The Smell of Now "Why does the fulfillment of our promise as a people always seem to be just within grasp yet forever out of reach?" -- Bruce Springsteen, August 2004 Catalyst Smell Design is a jaunt I got onto inadvertently in 1999 when my girlfriend at the time gave me a bottle of Jojoba lotion for Valentine's Day. I wasn't much of a girl about hygiene cosmetics, what my girlfriend used to call "girlie stuff," and what my current boyfriend unilaterally refers to as Lotions. I would inwardly scoff at anything beyond my two 99-cent bottles of VO5. The gift included a variety of cosmetics, a nudge to embrace my Girlie Side. I'd spent the first 23 years of my life actively resisting anything that could be remotely construed as a Girlie Side. It was a belligerent resistance that I could never fully defend to anyone, even myself. The excuse list was long:
etc. None of these reasons crack the nut of it. There was a kind of fear I harbored about Girlie Stuff, an inherent mistrustfulness, though I could never really say why. I also can't quite explain why I finally let it crack. It was probably the security of having another female as a lover, or that she was the first lover I ever actually loved, or that it was Valentine's Day, or that she was so shy about the whole thing that she hid at the opposite end of my livingroom while I opened her present. In any case, I decided to set aside my lingering body issues/social politics and embrace sweet-smelling things in pretty packages. I used the Jojoba lotion daily, and found myself enjoying its subtle scent. Layering Not long afterward, I found a perfume sample bottle in an old junk box, and started to wear it. My father used to travel on business, and would bring presents back from the airport duty-free store: mostly perfume samples and Toblerone. For some reason this stray bottle had managed to cling tenaciously to the sides of shoe boxes and toiletry bags through every home I've lived in since I was 11 years old. The sampler box had long been lost, and with it, the name of the surviving perfume. To this day I don't know what it was. I met a perfume seller a year or so ago, who agreed to sniff at the empty sample bottle, and she said it might be Chloe. I went out and bought some Chloe, but it wasn't the same. Maybe it needed to age. In any case, it was not the Jojoba lotion or the anonymous perfume independently that tripped my trigger. Alone, they were about average. Once I started combining them, though, I couldn't stop sniffing myself. It was the Perfect Smell. As long as that perfume lasted me, I was privately fanatical about securing the exact same Jojoba lotion I'd received once the gift ran out. Once the perfume ran out, I never bought the Jojoba lotion again. That was a sad day. It's not that the Perfect Smell is at the core of my enjoyment of life -- it wasn't a ripping heartbreak kind of sad. It was a small and simple sad. There's a sense of love when you stumble upon a sudden moment of enjoyment, and I had really enjoyed smelling good. I can remember relishing it gleefully. When something like that slips away from you, you miss it, and you remember it, no matter how tiny or silly it is in the grand scheme of your life. It was a brief period of Perfect Smell, something I'd never thought to think about, but that I have since tried desperately to recreate from the vast acreage of the cosmetics industry. I launched headlong into the American Marketplace, determined to recreate The Perfect Smell. Design The array of products in the American Marketplace expands more quickly and elusively than the edges of the universe. As the options multiply, so does our desire to explore them. This wave is compounded by the tide of human nature: where there are options, there are possibilities, and with possibilities comes hope, and hope -- when aged -- is need. As need grows, the consumer market becomes flooded with ways to make money as well as ways to spend it. In direct backlash to a long era of specialization, consumers want access to all the tools of trade, and these tools themselves become products. For example: Martha Stewart. Let's face it. The woman blasted open the field of Interior Design, her line of products looming like a mansion of candy and garden flowers on the shelves of K-Mart stores. Who needs an Interior Designer when an array of looks have already been designed for you and are available for mix-and-match purchasing in any venue from K-Mart to Ikea to the world wide web? Graphic Design and Web Design are also beacons of the self-sufficient. Software develops almost daily for people who can't afford these professionals, but don't want their entrepreneurial dreams to be held back by a lack of professional services. We are all playing at being the designers of our own lives, and when a small amount of resources -- enough to get by -- is immediately and easily accessible, why bother to search for more? The good news is that equal opportunity flourishes when the layman has access to the tools of the professional. The bad news is, ineptitude flourishes when he doesn't have access to the training. As a result, most of these products strive to take away the need for training, or technique, or education -- all of which are a lot more expensive and time-consuming than towels and software. This recreation of The Perfect Smell is not perfumery. It's not the alchemical science of oils and alcohols and distilled flower waters and citrus zests. It's about flavors: green apple, vanilla musk, tropical breeze, spring fresh, spring rain, white linen, cinnamon, lily, lavender, rose petal, sandalwood, berry, shea butter, peppermint, cucumber, peppermint-cucumber, fragrance-free. It's about aromatherapy: serenity, tranquillite, balance, celebration, relaxing, sanctuary, smoke-eater, creativity, energizing mint. It's about -- check this out -- Magical Aroma Pendants. Some of them come shaped like Chakras. This is the art of composing pre-made elements in relation to each other -- from body mist, bath wash, shampoo, and shaving gel, to laundry detergent, fabric softener, and "scent neutralizing" spray bottles of dry cleaning alternative. This is postmodernism in all its glory. This is Smell Design, and I am a Smell Designer. Obsession At some point in the last five years, a line was crossed. I had a revelation of this recently, while grazing through the shampoo, body wash, and lotion aisles of my local corporate pharmacy. I stopped dead on my knees on the industrial carpet of the pharmacy floor -- Maximum Hydration Oil of Olay Moisturizing Body Wash in one hand and Extra Moisture Dove Liquid Body Soap in the other. I saw myself: shopping the shampoo aisle, squeezing scented air into my nose from bottles I've surreptitiously opened; standing in the soap aisle, paralyzed by the fact that the only bottle not on sale is the one who's smell is most compatible with the shampoo I just picked out; standing in the lotion aisle, scanning labels and trying to remember the name of the lotion in my sister's bathroom that smells uncannily like Anais Anais . I saw myself: grazing through the aisles of CVS, Rite-Aid, Eckerd, Genovese -- all the Smell Design equivalents of K-Mart, Home Depot, or Linens 'N' Things; of H&M, The Gap, Old Navy; of Staples and Office Depot. I saw myself: glancing longingly and with shallow pockets through products by Kiehl's, Burt's Bees, and Aveda, like browsing through Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn, Urban Outfitters, Banana Republic, Sharper Image. Even in the wake of my Perfect Smell, I never considered myself to be the kind of girl who buys a lot of cosmetics. I'm a low-maintenance girl, I've told people. That denial broke one day when my boyfriend and I shared a shower at my place. Between my roommate and I, there were typically 10-12 bottles of stuff in there on any given day. I went about my usual lathering routine, then looked up and saw him standing still under the water. With a look of embarrassed confusion, he said, "I don't know which are the right Lotions." Shame From that moment forward, it became hard to consider my obsession with Smell Design without considering the shame. It is a left-wing sociopolitical shame, the modern liberal's version of white-man's guilt. It is the shame that comes from knowing that your level of privilege creates unbalance in many parts of the world, but wanting to enjoy the privilege of not living in those parts of the world. It's a shame grown by being told that the kind of privilege you enjoy should be available to everyone, and therefore shouldn't be indulged in by you. It is a shame born of confusion. It is a shame born of America. It is the voice of the socialist ideal inside me, saying: Economic privilege is a freedom. As with every freedom, it comes packaged with responsibility. The American Dream of Equal Opportunity means privilege should be equalized as much as possible. It is the responsibility of privilege to create a stronger foundation of security for human civilization. That's why there are such things as career philanthropy and Non-Profit Charitable Organizations. Anyone who spends their privilege on shopping for compatible-smelling hygiene products instead of contributing to the end of world famine, i.e. me, should be dragged out into the street and shot. I considered the magic of my small smell perfection with a newfound revulsion, like having picked a delicious JuJu Fruit off a house covered with candy, then looked up in mid-chew to see the witch inside, fashioning her latest batch of edible shingling from the fingernails of little children. The stench of shame has a way of permeating everything, like when you catch a funny smell off the air and can't help sniffing at it from that point forward -- can't help seeking out its source. Once the idea of shame crept in, layering shea butter body wash with Anais Anais -esque moisturizer wasn't creating a smell, but covering one up. The Smell of Now All this time, in trying to recreate the Perfect Smell, it's been like longing for a lover who's long been dead. I've walked through the motions of buying hygiene cosmetics, each product another victim inaugurated into a long line of rebound relationships with shampoo, conditioner, lotion, bodywash, handsoap, and fabric fresheners. Smell is a funny thing. When searching for perfumes, like searching for love, I would smell one on another person and think, hey, this might be the one. Then I'd try it on, or even buy it blind, only to discover that on me, it smells different, and is not what I want. One of the most fundamental variables of any design is the canvas. In designs of the self, like Smell Design, the canvas is the person. Some people are vanilla/oatmeal/honey/peach people. Some people are lavender/white lily/aloe vera people. Some people are peppermint/green tea/fabric softener. It just depends. It's possible that the real difficulty in recreating a Perfect Smell is matching a canvas that's constantly changing. I am no longer the female fat kid hiding through the halls of junior high. I've openly loved women, and am now nestled in love with a man. I've grown up, and my brothers support whatever profession I choose. I've figured out how to love myself, and mass media has nothing to do with it. I've learned that aging well is not about what you look like. I've made commitments to things more lasting than perfume. I've learned that you don't have to spend a lot of money to feel competent and fulfilled. My moments of perfumed Jojoba glory panned out because of limited supply, but I'm fooling myself to think that's why I can't recreate it. It's just not The Smell of Now anymore. It was The Smell of Then. This boyfriend I have, the one from the shower, the one who says Lotions -- there are reasons I'm with him that go beyond gaining perspective on my obsession with hygiene cosmetics. They have to do with gaining perspective on my obsession with helplessness, with one night in Brooklyn lying next to him in bed, several months after the Towers came down, when I felt myself watching the hope and optimism born out of the tragedy like a pair of phoenix lay twitching on the country like dying fish, pinned down by the weight of hate and fear, and I couldn't do something to change it, and I cried. He stroked my hair, and told me that sometimes there are things you can't change, but what we can do is play our saxophones and direct our plays and teach our classes and fix our subways and publish our magazines -- to pick tasks we love and believe in, and to do those things the best that we can. And, he pointed out, we do that. He's right, and his response gets to the heart of the paradox of pride and shame in American privilege: Human beings have a great desire for progress, for understanding, for change. We are insatiable, and we will always reach for what still lies just beyond the tips of our fingers -- whether it's something new or something that's long been gone. But this reality, coupled with the belief that we could be satisfied if we tried hard enough, breeds a deep sense of helplessness. The need to transcend that helplessness is met with products that promise to teach us how. We embrace and fear these products simultaneously. Something promises to be our teacher, and we believe what it says, we can already feel our fingers wrapping soundly around our goals. Then the catch transforms, inches forward, and helplessness seeps in. We begin to mistrust what we've invested in. Our need becomes greater, our mistrust deeper. The compromise we make is to find the control we do have, the design we can do, the tools we can own, and this is enough to keep us from fully considering how it all comes into our hands. To think that far deep is too scary. It breaks the illusion of freedom. So when the struggle for food is taken away, when the struggle for shelter and drinkable water, and in my case, true love, get taken away, what do we work toward? We work toward matching towels. We work toward blenders and dining sets. We work toward a different hair color, and we work toward younger skin. We work toward cures for cancer, AIDS, and Alzheimer's. We work toward equal rights. We work toward understanding Space, and we work toward understanding subatomic particles. We work toward understanding politics. We work toward understanding hate. We work toward understanding shame. We work toward the Perfect Smell. Whether petty or profound, the impulse to progress toward perfection is the same. The glitch is that what makes something Perfect will always change, so what we really work toward is The Smell of Now. It seems unlikely to parallel Smell Design with American politics, but the parallel is there: an ongoing battle between Republicans and Democrats over which party is The Smell of Now, neither party realizing that fundamentally, it's neither of them. The political Smell of Now is the battle itself, the need to be right, the need to win, the need to be The Smell of Now. It is not simply playing. It is not simply consuming. It is not simply indulging. It's not even just as simple as choosing. It's designing . It's the American Way. Democrat or Republican, PC or Mac, Dove or Oil of Olay -- anything can fight to be The Smell of Now, because anything could just as quickly become The Smell of Then. I love to spend hours in the pharmacy smelling gels and lotions and liquid soaps, and carve out a chunk of my monthly budget to indulge there. If I run out of shampoo, I can't send the boyfriend to the store for more -- I need to go and sniff all the bottles myself. I have a backlog of a GAP body mist I discovered, and some days still wear it as an accessory, the way some people wear earrings or belts. But it is not for the design of myself. It is for the love of design. It is The Smell of Ideas, of Possibilities, of Small Joys. In the end, they smell a hell of a lot better than shame. |