Jacques Yves Cousteau`s name came up the other day, and I recalled having lunch with him years ago in a celebrity haunt called Fritzel`s at State and Lake Streets.
Three of us listened as Cousteau, the only celebrity in the group, talked about sex. It was his theory that Americans, unlike the French, were sexually inhibited because they bathed too often and used deodorants, scented lotions and colognes to remove, suppress and mask the natural odors of the body.
The natural scents of all mammals, the underwater explorer asserted, were powerful sexual attractants; human perspiration, he said, was a true aphrodisiac, though virtually unknown as such to Americans.
It was not easy to accept Cousteau`s thesis because–well, no one at the table that day would have accused him of bathing too often. He smelled like a dirty sock.
Whether Cousteau was right or wrong, Americans have been bathing and deodorizing themselves daily since the advent of network radio, when commercials for Lifebuoy soap added ”B.O.” to the household lexicon.
”B.O.” was short for ”body odor,” and Lifebuoy was guaranteed to stop it. Commercials for Arrid ”underarm” deodorant nonetheless warned against being ”half safe.”
Yet from the mid-1950s until the beginning of the 1980s, when herpes and AIDS intervened, Americans became at least as sexually active as the most cosmopolitan Frenchmen, and as the so-called sexual revolution thrived, so did the fragrance industry. The U.S. perfume business in 1980 reported annual revenues in the neighborhood of $2 billion.
Now that fears of chronic disease and hideous death have taken some of the fun out of being seductive, the fragrance industry, perhaps sensing trouble ahead, has dispatched brigades of young women to the aisles of America`s department stores to revitalize the national libido. Armed with spray bottles of cologne, these crack troops wait in ambush for unsuspecting shoppers. The stockbroker who ventures into Marshall Field`s to buy a gift for his wife is likely to emerge smelling like a gift for his wife.
For a time, shoppers were zapped with Andron, a Jovan cologne calculated to drive humans into frenzies of lust over members of the opposite sex. Andron contained a synthetic equivalent of alpha androstenol–a steroid found in male sweat. Alpha androstenol was said to be a pheromone.
Pheromones (pronounced FEAR-oh-moans) are chemical secretions that trigger a powerful sexual attraction. Insect species are peculiarly sensitive. A male gypsy moth can pick up a few molecules of a female moth pheromone, bombykol, from a distance of two miles. The male`s instinctive response is to locate that female and make little gypsy moths.
Not surprisingly, the discovery of pheromones in lower animals sent researchers off in a quest for a human pheromone–a universal eau de l`amour–and in 1980 a team of British scientists at the University of Warwick discovered alpha androstenol.
Although the British refused to claim great powers for their discovery, America`s mavens of marketing had long known that, even when contradicted by experience, hope springs eternal in matters of love and lust. The result, after a $10 million promotional campaign, was Jovan`s 1983 introduction of Andron. Although there was never a scientific reason to suspect that a male pheromone would attract males, Andron was sold as a women`s as well as a men`s cologne.
In a testimonial to Jovan, a 32-year-old woman who had smelled Andron on a 70-year-old physician reported: ”The scent went through my body. . . I wanted to let my animal instincts run free. . . My eyes were lighted with lust. . . My mouth started to fill with saliva. . . .” Otherwise, frenzies of lust have been exceedingly rare.
Independent scientists believe it unlikely that anyone will ever discover or devise a scent that by itself sexually attracts all women or all men to any or all members of the opposite sex. Human sexual attraction, they say, is too complicated. Just as scents cannot exist in a physical vacuum, neither are they perceived by humans in a psychological vacuum.
”A sexually arousing perfume for some could be, through association, a repulsive smell to others,” says Ralph Haber, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who specializes in senses and perception.
”With enough practice or conditioning, we can get to like almost any kind of smell, or get to dislike it.
”That doesn`t mean that some smells don`t have strong affective qualities for most of us. There certainly are a lot of smells that most people find attractive or repulsive, but almost all our reactions are learned.
”There are some smells that, without any experience or training, all cats will avoid. We don`t have any like that because evolution has simply gone the other way. For man–and for some of the primates, though not all of them
–the mechanisms for sexual attraction, mate determination, and mating are basically psychological.”
Says Richard Fay, professor of psychology at Loyola University of Chicago, who specializes in sensory systems and physiology: ”The human olfactory system is often said to be primitive; it seems to have been left behind. It`s also possible that the olfactory system evolved early and became very efficient right away, solving the problems it had to solve, and that was the end of its evolution. Smell is definitely a sense you can live without;
it`s certainly less important to human survival than vision or hearing.”
Perfume marketing sells images, much of it aimed at training humans to associate the product with love, romance, lust. Accordingly, Revlon is introducing Scoundrel Musk spray cologne, said to be ”unmistakably female, undeniably provocative”; a seductively posed Joan Collins lets you know that she ”never met a scoundrel I didn`t like.”
Parfums International Ltd. evidently hopes magazine readers will associate Parfum Decadence with a Helmut Newton photograph entitled ”L`Ultime Seduction.” ”Indulge in it now . . . Order today!” reads an accompanying hard sell. In behalf of Le Jardine de Max Factor, however, actress Jane Seymour counsels, ”If you want romance, you have to come on soft.”
Revlon`s three Fleurs de Jontue fragrances conjure up a woman of volatile amorous inclinations: Lotus de Nuit is ”for seductive moods.” Rose de Mai is said to be ”tender, quietly alluring.” Iris de Fete is said to be ”as fresh as the first wildflowers.” In adspeak ”fresh,” whether applied to bottled fragrances, soaps, shampoos or tampons, has always signified ”devoid of natural odors.”
”I would guess that most people buy the image or the label,” says Haber. ”If you have a highly tuned sense of smell and have paid close attention to fragrances, then you would be able to discriminate in the same way that some people who have a fine sense of art can discriminate when buying a painting. If you haven`t got it, you`ll buy the name; you`ll look at who painted the picture, and that will determine if you like it or not.”
For whatever reason a woman may think she has bought a perfume, she is taking a chance. How would a man know that a particular fragrance represents, say, the ”seductive mood” of Lotus de Nuit unless the woman tells all or, less likely, he himself happens to be a parfum connaisseur?
The object of her intentions may respond exactly as the would-be seductress hopes, but more likely he will respond more powerfully to qualities she did not buy in a bottle: her face and figure, her legs, her brains, her personality, whatever complex of traits arouses him. She may remind him of a woman in his past that he wanted but could not have; she may only remind him of Mom.
The danger is that he may be repelled if she happens to choose a fragrance that, for whatever reason, has unpleasant associations for him. Men take the same chances when they buy a cologne. Not all women are attracted to English Leather or Old Spice or Musk, and even if they were, it is not ordinarily enough to induce lust for someone she thinks is a nerd–unless she happens to be attracted to nerds.
Even the most avaricious perfume merchants counsel against using more than a hint of any scent. They know, as Haber puts it, that ”any stimulus that becomes very intense immediately becomes unpleasant.” To smell like a rose is one thing; to reek of roses is quite another.
That fact is both a boon and a curse to the elderly, whose sensitivity to scent sharply declines. They are thus protected from the overperfumed. But for the same reason does the perfume of some women whose gray hair has turned to blue often precede them, like Cyrano`s nose, by a quarter hour.
”Perfumes, colors and sounds echo one another.” — Baudelaire
(1821-1867)
”Nothing awakens a reminiscence like an odour.” –Victor Hugo, via Jean Valjean in ”Les Miserables,” 1862
