How To Keep Money In A Safe From Smelling

Finger, Fluid, Liquid, Amber, Metal, Electronic component, Aqua, Bottle, Circuit component, Body jewelry,

Photograph by James Wojcik

Here's something you saw a lot at the contemporary art auctions at Christie's and Sotheby's in New York this past spring: old men. Maybe older men is the preferred term. They were certainly older than the women at their sides, uniformly tall and well-dressed companions who dared you to think they married for money. And maybe saw is the wrong verb. A more accurate one would be smelled.

I had a seat on the aisle, so at the end of the evening the exodus of older men passed right by me. I don't know what I expected from this propinquity—a stock tip, maybe?—but certainly not what I got, which was waves of citrus and nutmeg, horse saddle and fennel, veils of lavender, creamy hints of balsam and pearwood and marshmallow with a lingering powdery finish. It was just like The Matrix, only with fragrance: Time stopped, and for a moment you entered a bulge in the Hausdorff dimension where you could smell every molecule in an infinity of direction and scale.

Experts see mixed returns on this sort of investment. Studies by Alan Hirsch, director of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago, suggest that women find the scent of Good & Plenty, cucumbers, and banana-nut bread arousing. Cherries, barbecue, and, unfortunately for the high rollers, men's cologne seem to elicit the opposite response.

None of this bothered me. The older men were borne along on complex aromas that advertised their position, an SEC prospectus for the nose. One whiff and you could sense the marble shower and the Italian soap and the walk-in closet and the driver outside. You could sense the steps in private rituals they evolved as they built global conglomerates: the licorice toothpaste, the Benedictine foot crème, whatever they spritz on the sheets at the Prince Alexander Suite at Claridge's. Or maybe they have no time for such nonsense. Maybe they hire scent architects to do all that for them the way some people buy books in bulk through their decorators.

I have no shareholders to answer to, but I wanted to smell as though I did. At work the next day I plunged right in with bounty from T&C's beauty—er, grooming—closet. One fact helped me sort through the sheer quantity of products: The sense of smell is connected to the part of the brain programmed for survival. Smells inspire immediate reaction, using synaptic circuits that are more direct than thought. As a result, I recoiled from sandalwood and tuberose the way my forebears did from the smell of fire or Siberian tigers. I knew I didn't like it way before I figured out what it was.

But I also discovered promising elements: the balsamic aftershave from Acqua di Parma, the lemony L'Etrog Acqua cologne from Arquiste, a bitter orange skin toner from Aesop. I suspected, with no actual evidence, that the smell of money (or at least the smell of the moneyed) grew from the accumulation of such luxuries—not just the incomparably precious cologne but also the geranium scrub, the neroli shaving cream, the cucumber skin toner. Maybe what I really wanted was the kind of perfectly appointed life in which I could fret about finishing touches instead of recurrent crises. In the meantime, as I experimented with layering these scents, the reactions from those closest to me were less than appreciative. "You smell like weird jelly beans," my 10-year-old son said. "Too much going on," my wife said. "You're giving me a headache."

On their advice I tried to simplify. At this stage the first product I really loved surprised me: a minty foot cream, Crema Pedestre, from Santa Maria Novella, the Florentine apothecary that got into the perfume biz in 1533 when it made a special scent for the wedding of Catherine de' Medici. Massaging the stuff into my feet according to the directions made them tingle. It also did a number on my bald head one night, when I mistakenly rubbed it all over my skull in a jetlagged haze. Still, the former felt like the right combination: a fresh and elusive scent and a luxurious secret ritual.

In the course of educating my nose I began to recognize some of the scents from the sales rooms at Sotheby's and Christie's—the citrus, rose, and sandalwood Acqua di Parma, the salty date night confidence of Creed's Green Irish Tweed. I tried them all, and none of them worked for me.

Ben Krigler, who runs his family's 110-year-old perfume house, works with (or for) exactly the kind of perfumed gentlemen I caught wind of at the auctions, Middle Eastern sheiks and Texas oilmen who want not just a bottle but a concoction all their own. They pay $65,000 and up for a liter's worth of a truly custom scent, developed after interviews, questionnaires, and trial and error. Blaise Mautin, a French perfumer who scents the Bristol Hotel in Paris, had one customer, an L.A. CEO, who ordered five such special blends: one for his helicopter, his wife, himself, and his two daughters—in that order.

Maybe to find my signature scent I should just do what people in my profession normally do: steal from the great ones. The Creeds, who have been in the business since 1760, have reportedly made scents for George V, Winston Churchill (strong tobacco notes, naturally), Cary Grant, and Audrey Hepburn. I finally fell for the one Sigmund Freud ordered from the company in 1901. Sure, his phallocentric vision of our psychological depths may have fallen into disfavor, but his eau de cologne, Selection Verte, with its vivifying slap of neroli and peppermint, had a subtle scent still worthy of deep analysis.

I felt indebted to the older men at the auctions for their indirect mentorship, but nature seemed to have selected me for a different path—not just financially but as an agent of aroma. Apart from the base notes of tobacco and sandalwood, scents simply didn't stick on my skin, a fact that made the private rituals I had come to enjoy—the toner, the gel, the Moroccan shaving cream, the geranium exfoliant—even more private. I was buoyed by what Carlos Huber, the architect of Arquiste, had to say about a subtler approach to fragrance. "Perfume is not a paint," he told me. "Sophistication should not overwhelm you." •

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