I like a big stink!
Stop to smell roses on the path of life? No Thanks. Give me the gutter!

I.

It's always struck me as odd that perfumes and fragrances have tried to smell good. Think of the huge, whole range of smells that the world and the universe have. Think of it as a pie chart-all the smells that can possibly be conceived of being smelled, making up one single whole pie-graph. Think of the good scents being at the top of the pie, and the vile smells at the bottom. Then think of the small, small piece of that pie that represent the scents manufactured for men and women.

We might think there is a huge range of scents to choose from when we go to fragrance counters, when we're researching scents, or asking people what's good, but in the grand scale of things the scents we're after are a dieter's paper thin slice of the pie. They are the icing on the bitter cake of the true scents of the world: mere sugar coating on the gutter and all the nastiness that is the normal bodily function of living. How fake, how pretentious, and what a denial of the environment--the universe even--to cover up or keep away all the range of the world's smells by thinking you can elevate yourself and your station merely by spraying on some flower power.

II.

Fortunately, to save us from this regrettable good-smelling vanity, there is Yatagan, by Caron. "E-yooo! That smells like old spilled beer!" said one of my favorite fragrance sellers when I asked her to pull Yatagan out of the cabinet and give me a spray of it. She meant it too. "You could never wear that. Would you?"

Yatagan was created in 1976, and is classified as a woody chypre by the fragrance Web site Osmoz.com. Renowned fragrance expert and advisor Michael Edwards calls it "rich-dry-woods." One Yatagan fan told me he wore it to the office, walked past co-workers, and had good-old, loyal Yatagan called eau de "dead tree."

Yatagan's nastiness is reflected in some of the ingredient names: "top note: artemisia, wormwood, lavender, petit grain; middle note: vetiver, patchouli, pine needle, geranium; base note: leather, labdanum, castoreum, styrax." You can't smell it from reading that, but with funky ingredients that end in -anum, -oreum, and -yrax, under pine needles, with wormwood on top, Yatagan goes for cheap from online fragrance sellers.

Yatagan is hard to describe; when I think of it all I get is mixed metaphors. Some of Yatagan smells like a dirty old man. Some of it is a sour sweat smell, like the sweat brought out of the back of your hands by the first hot sunlight of the year. Or even the smell of your hands after getting them out of rain-sopped leather gloves, dye staining your skin. There is something fresh, earthy, and warm to Yatagan. Sometimes I get a note of oven-burnt fish. Sometimes it is similar to the nasty stink that comes up when you sniff deeply from the neck of your pennies jar-a blend of solidified finger sweat mixed with pocket liner jam, all caked around a copper nugget. That's Yatagan-essence of pocket liner from an old pair of wool work pants.

Who would wear this stuff? An "acquired taste," is what posts at Basenotes.com say. I didn't think I'd ever want to smell it a second time, so after I sprayed on a test shot I looked at it as fifty-five dollars-retail saved, but that changed. After I walked out of the store, to my surprise, all that afternoon my nose could not get enough of Yatagan.

In consequence, this is a story of how a nasty scent like Yatagan came to command my attention. Further, it's a story of how, in general, and if you're lucky, a single scent can come along and give your ass a super-good kicking.

All afternoon the Yatagan spots on my forearms didn't just sit there and smell docile, they kicked back-and nasty-but for some reason that only made me want to smell it more. What in the world was so compelling, so magical in this scent that it captivated so? What could anyone see in this? Why was it so curious and absorbing? How did a perfumer ever think to put this stink together in the first place? When the perfumer, after months, likely years, of Yatagan-work turned to the lab and all the lab assistants in it, declaring, "Eureka! This is IT! Finished!" did a fist fight break out? Did the perfumer's underling see this as a career opportunity-a chance to unseat a now discredited boss? When the company had its celebration party for the launch of Yatagan, searchlights, the beautiful people, a glass in everyone's hand and all that, did anyone come?

Someone had a vision to make this, made it, and someone else thought money could be made with it, which is funny, because it is easy to see Yatagan as a gutter scent all the way. Such an olfactory funk in a bottle that, word has it, it was hard to find in the late eighties, even in Paris. Now Caron makes it again and it is available online and in many fragrance-aficionado stores. I wonder why it's back, same as I wonder why someone made it in the first place. But it is here, it is strange, and it is art.

It is easy enough to be turned off by the scent of the real gutter. We sniff the trash, and we hate it. When other people sniff our kitchen trash we're embarrassed and know to take it out. But my point with Yatagan is something else: I thought it was the gutter, I thought it was the basement of a frat house to be more precise, but instead it wasn't the gutter at all-because I kept wanting to smell it and think about it. In fact, the awfulness of it is exactly what made me relish it-because it's a different kind of gutter-one created through the mysteries of world and artistic creation--it was fascinating and I wanted it in my nose. In the end it is something else from the gutter, even though it shares repulsive qualities with the trash. Yatagan is a special category, it's a "nasty."

What's striking is that this is the same reaction that comes from smelling a "flabbergastingly" beautiful scent. I've got plenty of flat-out amazing fragrances in my collection. L'Artisan Parfumeur's Voleur de Roses is one of them. Chanel's Antaeus is another. Diptyque's Philosykos is a third, Diptyque's L'Ombre dans l'Eau a fourth. These are all such perfect scents, such ideal things to smell, that they are truly at the top of the pie chart, opposite of the nasties. These are the roses on the path of life, so beautiful it is easy to call them "rosies." The truth is that the beauty of a rosey is what all scent wearers want-we want something great! And we want our loved ones to have the same reactions we do. We hope our scent is so amazing that they want to leave their noses right next to our necks. This nose-absorption is the ultimate in fragrance experience.

Interesting that it can come from the nasty Yatagan, same as from the best of the rosies.

I can't seem to get over this point. It isn't that all gutter scents are as curious and interesting. There are many scents that are raunchy, plenty that I smell, hate, and want gone from my world. Once out of my nose those are out of my mind. I first thought Yatagan was of this category, but no--its imperfection, the flaw, its nastiness, the question why-make-this?, made me buy it and want to wear it around an awful, awful, lot. The scent quality of Yatagan is like the mole on Cindy Crawford's cheek-an imperfection from which you can't turn your eyes, and that makes the whole of her face all the more electric. When the Hummer, the American Army-truck-Jeep-thing, first came out, I thought it was the ugliest auto on the road because of its perfectly flat and vertical windshield. That design broke the slanted, rounded, aerodynamic rule of windshield shapes that I'm used to. A friend of mine pointed out that it's exactly this crude, blunt, and air-plow quality of the Hummer windshield that makes the truck super-cool to his eye. You can't stop looking at the thing that breaks the rule of what is supposed to be beautiful, or supposed to be functional. Yatagan's appeal to the nose is the same.

This is art versus top-of-the-pops. This is a big beautiful stink versus all the pretty roses that will smell so sweet no matter what name I use to slander them. Do I want pretty scents at the men's fragrance counter and roses growing in the garden? No thanks. Give me a teeming anthill any day. Besides, my experience is that finger-crushed ants smell remarkably like sweetened almonds anyway.

III.

Another example of when the gutter became a mansion, or when the stone that the builder refused became the head corner stone, was with L'Artisan Parfumeur's "Dzing!"

The company's Web site describes it: "Inspired by the world of the circus, a scent of ferocious softness!" with qualities of animal fur, woods, and somehow, things "gourmand." The New York City fragrance shop Aedes de Venustas's Web site describes it as "Soft and fierce with tonka beans, balsam, saffron and ginger."

Sounds nice if you believe the people who want to sell it to you, but Dzing! is the really foul stuff that originally gave me the idea for this column. Luckily I found Yatagan too, proving that there are more smelly-shoes lovin' perfumers out there, kickin' some serious candy-landers' asses.

Dzing!, brought to market in 1997, smells like when you go to the zoo and walk into the big animal house. Maybe it's called the "Rhino Pavilion" in your town, I don't know, but you already know the big thick stink when you walk into that place. A smell like all the nastiness of the living, bark and straw chomping, pea-brained, hairy and wrinkled beasts and their drool all blended together into a thick, fragrant syrup.

"This does smell like an elephant!" declared a friend of mine who I had test Dzing!. But Dzing! is also a remarkable scent of nose-demanding curious beauty. It is a leather-family scent, but it goes beyond leather, beyond the beautiful, friendly, tooled, oiled, and soft, un-cracked leathers present in scents like Hermès's Bel Ami, Creed's Royal English Leather, or Jacomo's Jacomo de Jacomo. Dzing! is so beyond leather it is into the realm of hide. Following that, there is a dry background of sawdust. Then a last dry down with a lot of sweet sandalwood not unlike the dry downs of Dior's Fahrenheit and Hermès's Equipage. "If I were going to a hard, hard, board meeting I would wear this," my friend added. "It says you're so confident that you can wear smelly shit."

So the gutter-appeal of Dzing! holds some of its fun, but just like Yatagan, my first sniffs of Dzing! made me recoil. Again, however, walking out of the shop it held my mind in its cloud and I wanted to smell it again. It somehow left its own impression in my brain, I thought I had a hold on it, but I kept feeling that I could be more certain about it if I could smell it again. It was like a ghost, not sensible but present. I bought Dzing! with the next paycheck.

That was sometime over a year ago. Since then I read a similar experience with Dzing!.

Luca Turin, subject of the recent non-fiction book The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses, by Chandler Burr, wrote of Dzing!: "Dzing! is a scent of superlative oddness. For the first twenty minutes, it simply smells of cardboard." This then prompts Turin to exclaim how good cardboard actually smells. "[C]ardboard is actually a rich, warm, woody smell with a spicy angle." Sure, buddy. I've been throwing it out for years now. Silly me. (Next time you think your bathroom needs an air-freshener, just drop an old cardboard box into your used bath water. Yum.) Comparisons to cardboard aside, Turin's Dzing! verdict is definitive: "Dzing! Weird. A must have."

IV.

"Weird. A must have"--that is exactly the appeal of the scent gutter. My Dzing! testing friend called it "scent rubbernecking." This is an adventure, a weird piece of the whole scent hunt. We all know there are plenty of lousy scents out there, but they are lousy because they don't engage your nose. Dumb to wear one of those--you've got to wear the ugly ones that are somehow demanding and compelling instead! They've got to remind you of the joy of playing in the mud!

Why are the nasal nasties also a pleasure to wear? My pet theory is that unlike the rosies, they offer the pleasure of having the bad with the good. The Talking Heads sang, "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens," and that's what's going on here. Those perfect scents are smells where nothing is going on. Give me something going on, give me a big stink, give me something that needs to be fixed, don't give me the feel-goodies. Give me the earth and the universe in all nastiness over heaven any day.

The gutter. A nasty. Elephant hide. Stale beer. Rhino pavilion. An anthill. These are actually just terms I'm using to get a common experience across-that the scent hunt involves some extreme nose stretching. Yatagan and Dzing! are two extraordinary and wonderful scents in their own right, and many people who smell them will think them heaven right away, but I didn't. Their repulsiveness made them complicated pieces of art for me, and a lesson that in fragrances as in other things, love and hate are not opposites but apathy is the opposite of both. Initial repulsion that turns to love has happened to me before: for example, with everything from Guerlain; with the freshly stinky challenge of the discontinued Version Originale by Jean Marc Sinan; with Carolina Herrera's Herrera for Men; and even initially with the grand Fahrenheit by Christian Dior and Creed's Bois du Portugal.

None of those are as beautifully flawed and artistically challenging as Yatagan and Dzing!-all are closer to the sheer perfection of a fragrance manufactured to be the paragon of beauty. The problem with the paragon scents at the very top of the pie graph of all the scents created for our noses, the paragons being those that succeed the most at making a scent heaven, is that I can only wear them for a short time. They're so beautiful they figuratively burn a hole inside my nose. After a day of them I need to put them away for weeks, even months. It is beautiful and transcendent to smell heaven for a day on the earth, but it isn't real, and it isn't finally satisfactory. After a little beauty, that beauty becomes repulsive. With the gutter scent the opposite happens. It is scent-hunt in its most counter-intuitive, most creative, most expanding, and most rewarding.

Chris Peterson , June 2003

Chris Peterson is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C.

Special thanks to:
My friend Robin "early bird," for walking around olfactorally disguised as an elephant for a day, but mostly for his careful and thoughtful editing corrections and advice.

Caroline S., who thought through how to punctuate the name "Dzing!" in copy with me. Deviations from her advice are my fault.

Quotations of Dr. Luca Turin come from Chandler Burr's book, The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses, published by Random House, New York, and is copyright 2002.

 

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