New York Times

May Melange Marathon: Fragrances That Changed the Field
by

May Melange Marathon: Fragrances That Changed the Field

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming, because the following New York Times Style Magazine article popped up in my news feed, and I got totally distracted by it! It is called The Fragrances That Changed the Field, by Aatish Taseer. It starts with a childhood memory, from India, of a first encounter with oudh, and travels a winding path from there through the “Orientalism” of fragrances in the 1970s, to the power statement fragrances of the 1980s, circling back to previous centuries and the use of florals and musks in fragrances. It includes insight from several modern perfumers.

I highly recommend this article! You’ll want to set aside a good block of time to read it. The opening paragraph:

I REMEMBER AS IF it were yesterday that distant afternoon on which I first smelled oudh. I was in my grandmother’s house in Delhi. I was 13, maybe 14. We had a family perfumer, or attarwallah, a man of some refinement, who came to us from Lucknow — a city that is a metonym for high Indo-Islamic culture. We didn’t know the attarwallah’s name, or how he knew to follow us from address to change of address. But he came without fail two or three times a year. A slim, gliding figure, with a mouth reddened from paan, or betel leaf and areca nut, the attarwallah produced his wares from carved bottles of colored glass that he carried in a black leather doctor’s bag. He showed us scents according to which season we were in. So in winter, musk and patchouli; in summer, white-flowered varieties of jasmine — of which there are some 40 odd in India — as well as rose and vetiver. In the monsoon, he brought us mitti attar, which imitates the smell of parched earth exhaling after the first rain (“mitti” means “mud” in Hindi). The perfumes came from the medieval Indian town of Kannauj, which is a 75-mile drive west of Lucknow and which, like its French counterpart, Grasse, has a tradition of perfume manufacturing several centuries old. Once he had drawn his perfume out on white cotton buds at the tips of long, thin sticks, the attarwallah lingered over his customers, telling stories of the various scents and reciting the odd romantic couplet of Urdu poetry.

If that doesn’t intrigue you, as a person interested in fragrance, I don’t know what will! Enjoy. BTW, my scent of the day today was Cristalle, and I’ll write about it tomorrow instead.

Featured image from baystreetex.com.

COVID-19 and Smells
by

COVID-19 and Smells

The New York Times has published an essay by a writer who lost her sense of smell after having COVID-19 last spring; she hasn’t yet recovered it, although many people do (including my daughter, who lost her senses of smell and taste for a few weeks after having the virus this fall but has luckily recovered). The essay is a powerful reminder of how much smells and fragrance affect us: Covid Stole My Sense of Smell. For most of us perfumistas, we take for granted our sense of smell, so that fragrance has become our hobby, but it’s actually a very important part of human perception. I hope the writer is able to regain her sense of smell via the “scent training” recommended by her doctor.

Update: I also just found this article on WebMD about retraining one’s sense of smell: Smell Training Might Speed the Sense’s Return After COVID.

Stay safe, everyone! We have vaccines, but we still need to take all precautions like wearing masks and washing hands, until they are fully distributed and administered.