Weekend Update: Writing Against One’s Own Opinion and the Scent of Frieze
Reporting from Arabelle Sicardi's newly-launched fragrance writer's workshop and New York's leading international art fair
In an effort to connect with other people writing about fragrance and to hold myself accountable to finally finish some of the longer pieces I’ve been working on, I joined fellow Substack writer/all-around beauty expert Arabelle Sicardi’s fragrance writing group, Perfumed Pages. Our first meeting was held virtually on Saturday afternoon.
Part of the workshop agenda included a couple quick writing exercises, using samples of fragrances Arabelle sent to each of us ahead of the first meeting. One of the exercises was a 15-minute free write articulating the notes of one of our sample fragrances as they appeared to us, describing the story the fragrance is trying to tell. I decided to write about Liis Floating, a fragrance I sampled previously and hated, as a challenge.
I started the exercise by thinking through what someone might like about Floating:
Why would someone like this?
It’s soft, comforting, easy, unchallenging, so light that it’s barely perceptible. It has an ease to it that feels familiar and comforting. It’s the smell of the functional fragrances that make up the heart of one’s daily scent experience, but that no one thinks about much, like laundry detergent and shampoo. It’s the smell of the background of everyday life—skin musk with a touch of fruity floralcy. It’s a perfume for someone who doesn’t want to smell like perfume.
Ok, that last line is a little salty. Also someone called out my description of it as “unchallenging” as a drag, and they’re not wrong even though I didn’t mean it that way in the moment and I don’t think a fragrance needs to be challenging to be good. Elizabeth Arden Green Tea is unchallenging and it’s a good fragrance, for example.
I will also note that I had severe skin allergies as a child and my family was relegated washing everything in unscented detergents so I wouldn’t break out in a full body rash, so perhaps I never personally made the positive associations between laundry musk and comfort that other people have, predisposing me to writing off these types of scents.
Next, I moved on to describing the notes of the fragrance through a little story:
You lean into the neck of your beloved to smell her sunwarmed, still-sleepy skin as you slowly wake up on a Sunday morning. It’s ten AM and you have the whole day to laze about. The scent of the previous day’s shampoo in her hair is comforting and familiar. It’s the embodiment of the smell of a person as home. You cocoon yourselves into your freshly laundered duvet, into a cloud of warmth, a little pod of just the two of you, too cozy to get out of bed just yet.
Real notes: linen, peach, bergamot, wild orchid, sequoia
For contrast, here is the original review I wrote of Floating when I first tried it in February of last year:
An anemic whisper of grapefruit and dryer sheets. Hard pass.
It’s funny that the fruity notes in Floating read as “grapefruit” to me last year when I definitely got peach from it this time around. I will say this fragrance definitely needs the warmth of skin to bloom. On a blotter it has a dense, sour muskiness to it that’s almost reminiscent of unwashed bed sheets, and I think this sourness might have skewed my perception towards grapefruit rather than peach. On skin the fragrance develops a warm, airy, sunny fruity freshness that’s not unpleasant.
Anyway, both reviews are essentially two perspectives of the same experience. One through the eyes of a cozy-pilled optimist, the other through the eyes of a cold-hearted hater. It was an enlightening challenge to write positively about something that I don’t personally like, and if I gain nothing else from it, this technique will allow me to produce even stronger haterade in the future. “Know thy enemy” and so forth.
A Smell Report from Frieze New York
A friend of mine worked the press admissions desk at Frieze this weekend and graciously put me on the list so I could get in for free. Since this Substack was the rationale for my tenuous classification as a member of the press, I figured a little write up of the event would be appropriate, even though there was no fragrance-related art at the show.
What does Frieze smell like? According to a party report from The Cut, it maybe smells like Byredo Mojave Ghost, the 10th anniversary of which was celebrated at a party at an exclusive bar just ahead of the art event. It is still unclear to me whether or not this event was officially connected with Frieze or merely attracted the same audience. Either way, Byredo’s arty-yet-corporate persona matches nicely with the vibe of Frieze, so it would not be out of place.
The actual art show itself has a scent profile common in gallery spaces—the crisp smell of paint, sawdust, and floor polish, the smell of construction, the blank slate that is created ahead of every show. It’s a scent that conjures creativity in its own right, and of the gallery as a vessel for the creativity of others as a temporary home for individual works of art. The smell of paint asserts itself as an industrial product in the space while olfactively supporting and reflecting the use of paint as a fine art medium in the works hung on the gallery walls (which we likely don’t smell any trace of). Maybe this is nonsense and I’m high on paint fumes right now.
I caught whiffs of other people’s perfume as I wandered through the galleries as well, adding little jolts of extra fragrance to the persistent olfactory backdrop. The people of Frieze smell like: tuberose, cardamom, leather, sandalwood, and black pepper.
I wore The Zoo’s Carré Blanc as an homage to the white box of the gallery space (the name literally translates to “white square” in English). Unfortunately this fragrance is discontinued, along with the rest of the line. The perfumer Christophe Laudumiel describes Carré Blanc as, “Whatever rocks your boat: green foliage, grapefruit, rhubarb, blond woods, hay, orris, tonka … Trust and confidence on the outside, calm and peace on the inside. By courteous etiquette, do not wear this on a plane, at the theater or anywhere where you might sit next to someone who doesn’t like you.” The warning is a courtesy—this is an exceptionally strong and tenacious fragrance. You cannot wash it off and it typically takes over a day to fade, even with a light application. It’s also one of the strangest fragrances I own: a shifting, totally synthetic symphony that’s so sharp you can feel it in your teeth, like melted plastic grapefruits on a bed of lipstick and hay, with a texture somewhere between TV static and oil slick, a contemporary work of fragrance art in and of itself.
I have a homework assignment to complete ahead of the next Perfumed Pages meeting, which should yield some interesting olfactory writing. I look forward to sharing it with you.
More soon <3