The mad perfumer of Parma

Plus: where to find information about the presence of odor in the novels of Émile Zola

Hello readers,

I’m violating my own homunculus hiatus to share a newly-published story for the New York Times Magazine. The story is about scent, Italy, secrecy, throwing tomatoes at opera performers, nostalgia—is it Good or Bad?—and the woman pictured above, a fantastic perfumer and artist named Hilde Soliani.

Now that you’ve beheld the gaze of Ms. Soliani, perhaps I can tempt you to click on this “gift link.”

The world of fragrance is crammed with intriguing facts, and only 2% of the contents of my notebook made it into the story. This is a lucky scenario. Often it can be hard to strain enough cream from the meager milk of reporting (terrible metaphor) to form a rich and buttery story (guess I’m committing to it).

With scent, there is so much. Too much! It may be unrivaled as an area of research for people who love beginning a conversation with the words "Did you know that—"

For example, did you know that Melville wrote a chapter of Moby-Dick on ambergris, a prized perfume material that happens to be the excreta of a sperm whale? In 2021 a group of Yemeni fishermen found a 280-pound chunk of ambergris and sold it for the equivalent of $1.5M. “I felt so happy,” one of the fishermen told a camera crew from the BBC. “Wonderful feelings I can’t describe.”

"Who would think," wrote Melville, "that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is." And yet so it is with many of perfume's finest materials, like castoreum (secretion of anus-adjacent beaver gland), civet (secretion of anus-adjacent civet gland), deer musk (secretion of penis-adjacent musk deer gland), and hyraceum (petrified sewage of a mammal called the rock hyrax).

Perfume media has a higher-than-average hit rate. I recommend Odoratus Sexualis, a psychotic work from 1933 that manages to discuss Hungarian brothels and Kraft-Ebbing and the presence of odor in the novels of Émile Zola without breaking a sweat.

Second, the podcast Perfume Room has a fantastic interview with Ann Gottlieb, who is the genius (demon?) behind the scent of Axe body spray— as well as sundry highbrow sprayables. The interview offers a panoramic view of the fragrance world, which, of course, encompasses laundry detergent and kitty litter along with $300 liquids in cut-crystal bottles.

Finally, gotta hand it to this 2006 movie based on the bestselling Patrick Süskind novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. (Amazingly, I prefer the movie.)

Süskind’s plot revolves around an 18th-century man who serially-kills young women in order to bottle the aroma of their fresh corpses. The macabre perfumer is played by Ben Whishaw, and although he displays the cinematic hallmarks of a sicko—clammy complexion, disquieting stare, propensity to lurk—the character’s quest is presented as a valorous one, as though all were fair not just in love and war but also in small-batch fragrance-making.

Thank you for reading. And here’s the story again, in case your scrolling finger is fatigued.

Farewell,
Molly