Perfumery is much maligned and misunderstood. It is, ultimately, an art form, a kind of human expression like music or painting, that is rarely appreciated as such. Many would happily see it banned, knowing nothing about it other than that some people wear too much. That'd be like banning music because your neighbor's TV is too loud.
Lucky Scent (mentioned in this article) has a boutique in LA. If you're nearby, you can go in and sample to your heart's content. Perfume boutiques are unfortunately rare but most large cities will have something and they're accessible and inviting in my experience. There really is a _lot_ more out there than what a Sephora or Macy's will ever show you.
Nice article. He correctly notes that vocabulary for describing odors is limited for most so reviews and descriptions trend quite "purple" and abstract. There is a vocabulary, though, but it'd take some time spent with some books and a perfume organ to make progress on that front.
I belong to the ban perfume group. I am allergic to most of them, it feels like someone is hitting me from inside my sinuses. And it is not because someone wears to much or smell to intensely either. Sometimes I barely smell it but it feels equally violently bad.
I wish I knew what is so irritating in so many perfume so I could militate to have that substance banned instead of being in the no perfume militia!
For me at least, most of the other debilitating chemicals appear in predictable and semi-avoidable contexts.
Traffic chemicals appear strongest on busy motorways with stagnant air, where people outside of cars don't spend much time.
Flower chemicals can cause problems but usually dissipate within 10 feet or so.
Fresh rain primarily eliminates free-floating chemical attacks and does not cause one itself.
Cooking is self-regulating because the person actively triggering the chemical emission is exposed much more strongly than people elsewhere even in the same room.
Grass can only be crudely avoided or mitigated during the seasons where it's problematic. (Thank God for COVID bringing awareness that masks make it physically easier to breathe.)
But perfume? You never know when you'll run across a person who chooses to be a targeted, walking violation of the Hague Convention. There's no way to mitigate this other than avoiding people entirely (which some people do choose to do, but which has negative side effects).
That said, in recent years I find the perfume from cleaning supplies or laundry supplies to be more problematic than the perfume from people.
It's never about the smell. There are many unpleasant scents out there that do not count as a chemical attack. And when specific flowers count as a chemical attack, their scent is still pleasant (and proportional).
I'm aware of petrichor existing. I'm not aware of it ever effecting a chemical attack the way perfumes do.
My point is: the chemical-attack portion of perfumes can far exceed the scent component. So even a modest application that most people can't even smell still counts as a targeted assault against some of us.
If I have my inhaler at hand, that feels like pulling knives out of my lungs - better than before, but the wound remains. But we don't expect people to get much work done if they've been stabbed today.
Sounds pretty messed up, from memory there are some new meds for allergic/immune things, I remember looking at one for my eczema but its not that severe so the sid-eeffects weren't worth
I’ve had allergic reactions to perfume twice in my life, years apart. Both times it became very difficult to breathe, like an asthma attack. Both times it was very clear exactly which person’s perfume was triggering it. Both times it resolved within a few minutes of leaving the room to get some fresh air. The first time I wasn’t completely sure what had happened, so I went back in and experienced the exact same thing twice more before giving up. The second time I was wiser.
It would be extremely annoying if that was a regular occurrence. Luckily I only seem to be sensitive to something rarely used.
As a perfume fan, I mostly wear perfumes if I'm staying outside or at home, less so if I'm inside with other people because it can be annoying. Not only this, but lately influences have "popularized" perfumes and we see much heavier perfumes being advertised. It can truly be annoying or nauseating to have someone with a "perfume aura" so strong that irradites around him/her
"Reverse the problem" is severely overstated. Admittedly it can be useful for people with potentially-fatal allergies, but otherwise it's often the equivalent of building scar tissue.
Living in a tropical country, I found myself with increasingly bad allergy symptoms. I went to a doc and had an allergy panel done that clearly showed I was allergic to a weed that flowers all year around (boo). They gave me a nasal spray steroid that, to my utter astonishment, quickly and permanently cured the allergy, with zero side effects.
I know I was lucky, but the point is that yes, it is sometimes possible to "reverse the problem".
My wife and at least one of my children are sensitive to perfume. They get headaches, at a minimum.
A bit east of Elkhart Indiana, there's a place that claims to sell "natural perfume". Does anyone who is perfume-sensitive have any experience with that? Is it possible that the chemicals used in "non natural perfume" are at the root of the sensitivity? (I haven't dared to test it on my wife, so I'd be interested in any reports.)
It's unlikely "natural" has anything to do with it. Compounds that occur naturally are often synthesized, but it's the same molecule as found in nature. (example: vanillin) There are some scent molecules that are totally new and not found in nature outside of our production, but "naturally occurring" is a broad category that can include all sort of things individuals are likely to be sensitive to even after removing all the "natural" chemicals that are actual poison.
Plenty of essential oils (what tends to be used in these) are aggressively irritating unless diluted to people without allergies. Even when diluted, I am allergic to some, and my wife is allergic to others, though we get different symptoms than "unnatural" perfumes.
Instead of migraines, it's closer to hay fever type allergies.
Most of them but not all of them. Dove and even Irish spring us ok (not that it smell great) however my wife had to throw away many fancier soaps she received from a cosmetics sampler subscription.
Essential Oils like fir needles, black spruce, orange, rosemary... don't affect me, I even like them (but I find lavender repulsive but it's not hurtful).
And I don't feel like going to an allergy specialist for something as superficial as this is a good use of my time since my coworker, friends and family are not into perfume.
Just here to commisserate and help the others who don't realize we exist that we do. Every time in my life I've had to lodge a complaint to an HR department, teacher, or whoever controls some indoor space to tell the other occupants that their scents can be quite irritating to others, I've felt terrible about it, like I'm deficient as a human and missing out on something others take great joy in.
But oh well. It does happen. I don't know what it is. It's not all scents, and sometimes it is things that don't have much of a scent at all. But I will never use any perfume, any product with scent added, and aerosolized anything at all is always a minefield. Even letting my wife clean can be hazardous, because whereas I am always careful to hold the spray bottle close to the surface, she'll shoot it into broad air, where it gets into my sinuses and gives me a massive headache for the next two hours.
I can't identify what it is that does it, but I can at least enumerate:
* Any and every perfume I have ever encountered, regardless of the specific scent.
* Any and every essential oil I have ever encountered.
* Any aerosol.
* Pump-sprayed solvents, including pure isopropyl alcohol diluted in water.
What doesn't irritate me:
* Food of any kind.
* Shit and untreated sewage.
* Rotting flesh.
Each of these may still smell quite terrible, even to the point that I have to flee like any other person with working scent receptors, but it doesn't feel like someone poured acid into my brain.
Iffy:
* Plants. I guess these just depend on whether I'm allergic to their specific pollen or not, but the scents themselves are not irritating in the same way.
If anyone else can find a pattern here, well, I'd be thankful.
I think we should engineer the perfume equivalent of a headphone: something plugged directly into the nostrils so that the smell doesn't offend too many people.
> Many would happily see it banned, knowing nothing about it other than that some people wear too much. That'd be like banning music because your neighbor's TV is too loud.
Eh, we get pretty angry about people going around with music in public spaces (and tend to require licensing for it) and I think we're right to.
While (human) vision is 3 colors, reviews of visual arts obviously can't just describe the colors of the thing. It also has shape, depth, style, etc.
Food reviewers don't note the levels of salt, sour, etc. They describe flavors and textures and parings.
But also, I don't buy that taste is just the composition of 5 components. This sounds like a reference to that diagram of the tongue we've all seen. It's as complex as scent is. There's no way you can define the taste of cinnamon by specifying some sort of 5-tuple.
I believe he is correct. The misunderstanding is from the old chart that showed certain tastes were only detected by certain parts of the tongue.
It’s still true that we can only taste salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. All other flavor complexities come from scent simultaneously giving us information. It’s why everything tastes so boring when you have a head cold.
Think about this, suppose you're on a Zoom call and you want a person on the other side of the call to match a color that you're seeing. You can say "make it more blue", "make it brighter", "shinier", etc.
You can get pretty close to what you're seeing this way.
Lucky Scent (mentioned in this article) has a boutique in LA. If you're nearby, you can go in and sample to your heart's content. Perfume boutiques are unfortunately rare but most large cities will have something and they're accessible and inviting in my experience. There really is a _lot_ more out there than what a Sephora or Macy's will ever show you.
Nice article. He correctly notes that vocabulary for describing odors is limited for most so reviews and descriptions trend quite "purple" and abstract. There is a vocabulary, though, but it'd take some time spent with some books and a perfume organ to make progress on that front.