perfumesmelling plants in the Anthropocene

adam hunt fertig

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Nature is a temple where the living pillarsLet go sometimes a blurred speech—A Forest of symbols passes through a man’s reachAnd observes him with a familiar regard.

Like the distant echoes that mingle and confoundIn a unity of darkness and quietDeep as the night, clear as daylightThe perfumes, the colors, the sounds correspond.

The perfume is as fresh as the flesh of an infantSweet as an oboe, green as a prairie—And the others, corrupt, rich and triumphant

Enlightened by the things of infinity,Like amber, musk, benzoin and incenseThat sing, transporting the soul and sense.

Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondences”

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Perfume bottles by ceramicist Seth Bogart.

There’s a frustrated sort of motion in this sonnet. Senses, smells, fall in and out of alignment, bait-and-switch each other, enjamb and interlock. There’s little that’s atmospheric; everything’s on rails, or on a flight path. What happens to the perfumes of amber, musk, benzoin, incense—these smell-machines— when we think not in wafts and blooms and mists, but along wayward trails, splintered correspondences?

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It isn’t totally clear what effect anthropogen-ic climate change might have on the smell of flowers. While some researchers have linked higher temperatures to a decrease in floral scent production,1 others have suggested that floral emissions are actually likely to increase with rising global temperatures.2 Some aroma compounds may be amplified, while others may be dulled. Either outcome, though, is a problem for flower-insect relationships, since changes in scent bouquets could make it hard-er for insects to identify and pollinate certain plant species.3 Multiple studies seem to agree, though, that whatever the effects on flower emissions themselves, air pollution limits how far these scents travel. Fuentes et al. conclude that “even moderate air pollution levels [...] substantially degrade the chemical constitu-ents of released floral scents,”4 and McFreder-ick et al. quantify a drastic reduction in range: “the documented increases in air pollution

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Artist Anicka Yi encases perfumed, fried flowers in a hermetic inflatable bubble.

concentrations, from pre-industrial to present times, can lead to substantial reductions in the concentrations of volatile compounds insects use to detect flowering plants. For highly reac-tive volatiles the persistence of the scent trail may have changed from kilometers during pre-industrial times to 200m during the more polluted conditions of present times.”5

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Collecting aromatic tree resin.

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It’s an odd trajectory, a provincializing of a flower’s scent-world, when it becomes more cut off from each other and more local. It’s an arc that runs counter to the story of the ev-er-expanding radius of interaction, ever-grow-ing flight paths, brought about by global trade. While industrialization has limited the range of a flower’s fragrances through pollution in-terference, it has also, also helped to extend its scent far beyond its natural range.

What’s the scent of patchouli doing in En-gland, thousands of miles away from its ori-gin?

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This transplantation of floral scent is hardly new, though. Just as Jason Moore and Raj Patel trace the development of a ‘cheap’ thing across colonial, imperial and capitalist dynamics, fol-lowing the trail of perfume (a very expensive thing) seems to follow a laundry list of systems of exploitation of humans and nature. Flow-er aromas have been extracted, shipped and commodified since antiquity, spreading into a “vast commercial network that extended to the Far East before the great voyages of discovery of the fifteenth century.”6 European colonial-ism further expanded the scopes of this species trade. As Alain Corbin rather euphemistically describes it in the French context, “vegetable odors ‘from the islands’ contributed an exotic note to the range of floral essences.”7

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A 1930s map-advertisement marks the stores, factories and field locations of the Antoine Chiris fragrance house.

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And while the origins of these fragrant plant species are themselves crucial, their move-ments also developed in tandem with a whole infrastructure of production, transportation and storage. Perfume is, after all, ultimately a preservation method, and to preserve some-thing as finnicky as a plant smell requires a whole set of technologies and processes. Light-resistant glass perfume bottles, for in-stance, developed into an icon of the luxury of perfume.8 And with the discovery of petro-leum distillation and the preserving capabili-ties of petrochemicals, perfume could be kept longer and shipped further than ever before.9 It was oil companies that “diversified into the synthetic fragrance business”10—the infra-structure was already in place.

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A perfume bottle designed by René Lalique.

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360 degree footage taken of Givaudan-owned lavender fields in Grasse, France.

Unlike staple foods like wheat or cash crops like cotton, fragrant plants aren’t necessarily grown on a scale massive enough to alter the landscape (al-though they can be, as with the expansive lavender fields in Grasse). The way many of these plants are grown and harvested could be aligned with what Anna Tsing calls an ‘anti-plantation’ in her work on matsutake.11 They are caught up in capitalist flows, but are also not totally subsumed by them. There is often a jarring intersection at these ‘an-ti-plantation’ sites, where these two modes collide.

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“ScentTrek! The technology is about capturing vola-tile molecules of specific flowers, wood, fruits, or just in the forest—and then reconstituting it with mole-cules. We have gathered more than 500 Scent Treks from all around the world, and we still capture the smell of the world in this project. You can capture the smell of your favorite roses—and then create a fragrance based on its Scent Trek!”- Hervé Fretay, Global Director of Naturals & Fragrance Ingredient Market-ing, Givaudan12

A Givaudan ScentTrek researcher extracts fragrances from a flower’s ‘headspace’.

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A Givaudan blimp collects smell samples over the Madagascan jungle.

Givaudan, currently the largest fragrance com-pany in the world, is renowned for its meticu-lous process for sourcing ingredients. Its pat-ented ScentTrek technology extracts the smell of a single flower, then synthesizes it for mass production. There’s something so astonishing to

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Promotional material for PARADISAMIDE, a new Givaudan scent. Like many of Givaudan’s offerings, it is an assemblage of natural and synthetic ingredients.

me about seeing these vast circulations of hu-man infrastructure—specialized orbs and blimps and treks and airtight seals—being deployed to stretch, just for a little longer, the shrieking ev-eryday smells of a plant. It’s a race against emis-sion, against volatility.

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Fully half of fossil fuel-based VOC emissions in cities now come from consumer chemical products, including cosmetics and cleaning products—“fragrances are major contributors.” 13 Part of the problem, atmospheric scientist Jessica Gilman notes, is that “volatile chem-ical products used in common solvents and personal care products are literally designed to evaporate […] You wear perfume or use scent-ed products so that you or your neighbor can enjoy the aroma. You don’t do this with gas-oline.”14 In fact, perfume’s quick evaporation has been the mark of its luxury throughout history: “Money that was spent on perfume lit-erally evaporated […] buying perfume was like scattering your money to the wind.”15 Now, perfumes make up only a small chunk of the fragrance industry, as other scented consumer products have risen in popularity.16

What’s the scent of benzoin doing smeared on a car?

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A medieval pomander, with segments for different fragrances, was worn to dispel both bad odors and infectious airs.

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Harvesting roses for perfume extraction in Grasse.

In Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, the authors lament the loss of scent trails in perfume: “[…] to encounter a scent was to encounter proof of a ma-terial presence, a trail of existence which could be traced to its source. Today’s synthetic scents, how-ever, are evocative of things which are not there, of presences which are absent: we have floral-scented perfumes which were never exhaled by a flower.”17 I think this that this formulation makes a too-easy

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Biologists spray Calvin Klein Obsession for Men to lure a jaguar to a camera trap. The jaguars are attracted by the fragrance’s notes of vanilla and civetone.

distinction between synthetic and natural that im-bues aroma with a mystical aura of authenticity, and lets synthetics off the hook. But I think that think-ing with scent trails, with all their collisions, is im-portant. Not a trace towards on origin, but a way of moving, hungrily, on the scent, making a beeline.

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It brings perfume closer towards how Anne-Lise François, in “Flower Fisting,” sees flowers as figures of total openness and contingency: “floral lives, by their strange quickness, possess a kind of acuity of achieved reality that is never far from passing back into possibility.”18 Per-fume, perhaps, is an attempt to arrest that floral quickness, to pack it in petroleum for recall at a later date. But when is it successful? When does smell get away from us? As flowers (maybe?) settle in to a pollution-induced retirement to a 200-meter radius, I want to stick with their bombastic, ghostly liveliness through perfume. Thinking with volatility, with manic evapora-tion... in the in-between spaces, scents com-mingle; they correspond.

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19th century perfume atomizer imitates a flower.

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Image sources (in order of appearance)

1. Muraben, Billie. “Seth Bogart’s Sleazy Ceramic Homages to Salon Life.” It’s Nice That, February 2, 2015.

2. Rittenbach, Kari. “Anicka Yi | Frieze,” January 11, 2013. 3. Reinarz, Jonathan. Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on

Smell, 2014. 4. Dubey, Shikhar. “Antoine Chiris.” Scent-Room (blog), Au-

gust 15, 2012. 5. Launert, Edmund. Scent & Scent Bottles. London: Barrie &

Jenkins, 1974.6. Givaudan. Fly over the Fields of Lavender - Givaudan 360°

Video. 7. Gilbert, Nick. “Never Been Sniffed: New Tech, New

Scents.” CNN Style, March 30, 2017. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/future-of-fragrance/index.html.

8. Swiss Broadcasting Corporation. “Hunting Scents for New Bestsellers.” SWI swissinfo.ch.

9. Givaudan.“Paradisamide”.www.givaudan.com/staticweb/StaticFiles/GivaudanCom/Fragrances/Ingredients/

10. Groom, N. New Perfume Handbook. Springer Science & Business Media, 1997.

11. Reinarz, Jonathan. Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell, 2014.

12. “You’ll Never Guess How Biologists Lure Jaguars To Camera Traps.” Scientific American Blog Network.

13. Launert, Edmund. Scent & Scent Bottles. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1974.

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Notes1. Cna’ani et al., “Petunia × Hybrida Floral Scent Production Is

Negatively Affected by High-Temperature Growth Conditions,” 1333.an interaction facilitated mainly by floral colour and scent. Gas chromatography–mass spectroscopy analyses revealed that increasing ambient temperature leads to a decrease in phenylpro-panoid-based floral scent production in two Petunia × hybrida varieties, P720 and Blue Spark, acclimated at 22/16 or 28/22 °C (day/night

2. Farré-Armengol et al., “Changes in Floral Bouquets from Com-pound-Specific Responses to Increasing Temperatures,” 3667.

3. Fuentes et al., “Air Pollutants Degrade Floral Scents and Increase Insect Foraging Times,” 373.

4. Fuentes et al., “Air Pollutants Degrade Floral Scents and Increase Insect Foraging Times.”

5. McFrederick, Kathilankal, and Fuentes, “Air Pollution Modifies Floral Scent Trails,” 2346.

6. Reinarz, Past Scents, 64.7. Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, 74.8. Reinarz, Past Scents, 75.9. Reinarz, 73.10. Reinarz, 80.11. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 33.12. “What Fragrances Are Made Of.”13. McDonald et al., “Volatile Chemical Products Emerging as Largest

Petrochemical Source of Urban Organic Emissions,” 760.14. DeWeerdt, “As Cars Get Cleaner, Air Pollution Sources Shift -

Anthropocene.”15. Classen, Howes, and Synnott, Aroma, 83.16. Classen, Howes, and Synnott, Aroma, 192.17. Classen, Howes, and Synnott, Aroma, 205.18. François, “Flower Fisting,” 10–11.

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