Today I'm enjoying wearing Be Delicious for men by DKNY. It's a simple scent that has a beautiful but indescribably blunt effect. This effect is perfectly iconic of any good American design house and a clear distinction of what separates 21st century from 20th. The warm undertone of apple is more than just a pleasing soft fruit, it's iconoclastic.
Like most fragrance enthusiasts I always measure my collection, as medium-sized as it is right now, based on wearability, however my idea of wearability is very open-minded. It will be hard to catch me using any cliche phrase such as "___ smells too synthetic". This example being because I am convinced all fragrance is highly synthetic in nature. These oils and minerals and other organic matter don't occur in these combinations in nature, so why should we create a dichotomy of synthetic vs. non-synthetic? Regardless, I find almost everything to be wearable because something in my own innate experience of the world lets me truly enjoy a large variety. I'm wearing something different almost every day because I truly do enjoy this vast assortment, each scent with its own merits and mood.
I don't really want to vilify the contemporary model of judging fragrance that tends to divide everything between wearable/good and non/wearable bad about 50/50. The system works fine but it's just not for me. I prefer to look at fragrance from my own brand of point of view which finds every fragrance somehow endearing. The purpose of descriptors and loose ratings if everything is "good"? It's the search to justify fragrance, to search out an ultimate rationalization of its aesthetics, even if its something universally "bad" by industry standards. Nothing I mention here will ever be considered "bad" by me, and if something ever was just generally "bad" in my opinion, it wouldn't be worthy of mentioning here at all anyways.
Above all else I love the arts, but more specifically I love art as a verb, and my favorite sense is the sense of smell. "Bad" scents are merely labelled bad because the combination of elements in a particular fragrance trigger something in our brain, and universally "bad" scents tend to trigger a negative reaction in the parts of our brain that make sense out of our collective societal experience. 99.9% of the time, this is a memory, object, person, place, or something associated with a fragrance's element. In this way scents are "dreaming while awake." "Good" scents will lead us, and most of us in our generation, whichever that may be defined as, to a feeling of having a good dream. We know it's real because we experience it mentally and physiologically, but it's not tangible in person. This is what makes fragrance an art that can't be made better or sophisticated to be better. Of course we're nearing the time when we can generate digital smells, based on a "printer" that is a grid of hundreds of oils and essences, but even then it's that programming that will require a gentle touch and the mental accounting of aesthetics to put it into action.
Enough with the serious! I really do think about other things than my own ego-centric view on aesthetics, but I figured that this would be a great jumping off point to get me interested in my own life's comprehension via record again. I'm a simple guy in general, so it helps to organize myself in this manner. I'm looking forward to establishing a small presence to be somewhat of a scent whisperer, but again, I am NO expert.
Please stay tuned for more detailed reviews, stories, and other sundry tidbits relating to fragrance and some that may not be so related.
Peace out!
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