Issue No. 20

I couldn’t hold my breath any longer. The spiel
was highly concentrated, and I was starting to
hyperventilate. But my Nose asked me to
muster one more inhalation. She wanted to
educate my nostrils. Her nose told her I didn’t
know my “Intuition” from my “Knowing”. Or, my
“Youth Dew” from my “Brut”.
“If you want to smell the world you need only to
come to the French Riviera. We can now
simulate the world’s most arousing animal
musk. Did you know ambergris is a substance
secreted by the digestive system of sperm
whales? And castor is produced by beaver
glands?”
There was a lot of talk about modern, high-tech
techniques and meeting the qualitative and
quantitative expectations of the modern
marketplace and making human beings smell
desirable in an ecologically desirable way.
Having finished the maceration rooms and
proud of myself for finding out that ylang-ylang
comes from a tree belonging to the custard
apple family, my next stop was “The
International Museum of Perfumery”.