Man Smells Woman

A woman I’d never spoken to before invited me to smell the Champagne on her slip. Another offered the Cristalle on her neck, while confiding that she’s also been known to anoint the back of her knees. In a dank midtown tavern reeking of Guinness, a stranger yanked her turtleneck so that I could take a deep breath of her White Linen.

For two weeks, I put my nose to the grindstone and went about the soul-destroying business of smelling women. I hovered over inner wrists and collarbones, necklines and hemlines, napes and lobes. I smelled a woman from Bombay. I smelled a woman from France. I smelled Naomi Campbell in her maroon mesh underpants. It’s amazing I didn’t end up like Jake in Chinatown, with my proboscis in a sling.

When I was assigned the piece, I was deeply ignorant and happily oblivious of women’s fragrance. If anything, I found perfume a little off-putting and depressing, like romantic dinners and cleavage. Ten minutes into it, I was well on my way to a nasty little fetish. Why had I squandered so many year ardently staring at women, trying to burn their images into my retina, when without violating any federal laws I could have just inhaled?

What makes fragrance so tantalizing is that it’s both devastatingly intimate and maddeningly ephemeral. You can’t get much closer to someone than breathing her simmering sweet piquant evaporating self. But eventually you have to exhale, and when you do, all you’re left with is this haunting little trace of God knows what. It’s like trying to subsist on fumes.

Among the women I spoke to, there was almost no overlap in their fragrances. Laura, a location coordinator for a new TV series, wears Red during the day and Opium at night, Like a bad drunk, Alex often starts her day with Tribu, finds herself dipping into Tresor before noon, and come nightfall breaks out the Angel. Naomi’s current favorite is the Barneys scent, Route du The, which she heard about from her good friend Kate.

Alex upends the bottle against the tip of her pointer finger, then rubs her wrists and jawline with rapid little strokes. MaryAnn spills a drop directly on the inside of one wrist, rubs it against the other, then paws her neck with both. Naomi is more generous in her applications. “I’m not one of these girls who just puts a drop behind her ears,” she says in her lilting London Cockney. “I put it everywhere. I also love to put oils in my hair. I just like to smell good.”

If my modest hillock of data that has yielded a single conclusion, it’s that to use perfume to its maximum effect, a woman has to be comfortable turning herself into the object of all hope and desire. Most aren’t. “It’s a very strong emotional decision,” says Alex, a talented illustrator wearing a long jean dress, green army boots, and very short hair dyed whiteout white. “Some women think it’s too extraneous, girly, and unprofessional. Or maybe they think it’s too artificial and nastifying.”

But to women willing and able to live large, it seems perverse not to want to be as alluring as possible. “A woman can receive no more flattering compliment than to be told that she smells good,” says Diane Von Furstenberg, “and of course smelling bad is a nightmare.” Says Naomi, “All my friends know my scent. They can smell me before I open the door.”

I’m sorry to say, however, that for all my sniffing around, I didn’t smell all that much. It seems that at the same time that I was being invited to go ahead and take my sample, I was being prepared for the likelihood of not detecting a thing. “You’ll probably just smell my moisturizer,” Naomi had told me as I went into my nosedive, and I’m not even sure I smelled that. Maybe I was done in by the proximity of the women themselves. Maybe my instrument is flawed, but more probably I was thwarted by the fact that women’s fragrance is getting fainter and more intimate and more ephemeral than it has ever been.

According to people in the industry, the current trend toward smaller, less diffusive fragrances is, like everything else, just more fallout from the overpowering bouquets of the ‘80s, particularly Giorgio and Poison. In terms of strength, carry, and trail, Giorgio, a floriental released in 1982 and designed on a then-unique vertical formula, may be the most powerful perfume ever loosed upon the world. According to Nancy Williams, a nose at Lancome, who ran some informal tests in the company’s New Jersey laboratory several years ago, it can tweak the mucous membrane at 30 feet.

It’s also highly provocative. “When it first came out, I watched them spray it at Saks,” says Annette Green, president of the Fragrance Foundation. “The reaction was incredible. People were turning their heads like it was catnip.”

Unfortunately, Giorgio and Poison, and the other megaton fragrances that arrived soon after, were so invasive that they ticked off as many people as they turned on. People who encountered them in restaurants and movie theaters and elevators started to complain. San Francisco contemplated a city ordinance barring fragrances from public assemblies.

History was also rising up against them. “In the ‘80s, everything went. There were no restrictions. There was a lot of sex and a lot of buying,” says Green. “Now people just want to cool it. Women, trying to play a role in the business world, and not wanting to be misunderstood, and dialing down their sexuality.”

For most women, fragrance is becoming more personal and less overtly sexual. Rather than a mating siren, it’s something you share only with the people you’ve already decided to let near. Perfumers and designers have responded with a slew of lighter, fresher scents.

Must de Cartier II and Donna Karan Bath & Body Mist are diluted versions of earlier scents. Even Poison now comes in a lighter interpretation, called Tendre Poison. Other new scents like Carolina Herrera Flore, Jaipur by Boucheron, and Sun Moon Stars by Karl Lagerfeld are all far airier than any perfumes associated with those franchises. In a run through the gantlet of scentmongers at Saks, I tried most of these, and while they all smelled just fine, my unrequited nose preferred the darker, muskier scents like Casmir.

“We’re still selling sex,” assures Sarah Friend, “but now it’s comfortable sex.” Friend, director of fine-fragrance evaluation for International Flavors and Fragrances, which makes many of the world’s most famous fragrances, say new marketing plans are no longer asking for intriguing erotic notes but safe, soft, and subtle ones.“ Words that keep coming up are cozy and yummy,” she says.

The culmination of all this may be CK One, a new Calvin Klein fragrance so slight and sexually ambiguous, it is hoped that both men and women will drench themselves in it and still offend no one. What makes CK One intriguing is the unmistakable whiff of cross-dressing. According to Ann Gottlieb, a savvy New Yorker who has consulted on all six previous – and hugely successful – Calvin Klein fragrances, CK One was created for a generation of men and women who grew up sharing dorms and bathrooms, are so comfortable with each other that there is no longer any charged mystique of difference between them.

Twenty-one years ago the breakthrough Revlon scent Charlie said it was okay for an attractive woman to wear the pants now and then. CK One implies it’s just as appropriate for a guy to occasionally peck into his girlfriend’s closet and pull out a flimsy burnoose. A month ago I would have found this highly unseemly. Now I’m just looking for a simple white slip, spiked with the faintest smell of Champagne.