During the months of July and August, the IAO teamed up with Mediamatic in Amsterdam in experimental project enfleuraging redheads, led by IAO board member and bon-vivant, Kendra Gaeta.
Our attempt was an effort to recreate the central scent conceit from the novel “The Perfume: Story of a Murderer” by Patrick Süskind: To extract the smells of various lovely people in order to re-create the seductive perfume that eventually led to the death by orgy of the main character in the book.
This orgy scene, incidentally, was imagined in aroma by the great perfumer Christophe Laudamiel (there he is, to the right!) for the coffret once offered by Thierry Mugler back in 2006. If you’re curious about Christophe and his brilliant mind, check out his interview with Maxwell Williams in Episode 3 of Scentless Apprentice, which aired on July 31, 2018 on dublab.com. And if you’re ever at the Institute for Art and Olfaction in L.A., ask us to smell the scent he made for the orgy scene. We have it in our archives.
But back to the topic at hand!
Who hasn’t read ‘Perfume: Story of a Murderer’ by Patrick Süskind? You should! But, here’s a redux: Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with a super-nose, but with no smell of his own. A social outcast, he embarks upon a project of creating the most enticing human smell by embalming redheads in fats in a twist on an old process known as ‘enfleurage’. Maybe it’s an attempt to connect to his fellow humans? Maybe he’s a simple sociopath? Either way, it backfires. When he wears the scent, he’s violently torn apart by a lustful crowd, in a lovely metaphor for the destabilizing forces of lust, desire, and orgies.
Led by IAO board member Kendra Gaeta, we tried to replicate this fictional scenario (and yes, knowing full well that it might fail). We put the call out to Amsterdam’s exhibitionist redhead population, inviting interested parties for two-hour sessions in which Kendra covered our new friends in bandages soaked in vegan fats (coconut 0il and shea butter, for the curious). They then sat in Mediamatic’s sunny (and hot) Panorama Studio, sweating into the fat, while Kendra did her very best to entertain them. If you haven’t met Kendra, she’s pretty entertaining.
But there was a rub: A human enfleurage is harder with animate beings. Not being murderers, we preferred to adapt our strategies.
From Kendra: “Since our people were breathing, active people who didn’t want to lie in a tub of fat for 24 hours, we used their aromatic bandages – versus their aromatic bodies – for the actual enfleurage. We collected the scents on their bodies using the oils and bandages, and then placed the bandages into larger trays of vegetable fat.”
In the book there were about a dozen women treated in this way, but we thought we might be able to get equivalent results with a few less people. We also chose to do a mix of women and men. These are modern times, after all, and we’re pro equal-opportunity fetishization.
To our redheads, we issued the following warning: “Participating would require a certain degree of comfort with your own body and its smells, as you would be nude for the bandaging. We would also ask you not to bathe for a day before the enfleurage. We would consider all our subjects as collaborators in this experiment. Your individual scents will be anonymized, and – ultimately – mixed into an über-redhead aroma.”
Results will be shared as they come in, but here – meanwhile – are some photos, taken by Maxwell Williams and Saskia Wilson-Brown.
