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Lindsey Adams, 32, smells candles at Manhattan's Cire Trudon during the Sniffapalooza festival, which will appeal to New York's perfume boutiques. (Celeste Sloman for the Washington Post)
In 2007, when Spence Levy began to sell air, air that smelled good, to be precise, it was not really easy.
So, Levy scoured Miami's famous Collins Avenue, visiting a white and outsized decorating hotel, asking if he could convey the smell of green tea, maybe with a little lemongrass, or maybe from bergamot or oud, for a week. charge.
Miami is full of these old buildings, swimming pools and wet towels, as well as smokers, because it is libertine to light up, even in bars and on beaches. The air can be moldy and stale, and all of this is spreading, with some occasional whispers of hot trash, directly on the tourists' faces.
Levy and his cousin, who were the first to have the idea, understood that they could hide it all, piece by piece – like Febreze for a whole city. Some hotels in the South Beach tourist trap had already begun to sniff. Soon, Levy had convinced the rest.
Nowadays, you can enter the halls of Delano, 1 Hotel or the Shore Club, and you will find yourself almost immersed in divine odors, many of which are routed through Levy's ventilation system, Air Esscentials.
But recently, Levy noticed that his customers just did not want to cover what was unpleasant. Tourists had posted reviews on the quality of their hotel, and now hotels want to make sure their smells are unique. They wanted to smell the "driftwood of the oceans" or the tobacco of an extinct cigarette. "We ask what feelings or emotions they want to express, what demographics they want to attract," he says.
Making sure everything smells nice is booming and extends to casinos, recreational parks and even residential buildings. Every SoulCycle feels grapefruit; it's the smell of SoulCycle, and if you like it, you can buy it in candle form. The Equinox hotel in the dystopian city of New York, Hudson Yards, has not even opened, but it has already lined a candle to burn in its lobby: Cire Trudon's Abd El Kader, announced as smelling mint and tea and tobacco and "the temerity of the fighting". I recently felt one of these candles at $ 100 and I can attest that I died and that I was rekindled in the same breath.
At home, we also fall asleep in the smell, not only with candles, but also with room sprays, plug-ins, melted wax, "auto distributors, "and various miscellaneous items we buy, up to $ 4.2 billion in 2017, according to market research firm Kline.
Why do we need to take a rarefied air bath?
At Lab on Elizabeth Street in Manhattan, perfumes can be customized. (Celeste Sloman for the Washington Post)
Humans started making scents for quite simple reasons: Our smell smelled bad (our air, our body, our personal belongings), and the smell of pressed oil of pink roses of spring better.
So we turned tree resins and herbs into simple incense and fragrance until Jicky, the first perfume containing laboratory notes, arrived in Paris from Guerlain at the end of the 19th century. It smelled of lavender and lemon as well as civet, a note derived from the anal glands of civets. (The world of perfumes is full of strange strange "animal" smells, like those of musks and ambergris, which seem to deepen the smells, making them sexy.) Jicky was popular enough to be joined (in 1921) by Chanel No. 5 and finally a host of other fragrances came to signal wealth, class and sophistication.
According to Pamela Dalton, an olfactory scientist at Philadelphia's Monell Chemical Senses Center, a 50-year-old non-profit institute, our noses are like a highway over 120 km / h. Our sense of smell connects to our limbic system, the same responsible for the excitement and other primal instincts.
"When we feel something, our first answer is not," What is it? Said Dalton, but do I like it or not?
There are those who claim to dislike odors or who have a "sensitive nose". But it's probably because particular odors trigger a stress response, "as if we were listening to the sound of death metal," she says. Even so, "fragrance-free" products, such as laundry detergents, are bad sellers. Most of us want to be scented.
The question then is, "Why are we spending so much money on this?" Asks Dalton laughing.
I'm asking David Moltz, the Brooklyn-based D.S. & Durga perfumer. He says that when he asked the social media followers what candle they wanted to give him, they replied "after the rain". He created two: Big On After Rain (described as "rainwater in the Eucalyptus plantations of Highway 1") and Concrete After. Lightning ("electric crackling", "sizzling asphalt steam").
What his fans really wanted, he thought, was the reality. I tell him that he seems to want the smells of what the townspeople had abandoned for a long time. They wanted nature.
Moltz accepts, a hint of melancholy insinuating in his voice. "The larger story of our civilization. . . to move things forward as a society, we need technological progress. We have to live in the cities. it's more efficient. But there is a spiritual prejudice to that. "
Maybe we surrounded ourselves with perfume to fill the void.
"Perfume," he meditates, "drives you to feel things that are not there. It's really a sleight of hand. "
In the area of home fragrances, There is no greater obsession than the candle, and no bigger than Yankee.
Yankee Candle, these pretty pencil-colored glass wax jars, arrived in the late 1970s with a fairly simple range of scents: berries, pines, cinnamon, French vanilla, etc. What differentiated them from each candle that preceded them was that they were fragrant bombs, loaded with oils. It was exactly what people wanted: to be wrapped in good smells.
Yankee Candle today has hundreds of scents, some of which are fairly simple (coriander pineapple), others abstract to comic (how do we feel exactly the day of the wedding or the rays of the moon on pumpkins?). It also has hundreds of increasingly sophisticated competitors ranging from electronic fuel oil dispensers to scented matches.
But "sniffing", which brought this idea into the public space, was popularized by Abercrombie & Fitch. Abercrombie owned a home-made eau de toilette, Fierce, which would have notes of "sea breeze" and sandalwood – but for anyone who was in a mall in 2002, when Fierce was launched, it smelled like water. teenage insolence. Fierce was pumped to all places (and would have been sprayed on every garment) as a policy and spread through the mall corridors as a marketing tactic.
It was like a catnip for teenagers, keeping them surreptitiously longer. And Fierce (and the much-creaked Seminude photos and music) aggressively excluded others, said Aradhna Krishna, a sensory marketing expert and a professor at the University of Michigan Business School.
A few years ago, as a result of complaints from Yelpers, protests from environmentally conscious teenagers and a (possibly unrelated) sales slump, Abercrombie announced that the marine breeze would no longer come from heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. ("Does that mean I'm not going to choke while walking in their store?", Tweeted a woman on hearing the news.)
You think the tumult would have been death to feel. But one of Fierce's perfumers, Christophe Laudamiel, has found a prosperous future. Today, he also feels a "sculptor of the air" for hotel casinos such as Hard Rock and stores such as Bliss and New Balance.
And Levy's has a better smell of air at 6,000 locations, including hospitals and emergency care clinics, because, he says, the smell soothes people in an emergency.
When a new Florida rail system called Brightline also sought a distinctive scent for its stations to feel "energized" from driving, they opted for a grapefruit base note. Just like SoulCycle.
Even restaurants emit fragrances that mimic food, and because the only thing better than the smell of real cinnamon rolls is the smell of cinnamon rolls up to 11.
"Cookie stores spread the smell of cookies", said Krishna. "I know the bread shops have done."
One place asked Levy for bacon – or rather a near molecular approximation – that would allow him to pump outside his doors to seduce his clients. Levy had three possibilities: smoke, barbecue and sizzle. The sizzling bacon won.
"People are so bombarded with visuals," says Levy. "Scent is the ninja of marketing. We found another way to create that imprint in the brain, to put people at ease. "
For Karen Dubin, founder of Sniffapalooza, an obsession with perfumes began with her grandmother's soap. (Celeste Sloman for the Washington Post)
Sniffapalooza was founded in 2002 by Karen Dubin, a writer and mother who realized that there might be others like her, others who felt a pure and visceral joy every time the white flower or sandal fell to them on the nose. They are that kind of people who claim to instinctively know an oud (the rich aroma-like fragrance of hazelnut-flavored agar) sourced from a vetiver (the green, woody note of swamp grass) . Twice a year, they go on a pilgrimage to Connecticut, Texas, Maryland, France and elsewhere to visit the best shops in New York looking for sniffers.
Dubin, like almost everyone I meet at Sniffapalooza, remembers the first time that a perfume entered his psyche. It was the smell of luxury soap, taken from a European cruise by a grandmother, triggering an obsession of a lifetime with My Carven's Claw, Chanel No. 5, and its first fragrance acquired at 6 years old. : The Arpeggio of Lanvin.
She has her own theory about why so many of us bury ourselves shamelessly in the cold wax of an extinct candle or linger in the lobby of a beautifully scented hotel.
The reason is ardent.
Want to be in any place outside this abandoned lodge (try the temple-ish palo santo!), Aspire to be somebody else, some one of way (bergamot) , the lumpy orange of the Italian seaside, can do it for you).
"Perfume, says Dubin, is and has always been the promise of a better life."
To help us better understand this, Dubin takes us to Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, on the Upper East Side. Bottles and candles are presented as works of art, and modelish gallerinas – um, scented? – flirting, curious to know what you want to out of perfume, prompting you to understand who you are. I have no idea, of course.
A friendly French youngster wants to know if he could have an idea of the scented band I'm holding. It smells like lemon, I suppose. But when he brings it to his nose, he recoils as he found himself in Miami.
When he leaves, he suggests that I feel a candle called Cafe Society.
I lift the glass dome and inspire. It smells of cigarette smoke one day and boyfriend's cardigans, all distant and confused, like a memory. I like that.
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