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radfrac_archive_full) wrote2014-01-22 09:18 pm
radfrac_archive_full) wrote2014-01-22 09:18 pm
Memorial Deodorant (fougère a deux)
This morning I said to myself, "I think my deodorant is a fougère."
Deodorant
I have two deodorants, or one deodorant and one deodorant system. The system is my hippie mix: Tom's of Maine unscented plus Crystal Foot Deodorant (not a good foot deodorant, but not bad as an armpit adjunct).
On hot days, I supplement with tea tree oil, in which case bystanders occasionally ask the air where the smell of liniment is coming from. In these instances, I sometimes claim to have spilled a bottle of tea tree oil on myself. Now you know: really it is my attempt at natural odour management.
I also have hard-core killer deodorant, for days when smelling like chemical paste is better than smelling like sweaty human. I had class today, and I feel weird enough being forty. I thought: let's not be stinky-forty.
The killer deodorant isn't actually mine. It belonged to X.
Late this past summer, in the tent in the early morning rain, I watched him put his deodorant on, and I thought: I have to remember that brand, so that I can buy it, so that I can smell it, so that I can remember you when you are dead.
It seemed like the wrong thing to be thinking, imagining ahead to the time when he would be dead, but I knew that this was going to be soon, and I wanted to create a fixed point in time, something that could bring me back to the smell of his body and the memory of lying with him in the tent.
(Which, funny story, another time.)
I didn't see him again after that trip. He went home to Portland and died about six weeks later.
I remembered that the plastic shell of the deodorant was a dark teal, but I forgot the brand, and after he died I went up and down the grocery aisle looking for it. I opened the lids and sniffed all the sticks, but they all smelled like variants on chemical paste.
After the funeral we went back to his house, which was already not his house, because life does not hesitate even a moment on death's behalf, and new arrangements were in place. Most of his things were already redistributed, but all I wanted was the deodorant. There was a partly used stick still in the bathroom, and then his sister went and got two fresh sticks from the closet. This was more than I'd asked for, but she put them into my hands so I took them.
I wear it because it's convenient, but I can't actually say it always reminds me of him, though it did at first.
Fougère
You may have heard of the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab (http://blackphoenixalchemylab.com/) -- BPAL, to its devotees. BPAL manufactures these amazing scents with erudite, arcane names that reference literature, mythology, and comic books, with eerie stories or poems to illustrate them. They smell like magic.
I'm a little bit fixated on BPAL lately. I open the tiny bottles. I convey the oils to my skin. I warm them by rubbing my wrists together. I wave my arms around to help them dry. I inhale. I try to identify the individual notes and accords.
I have recently been given to understand (for example, at http://www.yesterdaysperfume.com/), and have enthusiastically adopted the idea, that a good perfume or cologne is a composition, as much as any other work of art.
Perfume has a bad reputation as a useless consumer product, a needless allergenic additive, and an air fouler, and under the wrong circumstances that is also how I feel about it. I believe in scent-free workplaces.
The construction of scent is also an art form that engages what we think of as one of the lesser senses, smell, and I am fascinated by this somatic side road.
Scent can be made to tell a story -- elusively, through reference, insinuation, recollection, ambiguity. A perfume is volatile -- it keeps changing out from under you. You can experience it, but you can't fix it. Perfume oil reacts with your skin. It smells different on every person, and even on the same person it changes from moment to moment.
Last night I was re-trying BPAL's Dorian, a tribute to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The site describes it as "a Victorian fougère with three pale musks and dark, sugared vanilla tea."
Maybe I thought to try it again because in class we've just been reading from the erotic novel Teleny, which is attributed to Oscar Wilde, and which contains a profoundly odd and moving sex scene between two men.
I remembered Dorian as too floral and light, a disappointment, but last night my skin chemistry was different (or something), and the scent unfolded for me.
I made notes, of course. Light and clean -- lilac? -- and something sweeter -- something almost malty -- something floral -- lavender? -- sweet -- what is that? Like carob, almost -- not cocoa but something peripheral to cocoa.
I let Dorian linger on my wrist last night, and this morning when I got out of the shower I could still faintly smell it. Then I popped open the lid on the killer deodorant and smelled -- not the same smell -- but something kindred to that weird carob-like note.
Fern-like
A fougère is a common and venerable basis for men's colognes, a combination (usually) of at least lavender, oak moss, and a compound called coumarin, which smells like new-mown hay or grass.
fougère means "fern-like," but this is an abstract category. The websites I looked at kept saying that ferns don't have a scent, though it seems to me that fiddleheads do have a smell, a distinct green scent less sweet and more bitter than a fougère.
The carob smell probably had to do with the vanilla tea, and also the coumarin. It often comes from tonka* beans, which apparently sort of smell like vanilla, saffron, almonds, cinnamon, and cloves. (Cinnamon also sometimes contains coumarin.)
So although I felt very clever for identifying the smell, it's almost obvious that my deodorant would be based on a fougère. It would be unlikely to be based on anything else.
The manufacturer's website makes this bold declaration: the killer deodorant is "a fougère aqueous with touches of lemon lime, lavender and patchouli." So there we are.
So there we are
The campground is in the woods on the edge of a lake. It was too late in the year for new ferns, but the place was certainly aqueous: it poured the whole week. One evening there was a lightning storm (notes of ozone) that over and over cracked the night into two halves -- one ink-black, one blindingly white. I lay with my arms around him and we played stupid word games while he waited for the painkillers to kick in.
The smell of the deodorant coming apart like this for me, or beginning to, yielding up its fougère, and yes, I think its citrus and maybe its patchouli, even in their stark industrial forms -- this new perception doesn't make me feel closer to him. He didn't care anything about perfume. Probably didn't like it. He didn't even like the molasses flavour of raw sugar.
It does make me feel closer to something, to an understanding of something about parts and wholes -- the incomplete synthesis that is the moment of aesthetic joy, recognizing the smell of a perfume or of a lover. The way a smell or a memory has to both be one whole thing and also always falling apart. Something about the pleasure of analysis, of finding the parts of things, and then surrendering again to the whole, which still works on you because you are still gratefully, miraculously, a mortal animal whose senses can be captivated. Something about beauty and its movement into the body through the senses, the way he came to me through my senses, and is gone to them now, volatile, lost, ash, air.
______________________________
*No relation, so far as I know, to Tonka trucks, which are awesome but do not smell like vanilla.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coumarin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foug%C3%A8re
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipteryx_odorata
http://www.fragrantica.com/notes/Tonka-Bean-73.html
www.fragrantica.com/groups/aromatic+fougere.html
http://badgerandblade.com/vb/showthread.php/288085-Can-someone-please-clarify-what-a-quot-fougere-quot-fragrance-is
http://theperfumedcourt.com/fragrance_families.aspx
http://www.whitelotusaromatics.com/recipes/fougere/fougere_base
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/science/ocr_gateway_pre_2011/carbon_chem/3_smells2.shtml
http://www.yesterdaysperfume.com/
Deodorant
I have two deodorants, or one deodorant and one deodorant system. The system is my hippie mix: Tom's of Maine unscented plus Crystal Foot Deodorant (not a good foot deodorant, but not bad as an armpit adjunct).
On hot days, I supplement with tea tree oil, in which case bystanders occasionally ask the air where the smell of liniment is coming from. In these instances, I sometimes claim to have spilled a bottle of tea tree oil on myself. Now you know: really it is my attempt at natural odour management.
I also have hard-core killer deodorant, for days when smelling like chemical paste is better than smelling like sweaty human. I had class today, and I feel weird enough being forty. I thought: let's not be stinky-forty.
The killer deodorant isn't actually mine. It belonged to X.
Late this past summer, in the tent in the early morning rain, I watched him put his deodorant on, and I thought: I have to remember that brand, so that I can buy it, so that I can smell it, so that I can remember you when you are dead.
It seemed like the wrong thing to be thinking, imagining ahead to the time when he would be dead, but I knew that this was going to be soon, and I wanted to create a fixed point in time, something that could bring me back to the smell of his body and the memory of lying with him in the tent.
(Which, funny story, another time.)
I didn't see him again after that trip. He went home to Portland and died about six weeks later.
I remembered that the plastic shell of the deodorant was a dark teal, but I forgot the brand, and after he died I went up and down the grocery aisle looking for it. I opened the lids and sniffed all the sticks, but they all smelled like variants on chemical paste.
After the funeral we went back to his house, which was already not his house, because life does not hesitate even a moment on death's behalf, and new arrangements were in place. Most of his things were already redistributed, but all I wanted was the deodorant. There was a partly used stick still in the bathroom, and then his sister went and got two fresh sticks from the closet. This was more than I'd asked for, but she put them into my hands so I took them.
I wear it because it's convenient, but I can't actually say it always reminds me of him, though it did at first.
Fougère
You may have heard of the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab (http://blackphoenixalchemylab.com/) -- BPAL, to its devotees. BPAL manufactures these amazing scents with erudite, arcane names that reference literature, mythology, and comic books, with eerie stories or poems to illustrate them. They smell like magic.
I'm a little bit fixated on BPAL lately. I open the tiny bottles. I convey the oils to my skin. I warm them by rubbing my wrists together. I wave my arms around to help them dry. I inhale. I try to identify the individual notes and accords.
I have recently been given to understand (for example, at http://www.yesterdaysperfume.com/), and have enthusiastically adopted the idea, that a good perfume or cologne is a composition, as much as any other work of art.
Perfume has a bad reputation as a useless consumer product, a needless allergenic additive, and an air fouler, and under the wrong circumstances that is also how I feel about it. I believe in scent-free workplaces.
The construction of scent is also an art form that engages what we think of as one of the lesser senses, smell, and I am fascinated by this somatic side road.
Scent can be made to tell a story -- elusively, through reference, insinuation, recollection, ambiguity. A perfume is volatile -- it keeps changing out from under you. You can experience it, but you can't fix it. Perfume oil reacts with your skin. It smells different on every person, and even on the same person it changes from moment to moment.
Last night I was re-trying BPAL's Dorian, a tribute to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The site describes it as "a Victorian fougère with three pale musks and dark, sugared vanilla tea."
Maybe I thought to try it again because in class we've just been reading from the erotic novel Teleny, which is attributed to Oscar Wilde, and which contains a profoundly odd and moving sex scene between two men.
I remembered Dorian as too floral and light, a disappointment, but last night my skin chemistry was different (or something), and the scent unfolded for me.
I made notes, of course. Light and clean -- lilac? -- and something sweeter -- something almost malty -- something floral -- lavender? -- sweet -- what is that? Like carob, almost -- not cocoa but something peripheral to cocoa.
I let Dorian linger on my wrist last night, and this morning when I got out of the shower I could still faintly smell it. Then I popped open the lid on the killer deodorant and smelled -- not the same smell -- but something kindred to that weird carob-like note.
Fern-like
A fougère is a common and venerable basis for men's colognes, a combination (usually) of at least lavender, oak moss, and a compound called coumarin, which smells like new-mown hay or grass.
fougère means "fern-like," but this is an abstract category. The websites I looked at kept saying that ferns don't have a scent, though it seems to me that fiddleheads do have a smell, a distinct green scent less sweet and more bitter than a fougère.
The carob smell probably had to do with the vanilla tea, and also the coumarin. It often comes from tonka* beans, which apparently sort of smell like vanilla, saffron, almonds, cinnamon, and cloves. (Cinnamon also sometimes contains coumarin.)
So although I felt very clever for identifying the smell, it's almost obvious that my deodorant would be based on a fougère. It would be unlikely to be based on anything else.
The manufacturer's website makes this bold declaration: the killer deodorant is "a fougère aqueous with touches of lemon lime, lavender and patchouli." So there we are.
So there we are
The campground is in the woods on the edge of a lake. It was too late in the year for new ferns, but the place was certainly aqueous: it poured the whole week. One evening there was a lightning storm (notes of ozone) that over and over cracked the night into two halves -- one ink-black, one blindingly white. I lay with my arms around him and we played stupid word games while he waited for the painkillers to kick in.
The smell of the deodorant coming apart like this for me, or beginning to, yielding up its fougère, and yes, I think its citrus and maybe its patchouli, even in their stark industrial forms -- this new perception doesn't make me feel closer to him. He didn't care anything about perfume. Probably didn't like it. He didn't even like the molasses flavour of raw sugar.
It does make me feel closer to something, to an understanding of something about parts and wholes -- the incomplete synthesis that is the moment of aesthetic joy, recognizing the smell of a perfume or of a lover. The way a smell or a memory has to both be one whole thing and also always falling apart. Something about the pleasure of analysis, of finding the parts of things, and then surrendering again to the whole, which still works on you because you are still gratefully, miraculously, a mortal animal whose senses can be captivated. Something about beauty and its movement into the body through the senses, the way he came to me through my senses, and is gone to them now, volatile, lost, ash, air.
______________________________
*No relation, so far as I know, to Tonka trucks, which are awesome but do not smell like vanilla.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coumarin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foug%C3%A8re
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipteryx_odorata
http://www.fragrantica.com/notes/Tonka-Bean-73.html
www.fragrantica.com/groups/aromatic+fougere.html
http://badgerandblade.com/vb/showthread.php/288085-Can-someone-please-clarify-what-a-quot-fougere-quot-fragrance-is
http://theperfumedcourt.com/fragrance_families.aspx
http://www.whitelotusaromatics.com/recipes/fougere/fougere_base
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/science/ocr_gateway_pre_2011/carbon_chem/3_smells2.shtml
http://www.yesterdaysperfume.com/