What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [101]
The uptick in scented exhibits is evidence of museums’ eagerness to be less intimidating and more consumer-friendly, less like temples of culture and more like theme parks. Some aim for what the art critic Jim Drobnick calls “aromatopia”: a total-immersion, firing-on-all-five-senses sort of experience for the paying public. In doing so, they go head-to-head with Las Vegas casinos and other venues, which, as we’ve seen, are heavily into sensory engineering.
PRESERVATION IS A priority for the fragrance industry, which bases its prestige on a long and continuous history of trend-setting creations, and which it expects its new recruits to learn. The world’s most extensive perfume museum is the Osmothèque in Versailles, France, founded in 1990 as part of a training institute for fragrance, flavor, and cosmetics. There are more than 1,400 perfumes in the Osmothèque’s collection, including 500 that are no longer manufactured. Despite having worked in the industry, I find it hard to get excited about visiting a perfume museum—how many little bottles can one stand to look at? (take one down, pass it around, 1,399 bottles of scent on the wall…) To some people, a vintage bottle of Halston is a fetish object; to me it has the emotional resonance of an empty Coors longneck. Still, 500 samples of extinct juice might be worth a stop, especially if they were presented in a compelling way, say a vertical sniffing (“From Obsession to Euphoria—A Calvin Klein Retrospective”), or a vintage sampling (“Backlash: Transparent Top Notes in the Post-Giorgio Years”).
Touring a perfume museum would be a testosterone-draining ordeal for most men. As a gesture to them, if nothing else, I would suggest the museum include a hormone-stabilizing Hall of Technology. Displayed in a spotlight under a glass dome would be the first spray bottle invented by Jean Sales-Girons in 1859. Sale-Girons wasn’t thinking about perfume: he wanted people to be able to inhale the allegedly therapeutic mineral waters of French spas. Later, his “vapeurisiteur” was adopted by physicians to spritz medicine into a patient’s nose and throat. Other uses were found for the classic spray bottle with the rubber squeeze-bulb, and it soon became standard equipment for dentists, chemists, barbers, and other manly professionals. The atomizer underwent a dramatic sex change at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1878. It was at this gigantic industrial trade show, according to the atomizer historian Tirza True Latimer, that it crossed over into consumer culture and became feminized. When Guerlain and other French perfume manufacturers at the show spritzed their latest creations onto the passing crowds, women immediately saw that misting was an excellent way to apply perfume—evenly and with no dripping onto clothes. By 1890 the atomizer was on ladies’ dressing tables around the world, and remained so until the invention of the pump spray.
My ideal Hall of Technology would feature significant contributions to science and technology made by the perfume atomizer in masculine hands. Wilhelm Maybach of Germany, who was designing the first internal combustion engines in the late 1800s, needed to get gasoline into the cylinders in a way that would maximize its explosive force when ignited. His wife’s perfume atomizer provided the inspiration for his invention of the carburetor. A few years later a University of Chicago graduate student named Harvey Fletcher was working with physicist Robert A.