A Hint of Basic

Clare Coffey on her once-and-future signature scent

Photo illustrations by Mark Wynne

I had never bought perfume, never been interested in perfume, never wanted to know anything about perfume. Nevertheless, as I saw my best friend’s bathroom vanity slowly fill with perfume samples; as she trained her nose to distinguish tonka from coumarin; as she learned what a chypre and what a gourmand was and developed opinions about niche and independent perfume houses; and above all when she sent me a package containing, conservatively, one million half spent and discarded perfume samples, I knew: I was going to get into perfume.

I was not necessarily averse to this inevitability. I saw myself – a version of myself – bathed in a faint golden aura. I was ever so slightly different. I got regular pedicures and slept in silk pajama separates. I was groomed. I had a regular order of operations I carried out before leaving the house – casually, thoughtlessly, out of habit, simply because that’s the kind of person I was and it never occurred to me to live any other way. This sequence involved makeup and a set of everyday pearl studs and culminated in a spray of my signature scent at the hollow of my ivory throat.

My signature scent! I could see it, custom-made, discreetly present, lingering delicately in the room after I left, suffusing people’s memories of me with a warm, subtle intoxication. My signature scent would be so closely associated with me and I with it that the two of us would be indistinguishable. It would not merely make me smell better, but manifest some inner essence in a shimmering concentration. It would, doubtless, be very expensive.

You will note that for the duration of this extravagant little fantasy I have said nothing about perfume itself: nothing about woody notes, attars, benzoin, vetivers. All of the focus has been on me, and the role perfume will play in a certain vision of myself and my life. This is not (or not only) an indication of narcissism. It speaks to a fundamental aesthetic divide between what I like to call the connoisseurs and the basics.

For the genuine connoisseurs, each discrete object is the point of the exercise. They lose their selves in what they love; they want to get deeper into it, and find it inexhaustible. They are always ready to be bowled over by some new wonderful thing, and there is always another hanger in the closet, another space on the shelves. These are the people who amass collections: art, books, jewelry, clothes, or, by way of example, one million perfume samples. Almost everyone who gets seriously into perfume is a connoisseur

I am not a connoisseur. I am a basic.

For basics, the dominant mode of engagement with the aesthetic realm is not devotion and possession, but mastery: the identification of excellence and its successful incorporation into her own persona. The connoisseur wants to have and wear marvelous clothes. The basic wants to look her best. She wants to look her best, specifically. The basic is concerned with two questions: what is best, and what is fitting. And what is best can only be determined with some reference to what is fitting. This is what a basic wants: the signature scent; high-quality clothes that flatter, manufactured in ways that meet her approval, that suit the demands of her specific life; a pair of gold hoops that go with everything.

Basics are not actually lower maintenance than connoisseurs. The rigors and difficulties of a given standard, the constraints on creativity, are half the fun. But deciding on the standard, and then meeting it, is more important – is more fun and pleasurable – than being ever open to the romance of some new particular object on undefined and finally ineffable grounds.

For connoisseurs, taste is an exercise in recognition; for basics, in judicious selection.

I am a basic to such a degree that I will wear what I have and like well past the point of stained and moth-eaten disgrace rather than settle for something new and affordable that is not exactly what I want, or that does not perfectly fit and fill a well-evidenced gap of real need. I rarely buy books; the process confuses me. There is no natural limit on the enjoyment of books, no overriding reason to buy one, but not another. If not one, why not all? I feel nauseous in bookstores. The library is much safer.

So you can see why, upon realizing that I would be following my friend down the perfumed rabbit hole, I needed a schema to order my quest.

I knew, for secret and foggy reasons probably best explained by Mandy Aftel’s contention that perfumery is the heir to alchemy, that I wanted only natural perfumes. That is, I wanted perfumes whose scent molecules derived from tangible materials found in the world, rather than being synthesized in a lab. Excellent – in one stroke, I had narrowed my focus and eliminated the vast majority of perfumes made today. I had also made the whole affair significantly more expensive. This was a promising start.

Unfortunately, perfume immediately began to resist my schemas. I was warned, for instance, against buying perfumes because I liked the notes listed. Tuberose, as a material, is not the same as silk or rabbit fur. However much you know about its properties, what you will think of the role it plays in a given composition cannot be pre-determined without smelling the specific perfume as a whole. Cultural associations and symbolism certainly contribute to our perception of scents, but trusting yourself to them is an uncertain gamble. Many a sniffer’s conception of herself as a tobacco-and-leather kind of person has foundered on the rocks of an irresistible vanilla reverie. The complexity and sensual immediacy of perfumery means that the nose always tells its own story. I found I liked rose and orange blossom, ambergris and animalics. But however much I wanted to specify and control the parameters of my signature scent, it would unavoidably be an exercise in surrender to the vision of the perfumer who translated these parts into a luminous whole.

Then again, perfume is troubled by the mysterious inaccessibility of the other. I can approve of the way I look, and know, more or less, how I look to other people. But I can have much less confidence in how I smell to other people, because the molecules in a perfume are interacting in a particular way with my body chemistry, and again with that of whoever is smelling me. There are many approaches to perfume, and for many of them this fact does not pose a problem. But it did for me. I wanted my signature scent to conjure up some wordless essence of me – some Eau de la Clare – not only to my nose, but to the nose of the other person. Or at least to the other person who mattered most. I wanted a lover’s help in choosing a perfume, which meant that my final once-and-future signature scent must remain undiscovered territory absent a once-and-future husband. My entry into the dark, sensual, and suspiciously French world of perfume had only landed me with something else I had to save for marriage.

And even that, I realized, as I sniffed samples, wouldn’t be the end of it. I would change. My body chemistry would change with time, with meant the way things smelled to me and on me would change. Scents would change from season to season, blooming in the winter and cloying in the summer. There would never be an end to all this sniffing.

I gave up.

That is to say, I tabled the idea of my one-and-only, once-and-future, custom-made signature scent, and decided to buy a bottle of Divine, an old-fashioned, vampy, leopard-skin scent from Providence Perfume. I had received a sample in my giant sample package and instantly fallen in love. It will sit on my dresser, much loved and over-sprayed; a small, grudging, one point seven ounce concession to the delight that makes no promises and the beauty that admits no mastery.