Contrarian Influencer (ROUND 3)
Let’s workshop this piece about how sophisticated consumers might be just as manipulable as mainstream audiences, perhaps even more so because of their belief in their own discernment.
scent of the day: Mississippi Medicine, by D.S. & Durga.—A cold and dry semi-headshop fragrance with a wearable-but-artsy feel positioning it (like Gucci Guilty Absolute) in that liminal space between niche and designer, Mississippi Medicine—inspired by a Mississippi-delta death cult that would burn human bodies in wood cabins back in 13th century—is a varnished cedar scent that (unlike its sweeter sibling Bowmakers) comes with a comforting medicinal edge of camphor (from the eucalyptus-like cascarilla) and a creosotic smokiness reminiscent of engine oil or kerosene (from the cade, violet, and birch)—the whole burnt package, with its clear industrial presence of turpentined wood and musty cloth gone sour with mold, evoking a stark impression in my mind (and which, strangely enough, makes it a perfect scent for a cowboy-booted Williamsburg Brooklyn hipster in the gentrification rage of the early 2000s): a vodou-leaning catholic church (full of frankincense thuribles and varnished pews) burning down along with some nearby trees (camphorous spruce, sappy pine, earthy cypress) on a gray rainy day as a result of gasoline arson (gasoline still perceptible along with hints of metal and meat perhaps from trapped victims).
Contrarian Influencer
Imagine a perfume house ravenous to maximize its metastatic reach. Superficial populations—strange Kardashian emptiness in their responses, their laughter, their eyes—are already in the bag, their critical faculties chloroformed by glowing reviews from YouTube influencers bought with free bottles. But what about those potential buyers who want art-driven as opposed to profit-driven fragrances? What about those self-mythologized aesthetes—too discerning to be counted among the sheeple—who fancy themselves connoisseurs immune even to the most twerkific marketing ploys? How might this house, this olfactory pocket predator, sway these above-it-all loathers of the aquatic freshie (Acqua di Bah) and the reptile-brain commercialism for which it stands in every Ulta and Sephora?
One strategy, already in play for all we know, banks hard enough into dystopia as to have been hatched in the cigarettes-for-feminists dreams of Edward Bernays or in the cereal-for-nonmasturbating-children dreams of John Kellog. The house could plant a sleeper agent in the guise of a contrarian influencer who will never, not once, say “smash that like button.” His main job, however much tucked behind the legerdemain of disinterested chronicler of the perfume tradition, will be to trash the current offerings of the house (and its competitors too, of course) for being “soulless cash grabs. I just can’t stand it. What happened to the Amouage of old? What’s become of Creed? The world doesn’t need anymore corporate sewage. All their releases have that amber-woods drone—an olfactory analogue to that botoxed alien plump all the women I see: plastic monocrop for a TikTok world.”
Like the coconut-banana of frangipani might barnyard-fecality of assam oud, genuflection at the feet of vintage bottles will balance out the critical content. “The vintages,” he will repeatedly stress, “not their neutered reformulations”—this way his praise, being for corpses next to impossible to acquire, will not threaten current market share. Breaking up the monotony of his condemnation for newer stuff (this way his audience has at least tentative reason to harbor hope for the future), he will on occasion applaud certain “artisanal houses that have managed—for now at least—to avoid the Estee Lauder clutch.” But even here he will make sure to weave in condemnation of the provoke-no-challenge approach of every mass-market designer (including the house pulling his string like Palpatine): “too concerned with the bottom line ever to risk the burning-tire accords of Andy Tauer or the barnyard oud of Bortnikoff or the pissy animalics of real-civet vintages like YSL’s Kouros before the days of IFRA overreach.”
The cost of such eviscerations, no matter how ruthless, is negligible. Those with artisanal-niche sensibilities, after all, were not going to buy the current line anyway or bat an eye at the house itself. The potential benefit, on the other hand, is tremendous. However counterintuitive the strategy might seem to myopic eyes (a strategy reminiscent of computer chess engines like Deep Blue or AlphaZero sacrificing queens and bishops early on for downstream positional advantage), the payoff comes into relief—like twilight stars—with a patient look into the distance. Whether hired from the start to run the long con of building credibility among the uppity crowd or simply manipulated in such a way not to realize he operates exactly how the company wants him to do (perhaps, for instance, the house years later flatters him, with the help of a big check or offers of under-the-table consultation employment, for “tough criticisms that we have taken to heart and hope to rectify with the help of your sensitive nose and knowledge of the history of the art”)—whatever the case, after rounds of passionate mockery the YouTuber (switched on and fully operational, so to say) the trojan horse will finally open up in the most vulnerable hour.
“The newest releases, I’m downright shocked to say it (and just as I was about to give up entirely on the house)—yep,” he will take a closed-eyed whiff of his arm, “they break, I mean straight up shatter, the mold of commercial vapidity that has been the rule for far far too long.” He will then drive the praise home with the help of context his subscribers have come to expect. “To put this in context, yesterday I wore the original Caron Tabac Blond. What I have on right now”—another quick sniff—“is just as well blended as that masterpiece from over a hundred years ago! And the thing is, they could’ve gotten away with sheit blending. The ingredients—” he will nosedive into his arm once again. “God, they’re just that fucking good. Excuse my language, but I gotta say it.” His eyes will close again, rapture manufactured. “I’d almost swear they used real oakmoss (I’m talking Mitsouko tier)—even real deer musk or Russian Adam hyrax.”
He will nosedive again for some hypnotic moments of appreciative silence, pushing the length of the silence almost too much like late-stage Miles Davis. “Oh man, now in the dry down I’m getting the sea, like deep ocean—briny, umami, seaweed ocean. Choya loban, choya nakh—you know? Even if the musk is synthetic (which it could very well be: this is just a first impression)—even if it is, the ambergris in here isn’t just some calone-ambroxan accord. No, this’s the real deal. I mean look at this.” He will hold up a bottle. “This is Areej le Doré’s Atlantic Ambergris II. The ambergris on my arm right now blows the Areej Le Doré away. I mean—away. Ambergris has gotten prohibitively expensive. I really don’t see how they’re managing to do this at this price point. I expect this thing to shoot up. Get a backup bottle now is my advice.” Although this might be pushing it (especially if the house did not make sure to have included certain niche elements at least at recessive enough levels so as not to offend mediocre sensibilities), he might even go so far as to say—in what would be a brilliant stroke—“And you know what? Maybe I was too harsh on the earlier work. I mean, this is pure art in a bottle. It can’t just becoming from nowhere.”
His on-screen change of tune, his bowled-over expressions at the house’s prodigal-son pivot, will move the resistant population—street cred earned through years of shared disdain—to start buying. Even just a sliver of their wallets would be a victory. Consider how susceptible smell is to marketing (as we get one of the purest examples of in the Orto Parisi line: its comparatively mediocre offerings boosted to must-have heights by the over-the-top narrative surrounding them). Consider as well how much heady creatures like us, evermore alienated from direct experience in our neurotic state of cyber aloneness, prefer hyperreality’s talk about sensation over reality’s direct sensation. In this case, the stratagem—even if the house alters not one thing about their ambroxan-overload cheapo style (adding not even one rugged drop of TSVGA-reminiscent skunk cabbage or goat hair tincture) is perhaps not as far-fetched as less cynical minds might imagine.
