Fragrance has no gender. Perfumery sells a story, a concept, a dream, a memory — all of which have no distinction between male or female in their ability to enthral us. So why should we limit the experience of these creative expressions to such binaries?

The truth is that gender in fragrance has been the solid, albeit antiquated, foundation for marketing purposes for centuries. The glistening Adonis in a cologne advertisement or the coy ingénue in a floral fragrance campaign feed into aspirational stereotypes. Advertisers prey on the fact that consumers believe buying said bottle of publicised perfume will bring them that tiny step closer to such an ideal.

Fragrance has no gender, so why should we limit their experience to such binaries?

Furthermore, for those who fear being too experimental with their scent purchases, gender binaries offer a small cage of comfort. Stay within the prescribed framework and you will never risk someone calling your scent too masculine or feminine.

The bias doesn’t merely infiltrate fragrance products, but even the raw materials themselves. More delicate components like florals are often attributed feminine qualities, whereas robust notes such as cedarwood are adorned with notions of masculinity. A Freudian perspective would even go so far as to declare the visual and characteristic similarities between certain materials and their corresponding gender as a sexual metaphor.

The bias doesn’t merely infiltrate products, but even the raw materials themselves.

Analysing gender-prescribed fragrances requires both a biological, but more importantly a cultural, component. According to Anna Lindqvist at Stockholm University’s Department of Psychology, a majority of consumers choose fragrances which land in the middle of the gender spectrum, regardless of whether they are male or female, thus making a case for the proliferation of unisex fragrances. A study on sexual dimorphism in olfactory function states that women have more neurons and glial cells than men, which, combined with hormonal fluctuations, indicates more scent sensitivity. This could explain an overall tendency towards softer smells in traditional women’s fragrances, like a soft white musk or light-bodied jasmine scent.

In a time where the best-selling mass-market women’s fragrances include highly saccharine, dare one say almost juvenile, gourmand florientals, could the delicately sweet nature of these perfumes be a method of belittlement? As the gender gap becomes narrower, one could almost see scented bodies as helping maintain the status quo of bold-smelling alpha males and obedient females, adorned with a fragrance that makes them smell more like a delectable dessert than mature woman.

As the gender gap narrows, one could see mass-market scented bodies as maintaining the status quo of alpha males and obedient females.

However, in a day and age where an increasing number of individuals identify as gender fluid, these distinctions needn’t exist. While the likes of CK One have been deemed as revolutionaries in the marketing of unisex fragrances, gender-bending scent adoration has been around for much longer. It has taken the recent rise of niche fragrance, which sells a story rather than a gender ideal, to make mainstream audiences comfortable with adapting their purchases to personal preference rather than prescribed gender category. For example, many men often feared wearing a floral scent at the risk of being perceived as less masculine, yet rose scents have proven particularly popular among this demographic in recent years.

Consumers shouldn’t be denied a plethora of scent possibilities based on whether they are male or female.

But ultimately, individual smell perceptions remain the biggest factor at play. How gendered this approach will be is dependent on a multitude of factors such as taste, upbringing, current environments, or what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu referred to as ‘habitus’. It is a matter of personal choice, but consumers shouldn’t be denied a plethora of possibilities based on whether they are male or female. In a future where gender identity has become non-binary, it’s about time our fragrances did the same.

We are animals and deep down we desire the smell of the other sex. Unlike the other animals, though, we spend our time eliminating our own body smell and replacing it with secretions from other creatures. And not just any secretions, but secretions from their nether regions. Civet comes from glands right next to the civet cat’s anus, musk is located in the penile sheath of the musk deer, and castoreum comes from little sacs tucked under a beaver’s tail. The beavers smear the castoreum around their territory as a kind of Morse code to communicate quite complex messages to other beavers. Weird as these ingredients may sound, and stinky as they may be at concentration, at the right dilution they have a natural magic.

An Auranone would look like a deer but with jasmine vines in place of antlers

Only a couple of the animal ingredients used in perfumery nowadays ever come from a real animal. The rest owe their existence to a zoo of lab-created molecules and bases: the animal imaginarium. The imaginarium is inhabited by fantasy animals. Some of them, such as the molecule ambroxan, are nature-identical which means they have exactly the same chemical structure as molecules found in nature. The Ambroxan that is our Molecule 02 is made in the lab, but the same molecule is found in ambergris, a substance formed in the belly of a whale.

An Applelide would have a pair of Cox’s Orange Pippinicles dangling from its underside

Some of the creatures in the animal imaginarium are a bit more hallucinogenic. Take applelide, which is a musk-type molecule with a green apple topnote, or Auranone, a musk base with a floral note. Auranone is like a cross between a musk deer and jasmine. If you can imagine a future where synthetic biologists created an Auranone, it would look like a deer but with jasmine vines in place of antlers. While an Applelide would have a pair of Cox’s Orange Pippinicles dangling from its underside in place of testicles. Pippinicles? A hybrid of testicles and apples.

When you see ‘musk’ listed as an ingredient in a fragrance, know that it could be any one of the dozens of fantasy musks out there. These each have a different scent-profile and names like Shangralide, Nirvanolide, Celestolide, Sylkolide. Sometimes you will see ‘white musk’ mentioned as an ingredient. This is the name given to fantasy musks with a clean smell. The best-known white musk is Galaxolide, which to my mind has a paper note. It’s so good that these days it is used in everything.

For Escentric 02 I combined muscone with vetiveryl acetate and ambroxan, they fused together to make a radiant bomb.

But if you use those big musks like galaxolide your fragrance will smell like every other perfume. I would rather leave it out. I prefer muscone, which is the nature-identical musk. Muscone is beautiful, but it’s not cheap. Galaxolide is around 4€ per Kilo, whereas a kilo of muscone costs several hundred euros. For the base of Escentric 02 I combined muscone with vetiveryl acetate and ambroxan and the three fused together to make a radiant bomb that’s warm, clean and cocooning.

Fantasy animals are strange, but nature has some pretty strange crossovers too. Some plants have musk notes, while ambroxan is the key aroma-molecule in ambergris, yes, but it also occurs in the herb clary sage and the Mediterranean plant, cistus labdanum. Nobody knows why these aromas should occur in plants as well as animals.

Ambergris is formed in the whale in much the same way that a pearl forms round a grain of sand in an oyster.

And then anyone smelling ambroxan without knowing what it was would never say it was animalic. It had a mineral freshness and a dry woodiness to it. But then ambergris has a different natural function than the other animal ingredients. It is formed in its digestive system of the whale in much the same way that a pearl forms round a grain of sand in an oyster. The whale builds up the paste-like substance to protect its innards from the razor-sharp beaks of the deep-sea squid it eats. Eventually it ejects an ambergris bolus studded with squid beaks. It will then take years of floating on the ocean for the ambergris to refine its distinctive smell.

There’s a note in Animalis that smells like ‘clean bum’, that’s the only way I can describe it.

Some of the most flagrant animals in the imaginarium are down to bases. Take Animalis, a famous base created 80 or 90 years ago. There’s a note in there that smells like ‘clean bum’, that's the only way I can describe it. Clean bum is a smell we human animals are drawn to, whether we admit it to ourselves or not. Think of a big male fragrance like Saint Laurent’s Kouros - that's basically raging Animalis. There’s around 10% of it in there and 10% of Animalis will hack right through anything else to give the impression you’ve landed in the lion’s den at the zoo.

The wackiest animal ingredient in perfumery has got to be hyraceum. This is the fossilised shit and pee of a small furry creature called a hyrax. These African animals always use the same rocky area or cave as their lavatory, and in some of these hyrax loos, the poo has built up over thousands of years till it turns to stone. Collectors gather the petrified poo at the bottom of the pile. No harm to the animals here, they are probably delighted to see it go. Some perfumers say it can be used as a substitute for synthetic musk. But when it comes to hyraceum I like to apply my key rule of fragrance: it’s not what you put in, it’s what you leave out.

Don’t expect petrified poo in Escentric Molecules anytime soon.

One such crusader for equality is Michael Irwin, who has been busy helping art escape its confined realms of stale museum shows and exclusive velvet ropes. He is the assistant curator for Late at Tate at Tate Britain, former assistant curator for the Young People’s Programmes at Tate Britain and Tate Modern, as well as founder of the online art platform Float, which supports emerging artists by exposing them to wider audiences and connecting them with art institutions.

In the following interview, Irwin discusses the democratisation of art, the museum of the future and olfactory art installations.

‘Blood Sport’, still fromvvvva live coded 40 minute video for the band Blood Sport, Antonio Roberts. Single-channel digital video, 2017

If you could describe your style of curation, what are your specific points of focus?

It came from using disused and problematic exhibition spaces. I never had shows in white cube spaces, so for me it’s about creating a harmony between the space and the artwork. Even if you’re a painter that might be creating two-dimensional work, it’s still looking at how they respond to the space and the crossover between it. It is really key for me to create a site-specific element with what I curate.

Soof, Photo - Krishanthi Jeyakumar, 2017

What inspired you to start Float?

I was working as a curatorial assistant in exhibitions at Firstsite in Colchester and alongside that role I was also starting to work on a program called Circuit. It was a nationwide program headed up by Tate, spanned across several Tate Plus galleries and was all about offering autonomy to people ages 15-25 within gallery spaces. There’s this epidemic across museums around what are they going to look like in the future, what is the museum of the future if those younger generations aren’t engaging in the museum, finding it relevant, or seeing the space for them.

Me and my colleague at the time, Liam Roberts, put on a digital residency, which was a really big success, and then started to put on monthly showcases at the gallery. Gradually it gained more and more momentum and that led through to the Circuit festival in 2016, which was a big part of the showcase. The show started to have a much wider impact.

There is a real discrepancy between younger generations, how they are looking at artwork through the screens, and traditional institutions. Float strikes an interesting middle ground between that. It is democratizing art because it can otherwise feel like quite insular, especially for new and emerging artists.

That’s why we wanted to keep Float going when I left Firstsite. That had been our continuous space and those are hard to come by, so that’s where the digital element ramped up because we wanted to keep the visibility there and keep exposing emerging artists to a wider audience.

Websites can become dead spaces where things just sit and nothing actually happens, so the idea for Float is that the online space is always active and interactive in different ways — whether that’s a young artist wondering how someone who is in a similar field to them got to where they are, or institutions looking for artists to feature. The concept is also to be linking artists with art institutions. We were doing that in a physical way monthly and the website is a digital conduit for that mission as well.

‘FL’, Susi Disorder, 2015

What would the museum of the future look like, where are we headed?

The segmentation of audiences will be reduced and you will end up having a much more inter-generational experience. The collection at Tate is the nation’s collection, and one of the key things in my work here is trying to enable younger or new audiences to understand that this is their work as much as anyone else’s. So it is that democratisation and the creation of equity in the collections and exhibitions as well.

I’d like to think that museums start to become less traditionally curatorially-led in terms of exhibition programming and event programming. The traditional forms of curation and curatorial practice can be seen as quite elitist and exclusive at times. If you don’t see yourself represented in a space you’re simply not going to come in here. In every artwork there is something that someone can respond to, it’s just a case of breaking the artwork down in a way that someone can actually understand how it’s relevant to them, how it does actually mean something to them in their day-to-day lives.

In a digital as well physical sense, there are more artists experimenting with augmented reality, virtual reality that will be interesting to see in terms of how technology increases and how that impacts museums.

‘Archive Remix’, Antonio Roberts. Digital painting, 2015

Have you seen any engagement with our olfactory sense in artwork or any of the artists you have come across? How is that fitting into the current landscape?

Artists have used different sensory experiences for a long time but I think that more and more it is becoming used in exhibitions in terms of full-sensory and immersive experience. The last Turbine Hall commission was Tania Bruguera and she had a Crying Room. I didn’t think a smell could evoke this reaction, but you walk in there and you are hit with this overpowering smell and your eyes start streaming. That was really powerful. It is similar to virtual reality in terms of accessibility in a museum, that the more technology successfully carries through those elements the more they exist. I think that more artists are going to be experimenting with it in the future but it’s that ability to carry it off.

We consume so much through the screen and it’s predominantly visual, but smell is one of the few things that hasn’t been captured, so the physical space might be seeing more of it. It’s harkening back to our primal senses because we can’t smell through the screen.

The increase in screen use, people consuming artworks and designs through their Instagram, Pinterest, you name it, it does raise the question: where is the value in the object anymore? I think that is something, again around the democratization of archives and a collection — opening up those objects, understanding the specificity of the place. The power and potency of the object is here, in these spaces, and it’s just a continuous collective approach to open it up.

The same with smell. It would be a really interesting way of opening up the gallery spaces to something where you walk in and cannot experience it through a screen, images, video. You need to be there too. The archive and the collections need to be activated in a similar way. The value of these spaces need to be appreciated ahead of Instagram. That’s a really tough thing because more and more artworks are being digested in that way.

‘Ethereal Traces’, Susi Disorder, 2016

What are some of the most exciting new talents or general developments that you’re seeing in the art world right now?

I recently worked on a project called LDN WMN. I saw some incredible work being done there, welcoming and putting women, female-identifying and non-binary artists to the front of the conversation, and highlighting these new social debates around gender, sexuality, and carrying that program off on a city-wide scale across the whole of London.

That was incredible, some of the artists that I have worked on with that have gone from strength to strength. One artist in particular is a digital artist called Susi Disorder. The way she is working with coding, constant data flow from Google, Google Analytics and Twitter — it’s amazing to see. It is a weird critique of the problems with social media and the networking sphere that we’re in but also embracing and creating artwork from it.

Another artist is Soofiya Andry, a non-binary artist who is working in education but also for body and gender acceptance. I think that Soofiya is probably one of the most inspirational artists that are up and coming, in terms of the waves they are creating and exposure of their art practice.

Do you think fragrance can be considered an art form?

Fragrance definitely is and can be an art form, it’s just the context in which it’s presented. Art is also a consumer product. Artworks can be mass-produced, printed on T-shirts, consumed like anything else, but the context in which these things are presented in makes a huge impact.

The processes through which scents are made — the research, the concept, the way that the projects are presented — lend it to a much more artisan and artistic concept. But any other sort of fragrance that is highly consumer-based would be much harder to define as artwork. There is a blurring between consumer culture and an art form, fragrance definitely sits in the middle.

Last but not least, if you could curate an exhibition around scent how would you go about it?

There is no doubt that scent would need to be at the forefront of the experience and the concept behind why that is too. It would depend on the artists or whoever I was working with, on how they would want it presented, but you would need to remove all visual stimulation from it to really put an onus on the smell and what you’re trying to convey with that.

In the same way a scent might be used to enhance the visual aspects of an artwork, there could be lighting, steam or something more interactive that could be an asset or an influence on the scent. I would be really interested in flipping that from the visual being a provocation for the smell rather than the other way around. That would be my starting point.

Michael’s Acknowledgements:
Adrian Shaw - Influencing my current work at Tate.
Charlie Bryan - Content Curator for Float and a big influence getting it to where it is now.

floatshowcase.org

On paper, the divide is clear. Mainstream fragrances are those produced and marketed to mass audiences by large corporations who devise their latest releases according to consumer trends and panels. Niche ones are created by independent houses with smaller circulation figures, working to their own creative briefs and distributed at selected retailers. The recent explosion in demand for the latter has muddled these divides, the acquisition of indie brands by luxury conglomerates notwithstanding.

Thanks to online portals into the heart of independent perfumery, scent exploration options are infinite.

As fragrance commentator Lizzie Ostrom notes in Perfume: A Century of Scents, niche fragrance first came to the fore in the 1970s, but flourished with the rise of the internet. Nowadays, sites like Basenotes or Fragrantica offer a vast universe of discussion forums, fragrance reviews and extensive scent directories. Thanks to these online portals into the heart of independent perfumery, the scent exploration options are infinite.

Fashion theorist Carol Tulloch first discussed style narratives, or an expression of one’s history and identity through fashion. Borrowing from this concept, fragrance functions as an olfactorial fashioning of identity. Independent brands have an undeniable advantage over their mass market counterparts for those who see individuality as a core element of this display of self. “The creators of niche fragrances offer different narratives for thinking about our sense of smell, a form of intellectual enquiry,” Ostrom writes. “We live, today, in a perfume fairground with a ride for every persuasion, whether play-it-safe or daredevil.”

In creative industries, an increase in popularity or brand expansion is often equated with selling out or losing sight of one’s original vision. On the other hand, one could argue that a superbly crafted product is bound to gain a large audience, in large part due to the aforementioned digital channels that offer amplified promotional opportunities. While a tendency of disdain towards mass popularity may exist, the real defining characteristic of the niche industry is its unbound creativity, which should be protected at all costs.

Back in 2008, Marina Geigert noted: “The history of fragrance in the 20th century follows the same model as fashion: from exclusivity, high price and made-to-measure quality to the focus on middle market, mass production and democratisation.” If one looks at the infiltration of athleisure at heritage fashion houses, and similarly, perfume underdogs sitting alongside established names in fragrance retail, one thing becomes clear: the game rules have changed.

The defining characteristic of niche is an unbound creativity, which should be protected at all costs.

The niche industry’s tune hasn’t changed, it is simply playing to a larger audience.

In his speech at the World Perfumery Congress, entitled Niche 2.0: The Future of Niche Perfumery and its Search for Meaning, journalist Eddie Bulliqi stated: “Niche is only a symptom and coincidental expression of a much larger and more powerful cultural weather system that is shifting the way we engage with scent…People want their fragrances to make them feel more, stimulate them more specifically and exercise them more intellectually than ever before, exacerbated by society’s search for anti-digital antidotes to electronic ways of life.”

A Global Fragrance Market report states that artisanal scents are the fastest-growing segment of the fragrance industry. After several high-profile niche brand acquisitions, Estée Lauder saw a 24% annual increase in sales. In the digital age, no industry can stay inside its own isolated bubble forever, and the clear demarcations have been replaced with increasing fragmentation. This doesn’t mean that independent perfumery is doomed, quite the contrary. Expressed as a musical metaphor, the niche fragrance industry’s tune hasn’t changed, it is simply playing to a larger audience. Now more than ever, it’s an opportunity to amp up the volume.

You sit in a white, technical environment, but you feel you are being taken deeper and deeper into a primitive forest. You are taken there by the scent created by Geza, green and resinous – the smell of the branches - but also slightly sweet, woody and rotting - the smell of the forest floor. At the same time you are surrounded by sounds recorded in seven forests round the world by Chris Watson, who is probably the most renowned field recording artist out there. You’ve got an Australian eucalyptus forest, the Masai Mara in Kenya, the Finnish taiga, and an ancient English greenwood, all delivered on a 16-channel sound system.