perfume seller I can just… buy 10–20 perfume samples from without breaking the bank? Well. That changes things.

Every time I teach esthetics (except this year), I always ask my students if they think perfume can be real art. 90% say no. Then I bring in a few of these, let them try them, and they are almost all instantly convinced. I’ve had people cry from some of the nostalgic scents.

I sat down and did some reading on perfume-as-art (“The Aesthetics of Smelly Art”, Shiner & Kriskovets 2007_19ya; “The Odor Value Concept in the Formal Analysis of Olfactory Art”, Kraft 2019; “The Scent of the Nile: Jean-Claude Ellena creates a new perfume”, Chandler Burr 2005_21ya), and was sold on the idea. Alright, Nguyen, I’ll give it a try and see if you can convince me that perfume can be an art rather than ‘just’ a craft.

So one day, when math felt hard, I went shopping.

I couldn’t get all the ones Nguyen highlighted from LuckyScent and some sampler packs were sold out, but I settled for 39 samples total on 8 February 2021. (Which cost $190.37^$153₂₀₂₁, so amortizing to $6.05^$3.9₂₀₁₁ each.) At that point I felt I had gone a bit overboard, so I didn’t do an additional order from CB I Hate Perfume, which Nguyen praises for doing the most interesting ‘abstract’ perfumes, to pick up ones that LuckyScent didn’t have in stock.

Luckily, I was able to get Room 237, Asphalt Rainbow (“The weird wing of the perfume world thought:”Well, the rest of the art world doesn’t have to be pleasant, so why do we? Can’t we be punk, interesting, jolting?” Thus a scent like ‘Asphalt Rainbow’, which is: wet pavement, car exhaust, street food, aerosol”), “Molecule” series from Escentric Molecules (“very clean/airy and abstract. Kind of like the perfume version of a Rothko painting”), and some curious-sounding ones like “Lampblack” (which is “Inspired by the smell of India ink”) or “Confessions of a Garden Gnome” (praised for how much it changes over time) or “Acqua di Sale” (“the tang of briny air, salt and sand and shells—it’s all here in the most realistic ocean scent we have ever encountered”).

On 10 December 2024, I followed up that order with a second order, to double-check Acqua di Sale & Kyoto Incense, and add a few more similar ones, like the infamously polarizing ocean perfume “Megamare”. (10 samples cost $59, so post-COVID inflation had pushed samples up to $5.9 each.)

This resulted in quite a few little bottles showing up in my bathroom, and I began casually trying them day by day. I was a little disappointed how fast I became ‘nose-blind’ to each scent, which made it hard to evaluate them as much as I would like, regardless of where I applied them to on my body. (One reader has suggested smelling coffee beans to reset your nose.) This especially impeded trying to smell how they changed over time. I eventually settled for just dabbing them on my neck for initial testing. (Wikipedia has an amusing suggestion for where to apply perfume: to the back of your knees!)

And I wondered whether I would agree, given how inconsistent and over the top perfume reviewers tend to be—I kept reading reviews of possible perfumes to buy on Fragantica and laughing hysterically at the sheer hyperbole and level of disagreement. The same perfume can either be so weak that you might as well “Buy a bottle of water. Pour it over yourself.” or “This is the gift of kings because when you wear it, you feel like royalty. It is truly jubilation in a bottle. THE. GREATEST. FRAGRANCE. OF. ALL. TIME.” (Safe to say, opinions differ. Fonts, watches, & wines have nothing on perfumes.)

Many of them left me shrugging. They smelled perfume-y or chemical-y, and I had nothing more to say about them than that. Still, overall… The perfumes lived up to Nguyen’s billing! I now agree with him that yes, perfumes can be art and it does make sense to speak of “avant-garde” perfumes which can sustain meaningful critique and engagement beyond simply being cosmetic products.

Room 237 really does smell disturbingly creepy, a mix of chemical and death.

Asphalt Rainbow does smell like asphalt and gasoline, and every time I smell myself, it reminded me of NYC.

Garden Gnome keeps changing constantly over the hours, and sort of tells a story about a day in the life of a garden gnome. (Even if that admittedly is something I would never have thought of without reading the explanation.)

Lampblack is like ink and a bit like old books, and would be an amusing perfume for a writer to use. (And unsurprisingly at this point, if you want to smell more like an old book than Lampblack allows, there are many alternatives.)

And Acqua di Sale smells like the ocean—I remembered summers down in the country fishing with my grandfather, or just sitting on the pier crabbing in between reading the stack of books from the local library, and the sound of gulls down by the lighthouse… (Megamare, on the other hand, smells like when I am out walking and I cross by the swamp marshlands and I am woken by a sudden blast of brackish decay—memorable, but not exactly something I wish to keep smelling.)

The Escentric Molecules didn’t initially strike me as anything but odd, and I downplayed their use. As I kept trying more of the other perfumes, though, I began to appreciate what they meant: they were odd because they were pure ingredients, and I was smelling traces of them in all the others. So using one of the Molecules was like staring at a single page of color, after a lifetime of nothing but photographs. They are uncanny: both familiar and strange. I didn’t necessarily like them (aside from “Molecule 03”, or vetiveryl acetate, which I came to like, and which I think would be funny to wear just to troll people who are very into perfumes—“what is that? I can’t… quite… figure it out. I can smell the vetiver, but what’s the rest of it‽”), but they were educational.

I found that I liked the incense-style perfumes, in particular: Incense Kyoto, Hinoki, Anbar (runner-up: Cardinal). Of them, I liked the Kyoto best. It had a warm comforting smell—and perhaps benefits unfairly from the mental associations I have with Kyoto from so many years of reading Japanese literature, where “Kyoto” is a byword for elegance & culture, and how, in my opinion, the Kyōto-ben accent is one of the most beautiful (to the extent I can form an opinion on the matter from watching so much anime, anyway).

So esthetically, this was a success. I’m glad I spent some time going down this rabbit hole to gain some appreciation of perfumes.

I haven’t previously worn perfume, but after all this, I find I liked the best ones enough to do so, even if I’m not interested enough to pick up perfume as a hobby (and keep going with the ‘abstract’ scents from CB I Hate Perfume that I omitted).

Which ones? I didn’t want to buy more than a few, because I do not need that much perfume and want to avoid too much clutter, especially for travel.

The ‘stunt’ perfumes like Room 237 or Megamare or Asphalt Rainbow are right out. I liked the idea of Lampblack, but it seemed a bit weird and selfish to go around smelling like ink. Acqua di Sale was my top choice: I liked the smell and the mental associations, and it was the only ocean perfume that worked for me. What would be #2? There were several incenses and then Molecule 03, but I didn’t see much point to having more than one after comparing them side by side, and decided on just Kyoto.

So, I settled on Acqua di Sale & Kyoto Incense. (How to pick which one to choose if I have two? I decided I might as well ‘theme’ them, similar to how I use dropcaps on Gwern.net, to distinguish modes of writing, and so use Acqua di Sale for more ‘professional’ contexts, and Kyoto for more ‘personal’ contexts.)

And since I felt I was done sampling perfumes and perfumes are usually shelf-stable for a decade, instead of hedging by buying small amounts or samplers or using a ‘decanting’ service (which will split a full bottle into something more reasonable), I would buy a bottle of each one, and be set for a long time.

(I did have some left over samplers, but I wound up using them in a futile effort to non-lethally repel the mice in my apartment who had begun to gnaw on computer cables, including cables to backup drives.)

I couldn’t find anywhere cheaper than LuckyScent for Kyoto, so in March 2024, I bought a $111 50ml eau de parfume bottle. Shopping around, I did find alternatives to LuckyScent’s ~$290 100ml Acqua di Sale on eBay, which saved $30. (The Kyoto bottle is a relatively small ‘travel spray’ with a protective metal cap, so I can travel with that; I had to buy an additional little spray bottle from Walmart for the Acqua di Sale bottle, which has an atomizer but it is a large glass bottle and too risky for luggage.)

Judging from my current rate of consumption, I will not run out for another decade or two. Perhaps I will get bored with them and will try some more? After all, there are so many strange perfumes one could try, like stealth fighter jet or spaceships/space or new car smell or dust Catholic holy water or F1 Racing (sample was meh), an eau de Cleopatra, Calvin Klein’s “Obsession” (but just for the cats), or truly avant-garde perfumes…

We’ll see.