Curious about…Sillage.
pr: (see-large) n: a perfume’s trail. The art of evoking a presence, to create a scent memory.
“Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousand of miles and all the years you have lived.” Helen Keller
I’ve been fascinated by smell my entire life.
Most of my earliest and deepest memories are to do with smells: the medicinal soothing twang of Calomine lotion being gently applied to my sunburned and sobbing back by my mother when I was four, the acrid stink of the Durians in the street markets in Singapore where I grew up, the thick mist on the kitchen windows that signified the overcooked brussel sprouts of the True English Christmas.
Recently I was in Chicago, staying at a fancy hotel on the Lake. I noticed everywhere I went that there was a nice, clean, kind of greeny-lemony-mossy smell; in the lobby, in the elevators, even on my towels. It smelt good, like a clean spring day should smell in your dreams. It was calming and reminded me of gathering brambles outdoors when I was a kid. I asked the manager what it was. It’s called “W-Essence” was the unfortunate answer. Clever - a viscerally-evoked nostalgia, to imprint more deeply the experience I was having. It stopped me in my tracks - could smell be the link in some way between the creation of mere “everyday” experiences and the deeper, more emotional, creation of memories?
Perfumery is a really extreme medium. On one hand, it is extreme science - molecular, chemical, technological, biological. On the other, it is poetry - extreme emotion. You’re designing an Obsession. The awareness of Eternity.A sense of Euphoria.
Extreme science? Oudh is the rarest, most complex and therefore most expensive scent in the world. It is made from a rotting fungus that grows at shade-level on trees in Indonesia. It is said to smell “Like pure maths. Or deep space.” It is revered to be “like a star in eternal darkness.”
Extreme Chemistry? “Molecule One from new, underground brand Escentric Molecules, is no commercial blend. It’s not even a perfume really, more of a viral elixir. It’s just a clinical dose of a single-aroma chemical with a name as long as some distant galaxy’s. It comes in a menacing engineered bottle with strange light effects that shift in the dark. The aroma molecule is so complex, the body can only metabolize it very slowly so it appears to vanish, then reappear hours later, hovering like a stealth bomber over your skin.” British Vogue
Extreme emotion? “Civet is a popular ingredient in a lot of perfumes. In concentration, civet reeks of the sewers of old Paris. In extreme dilution, maybe one part in a thousand, it’s the sweet tormented flesh of the sinner, and you want that in your fragrance.” John Galliano
Extreme art? Truffles are a missing link between fungi and animals. They contain labdanum, which is used in rare scent blends, particularly in heady Arabian perfumes. It is described as smelling hot and musky, “like the viscera of an odorous, hot furry little mammal in it’s last death throes. Crouching. Unknowable.”
What Of It? I’d love to understand better how to we design sillage. In other words, what can we learn and apply from the process of designing a fragrance that allows us to create not just experiences but lingering memories?
I am Curious about the potency of harnessing the senses better, about the connection between scent, emotion and memory.
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