Roundabout
On the Scent
By KA THARINE WH1TEHORN
THERE has recently been a concerted drive going on in London organised by fifteen French scent firms. It is designed to improve the present scent situation in Britain, where only 20 per cent. of the women between sixteen and forty use scent regularly, as op- posed to something like 96 per cent. of French- Women. There have been scent testings equiva- lent to wine tastings in some of the big stores (though almost nobody can smell more than two or three scents consecutively and still tell a difference) and large promotions in magazines. I am told by those who know that the prettiest sight in the whole promotion was the fifteen PROs coming together around a table to arrange all this: their business ,rivalries for once put aside, the only sign of their essential feminine competitiveness was the aroma that arose from a conference at which every woman present was drenched in her firm's strongest product.
In the general airing, a good deal of stray fact about scent has been going around. Historically, it seems as if the two big changes in the scent World have been the switch from a mainly oil base to a mainly alcohol base as the carrier of sweet smells, and the arrival of synthetisation. The reason all those people in the Bible -kept 011 pouring ointment over each other was, ap- Patently, that that was their form of scent; not till the arrival of 'Hungary Water' in the four- teenth century did an alcohol base seem feasible. SYnthetisation began in 1828, when a German (it would be a German) started off by synthctis- h18, of all things, urea; then the English suc- ceeded in synthetising the scent of new-mown hay (possibly, I suppose, owing to the prevalence of guinea-pigs in labs, since guinea-pigs all smell of new-mown hay). Nowadays there are no scents which do not contain some synthetic, though the main fixatives are rare, revolting and terribly expensive still ambergris, musk, civet and castoreum, all from the ruder parts of scarce and unsociable animals.
This is what keeps the price up; but it is not only price that seems to deter the English- Woman from splashing about in Coup de Feu and washing her feet in Muguet des Bois. So much scent advertising and promotion has been based on the power of scent to attract men that good women feel simply scared of the stuff (re- member the cartoon about the scent that 'came into the same class as dynamiting fish'). This terror is enhanced by the lack of any sort of thermostatical control on scent, so that if you Put on enough to last through the evening you 4sPhyxiate at the cocktail hour; if you put a delicate blob behind each ear, an hour later You will be, nasally, extinct. This has to some extent been got over by the production of hand- bag atomisers, but even setting aside men's distaste for seeing refurbishing at table, I can- not help feeling that to spray scent around half- way through dinner would be to invite lynching, if not from your escort, then from the chef.
No: the main trouble is that scent seems to cover too narrow a field. 'Dab scent on where you expect to be kissed,' urges Chanel. The corollary seems to be that if you don't expect to be kissed you may as well not bother, and so there are vast and •largely unexploited areas in which things, people and even places could and should smell better.
There is, for example, the whole field of pre- ventive smell, now run wholly along deodorant lines; presumably on the puritanical assumption that it is cheating and unwise to use a smell to kill a smell. But just as American manufacturers spray their second-hand cars with 'new car smell,' so offices wishing to attract young female staff could instil a smell of tweed and bay rum to sug- gest romance, rather than allow it to go on smelling of linoleum and solicitors as before; and young mothers, whose social life and cheer- fulness may well depend entirely, during their most housebound years, on their ability to get people to come and visit them, can stop their houses smelling of nappies by making then smell charmingly of something quite, different: joss-sticks should be included with every layette. On this principle„ I was anxious to try out three samples of scent given to me on my three cats: I was only prevented by my hw,band, who thinks cats are sacred and does not realise that the BgYptians, who shared his feeling, used to scent, their cats liberally—and anyone who conies into our flat on a warm day can easily guess why. We have actually been trying some stuff called Freshaire—but all the perfumes of Arabia could probably not sweeten that little band.
I had hopes, though, of testing out on them another practice that is always urged in articles about beauty: choosing a scent to fit your per- sonality. Nobody has ever worked out what would happen if anybody actually took this ad- vice: if one woman smelt like acid drops, another like an overheated bedroom, a third like very old Bibles. Nor have they worked out how this principle is to apply to the ever-growing perfumery trade directed at men, even allowing for the fact that smells smell different on different people according to the acid/alkali balance (the PRO for Marquay, one of the newer scents, swears this depends on your weight).
But this is the real reason why this tremen- dous emphasis on perfume as a sexifier is wide of the mark: the sexes are too mixed up for it to make sense. Civet and musk may be part of an animal's sex appeal, but they come from male animals. And why, come to that, should leather be such a masculine smell? Half of it is presumably from cows or mares. And, in fact, scent, is something which appeals to other women quite as much as to men: like perfectly groomed and well-ringed hands, scent suggests luxury— and women respond to luxury in each other as they certainly don't to straight sex-appeal things like wiggly skirts and tight sweaters. And come to that, why should the perfume people limit their attacks to the nubile age-group of sixteen to forty? The elderly are much better scented than not, just like anybody else—think of all that, old-ladies-and-lavender stuff. No: any per- son or place that can smell bad can smell good, and the range should be as, wide as possible. Let us never forget the inspiring example of the tramp in the night-club who, unable to drink any more champagne, instructed the waiters: 'Pour it over me. I like the smell.'
''1l? re is nothing wrong with foutuitaion..., thanA you.'
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