Fragrance geekery...
...featuring a load of brilliant smells that won't bust your budget, the truth about "pheromone" scent, Molecule 01, plus what the word "Fragrance" is really concealing on beauty products...
The heatwave has disappeared and so, for the moment, has my banging on about UV. (Although, UV chat isn’t just for when the sun is shining and it’s a subject I love, so please do bombard me at any point with your thoughts and questions on the topic — and, of course, any others…)
My thanks to those who have waited patiently for the long-promised affordable perfume recommendations from Pia Long — your patience is rewarded below — and not just with a handful of names, she’s also taken the time to share some really thoughtful insights into perfume, pricing and value.
There’s also a stack more brilliant affordable fragrances from Thomas “Making Scents Make Sense” Dunckley’s incredible Instagram series, Smell Good For Less
And, as I’ve decided to focus on fragrance this week, I’ve also unearthed some of my favourite fragrance factoids that early Patreon readers might recognise. They are, as you might expect, about the geekier side of perfume: whether your body responds to smells if you can’t actually smell it; the truth about that much talked about fragrance, Molecule 01; and the real reason that so many beauty products just have so many of their scent components lumped together under one catch-all term “fragrance” — and spoiler, it’s not because they’re trying to sneak something in that they don’t want to tell you about.
Let’s get into it…
BTW: some of the links in this newsletter are affiliate links which means if you buy a product through them, I can earn a small amount of commission. This will never influence my opinion on something: I only rave about products I really rate. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone (and, for more on my thoughts on affiliate links, click here.)
Fragrance that doesn’t cost a fortune
A few newsletters ago, I talked about dupes and specifically dupes when it comes to fragrance. In that newsletter, I quoted Pia Long, a perfumer and author of Demo Accords, a book on fragrance (and so much more), who has a chapter dedicated to dupes in the book, an abridged extract of which was published in the debut issue of On The Scent magazine, a new fragrance-focused quarterly publication.
While she believes that fragrance should be accessible to all, that doesn’t mean buying dupes. Instead she points out that,
“Many of the legendary pillar perfumes from the last 10, 20 and 30 years are now available for less than it costs for two people to go to the cinema. Look for brands with design and originality, but enough mass market presence and history that they can now offer excellent value for money.”
She gives a host of examples that include some that I used to love and had completely forgotten about, including Elizabeth Arden Green Tea (currently a ridiculous £16.65 at Superdrug) — my grandma used to give this one to me and I loved its fresh zestiness — and CK One — which takes me straight back to the mid-90s when my prized possessions were my Calvin Klein underwear (the crop top of which I wore out clubbing with nothing but black hot pants and knee-length boots — and my CK One, like some low-rent Marilyn Monroe with more clothes but less class)*
* this gag only makes sense if you’re aware of Marilyn saying she wore nothing but Chanel No 5 to bed, which I’m guessing you are but I felt it needed some explanation in case you’re not. Otherwise it just sounds really weird.
Others on Pia’s list include Roger & Gallet Bois D’Orange and Armani Code
“One of my personal, relatively affordable, and easy to wear all-time favourites is Clarins Eau Dynamisante,” she says. “And — completely unironically, I think there aren’t many more confidently masculine scents for a grown up man than Drakkar Noir, which is available for under £15 for 100ml.”
She also has advice for anyone who is prepared to spend a bit more.
“If you can save up for one wonderful perfume, you are better off spending a bit of money upfront on getting a couple of discovery sets or travel sizes from the myriad and exciting independent and artisanal perfumers. There is a new golden age of perfumery that you may not yet be aware of: the monopoly of large corporations has been broken by thousands of independent brands popping up all over the world from New Zealand to New England. The exploration itself can become satisfying, but to support small brands and to get most out of a full relationship with a perfume (rather than series of flings), brands need you to buy full bottles. Test, discover, sample, watch reviews if you fancy, and if you can get to events like Scent Week Los Angeles or Barnes Fragrance Fair in London [I’m really sorry, that was a couple of weeks ago and you’ve missed it because I wanged on about UV], this could be the most wonderful way to find something that much closer matches both your budget and identity. Prices for artisanal and independent perfume vary wildly, and you should rely on your own impression and wear test of a perfume to decide its value to you.”
If cash is tight, she warns that,
“the real trap is getting carried away with false economy for a product that is meant to add joy to our lives. My recommendation would be to have one or two fragrances that are of the highest quality that you can personally afford, rather than a dozen dupes. For everyday, when you want to smell great, scented body oil layered with a body spray can be a great option, too.”
I wanted to know if less expensive fragrances can ever have the depth and longevity that more expensive ones do and her answer was, as it is to so many geekery questions, it’s complicated…
“If the style of the fragrance falls into one of the categories that is possible to do even with a tight budget, if the brand happens to be well-established and globally distributed in such volumes that they benefit from the economies of scale (bottles, caps, boxes and the fill of perfume cost less per unit the more units you can manufacture), then yes. To a point.”
However she flags that once the perfumer is stripped of budget, especially for a new creation for a smaller brand, there’s a point where something has to compromise.
“One way to get around this is to rely on so-called high impact materials which offer a lot of projection and longevity but don’t need to be dosed very high to achieve that. There is a point at which a fragrance can’t get past “smelling cheap.” If someone comes to me asking for actual oud, rose, vanilla and orris, for example, in amounts distinctly noticeable to the wearer, then the corresponding product will have to have a certain price tag. One of the most frustrating things as a working perfumer over the last decades has been to watch how many fraudulent claims go around, by brands who want to make the customer believe that they have used more expensive materials in high quantities and then you pick up the bottle, smell it, and know immediately that they’re not telling the truth.”
Pia believes that pushing the believability of such claims versus the retail price of some designer and luxury brands has given the dupe companies a wonderfully fertile ground to plant their seeds on.
“It doesn’t make it right, but you can see why customers have been scratching their heads a bit with some of the more ambitious pricing.”
Finally, Pia has some really interesting thoughts on why fragrance is so different from so much of the beauty industry.
“Perfume is NOT food, it is NOT even strictly what we understand to be a cosmetic. There is no direct feature-benefit association (ingredient x at y % will have z effect on skin) or “a slightly rotting old potato vs a new Jersey Royal” – the art, beauty, intrigue, wonder — and the potential for deception — in perfumery comes from the fact that a great perfumer can do what appears to be magical with very little and an amateur can make even the most expensive materials smell cheap. The search for what represents “true value” in any kind of art that also exists as a consumer product is not a topic that will ever find one, satisfactory answer. We don’t judge the value of a painting based on what the materials for it cost, nor do we truly understand what our smartphones and trainers actually cost to make, versus what we are being charged for them. As soon as consumer product thought processes enter the chat, the real answer is: a product is worth what its customers are willing to pay for it. Therefore, as customers, we should give our money to businesses who we want to support, and for products we personally feel are worth it.”
I would love to know your thoughts on all this — any old favourite fragrances that you’ve rediscovered at bargain prices? Let me know in the comments.
PS When I was talking to Pia about affordable fragrance, she said I should check out Thomas Dunckley’s Smell Good For Less series on Insta. Thomas is the man behind the Making Scents Make Sense newsletter and podcast and even if you are not a perfume junkie, you should check out his work — he is, as the name suggests, all about making scent accessible and understandable.
I’ve listed and linked to just a handful of his videos on inexpensive scents, but they are all well worth a watch. (And interestingly Roger & Gallet, Elizabeth Arden and Calvin Klein fragrances all feature strongly in his picks as well.) Others he’s flagged that you might remember include Moschino Cheap & Chic, Ghost The Fragrance, Jil Sander’s Sun and Tommy Girl
The science of sexy perfumes (sort of)
A few years back I wrote a piece about Molecule 01, a very unusual type of perfume. At the time I was in the habit of doing little videos talking about the pieces I’d written and in the video I did about the piece, I talked about the mystique around pheromones and this fragrance. When I was researching it, I was told by the brand that Iso E Super, the molecule that Molecule 01 contains, is “to our knowledge, the only one that has been found to stimulate one of the five remaining pheromone receptors.”
A bit of background: hormones are the chemical messengers that you produce that make your body respond in a certain way, while pheromones are the chemical messengers that you produce that make other people’s bodies respond in a certain way. It’s how babies know where to find milk, and there’s some suggestion that pheromones are involved in sexual attraction too.
Apparently you detect pheromones in a different way to the way that you smell things, via something called the vomeronasal organ (VNO) which has five different pheromone receptors (unlike mice who, it turns out, have 300 pheromone receptors!)
I quizzed Prof Tim Jacob of Cardiff University about this — he’s my go-to for geeky stories about fragrance — and he told me: “I’ve not heard that [Iso E Super] binds to VN1R1 receptors (pheromone receptors) but, if it does, then it is not the only fragrance that does - hedione does too.”
As Molecule 01’s claims were based on research that the late Professor Hanns Hatt of Ruhr-University Bochum had carried out I went hunting around to find it and found a now-deleted page where Prof Hatt talks about the research, and confirms what Prof Jacob told me.
“Geza [the perfumer behind Molecule 01] asked us to test Iso E Super, and it does stimulate a vomeronasal receptor in humans.” However, he also says: “We originally tested hedione [a sort of jasmine-magnolia smell often used in perfume] on the human vomeronasal receptors and it activated one of them.” Which rather puts paid to the idea that Iso E Super is the only one. (By the way if you’re interested in the research paper on hedione, it’s here.)
So while Molecule 01 is interesting, it’s not unique in activating a human pheromone receptor. While digging around, I also found out some other interesting stuff including the fact that research shows that even if you don’t have a VNO (some people don’t apparently) you can still respond to pheromones. But, even more interestingly, you can get pheromone-like responses without using pheromones or stimulating pheromone receptors.
This was something that Prof Jacob told me. In his words “It has been accepted that odorants can have a psychological impact via olfactory receptors in the nose so it is not necessary to invoke the presence of pheromone receptors for such psychological or behavioural responses.” My interpretation? Your perfume can drive someone else wild with desire, even if it doesn’t contain anything pheromone-related at all.
Why you should put lavender in your bath, even if you can’t smell it
Interestingly, it seems it’s not just pheromones that the body reacts to even when you can’t smell. Back in Covid times, I was intrigued to know whether other scents that we know have a physiological impact on the body still worked, even if you couldn’t smell them. I basically put exactly that question to Aromatherapy Associates master blender, Luke Taylor. Here’s what he had to say:
“Recent studies have shown essential oils can still be effective when inhaled even if the recipient has anosmia (impeded or total lack of sense of smell). For example, someone may still feel the relaxing benefits of lavender, even if they cannot detect the odour. This is particularly relevant with it being one of the symptoms of Covid, which I experienced first-hand. Not only can the oils deliver the traditional benefits, they can be used to stimulate the olfactory system and begin the recovery to help restore the sense of smell.”
So, it seems that when I was languishing in anosmic Covid misery, I was wrong to think there was no point in having a lavender-scented bath when I couldn’t smell it — if you’re ever similarly afflicted, learn from my mistakes, and indulge yourself.
PS Talking of Luke Taylor, there’s a new Aromatherapy Associates fragrance blend out — the first in seven years (the last one was Forest Therapy which as the classic nature-starved urbanite, I love.) I know AA is far from inexpensive but a little goes a long way and in a lot of ways they’re the brand that truly made me believe that aromatherapy wasn’t just hippy woo-woo and was actually grounded in science. I am properly obsessed with the Support Breathe Shower Mist which is genuinely a magical transformer of bog standard shower into spa experience and invaluable when you are barely able to breathe through your nose. And the De-Stress Muscle Bath Oil has been my post-skiing saviour for decades.
But I digress, this new one is called Desert Therapy and combines 50 different essential oils, including Frankincense, Oud, Sandalwood and Orange. I have to be honest and say I’m always a bit suspicious when a very Western brand comes out with an Oud-based product because Oud is such a feature of Middle Eastern scents that it just seems like a really transparent play for a share of that market. (Look, I never pretended that I wasn’t cynical.) But this isn’t heavily Oud-y. It’s designed to “support calm focus, ground and strengthen” and I really like it. I’ve been slathering on the body oil and it smells sort of warming and earthy and like wood when the sun’s been shining on it. Because I’m rubbish with body oils, it stays in the bathroom so I slap it on wet skin right after a shower and it leaves my skin feeling really soft and nourished. So, if you’re looking for a new body oil, I hard recommend.
The “Fragrance” conspiracy theory
You know my feelings on fragrance in skincare — at least I think you do — I’m not against it. If you don’t have an allergy or sensitivity to fragrance, stick as many scented lotions and potions on your skin as you like. While I once had a bit of a “who cares what it smells like, slap it on if it does the job” attitude, when I had Covid and lost my sense of smell, I realised I really missed the smell of the oils and balms I usually use to take my makeup off.
However, you will often find certain factions within the beauty industry referring to the fact that because manufacturers are not obliged to list individual fragrance compounds, the word “Fragrance” on an ingredients listing can “conceal” more than 3000 different compounds, suggesting that this is how brands sneak in terrible ingredients that they don’t want you to know about. This is BS.
(BTW just to be super clear, brands still can’t use any fragrances that haven’t been safety tested and approved etc etc. And there are 82 different fragrance allergens that must be listed separately if they’re included at a concentration of 0.001% in leave-on products, or 0.01% for rinse-off products so if you know you’re allergic to a very specific fragrance allergen, such as lavender oil, ylang-ylang oil, vanillin or menthol, if it’s included in significant quantities, you’ll know about it.)
To be honest, I’d never really spent much time dwelling on why it was the case that individual fragrance ingredients in products weren’t individually identified, but this post, which led me to this podcast, elucidated so incredibly clearly exactly why that’s the case.
In the podcast, perfumer Christophe Laudamiel explains that part of the reason that “Fragrance” is protected is because of the fact that creating a scent is, as Pia talked about above, more akin to an art than a science. Fragrance has an impact on the mind as much as it does on the body. And so one of the reasons that manufacturers don’t have to spell out exactly what is in their fragrance is effectively so that it can’t be ripped off by someone else.
If you think about some cult beauty products, I guarantee if you’ve used them, you’ll know what they smell like — from Elizabeth Arden’s Eight Hour Cream, to Guerlain’s Meteorites and Piz Buin suncream — they are scents that are not only recognisable but scents that are designed to make you feel and think a certain way — they create an emotional connection with the user in a way that an unscented product just doesn’t. They can conjure memories, prompt you to feel cosseted, or more awake, and when they’re aligned with a cream, or a powder, they create a connection between the person and the product.
If the details of that unique and special formula were available, not only would it probably mean very little to the consumer, but it would give competitors (or just dupers) the opportunity to copy the formulation. It’s not like skincare where while the ingredients tell you something, they don’t necessarily tell you about the delivery mechanisms or the way in which a product is formulated, a fragrance formula can, apparently, with a little knowledge, easily be recreated. And so, in the same way that, as the post puts it, “authors can protect their words, and brand can trademark logos”, perfumers should be able to protect their creations — and if that means that more than 3,000 ingredients are covered by the catch-all term “Fragrance”, I’m OK with that.
That’s all for this week, until next time…