At the beginning of the XXth century something completely new occurred in the life of many ordinary people. Electricity, huge buildings and central heating represented a new olfactory paradigm for several generations, affecting mostly those who came in big cities to start a new life. Suddenly, the fire, the smoke and the scent of candles, basic elements for many centuries, had almost disappeared from everyday life. But this amazing change, the new income and the help given by advertising, allowed the success of 2 other notes that came to fill the "emotional gap".
The scent of London and its color in the golden era of the Industrial Victorian Age was highly specific. New York with its high buildings, central heating and electricity was rather different at the turn of the new century.
The "house pipe" became the cigarette, smoked by women. True emancipation came much later. The "modern maiden" (also a song in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1917) or the working girl, smoking on street in highly fashionable clothes, was the opposite of the maiden working in large kitchens, almost always around fire and its scents (smoke, grease, oil). The cigarette was the unconscious response to the sudden olfactory change and its association with freedom and sex only increased the sales, when Edward Bernays applied the teachings of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, to the American market.
The disappearance of candles, with their specific strong scents, was simply translated worldwide by the success of aldehydic perfumes worn with beige dresses under opulent furs. The new girl was like a burning candle and the devotion and piety of the old world were replaced by the explosion of hidden desires. She had a slim slihouette in her beaded dress and a diamond Cartier tiara with a feather, sparkling in the night like a candle in a cold winter. "The Little Match Girl" of H.C. Andersen became the Queen of the Night. In this social transformation of an entire generation, the scents of cigarette and the aldehydic perfume played their role.
The fatty aldehydes, behind their characteristic notes, have all a fatty waxy note that is related to the main molecules found in a candle (stearic acid). Smell the warm drops of a raw candle, the C11 and C12 L aldehyde and then rub your fingers with some "beurre d'iris".
When women gradually found the aldehydic perfumes, and some in the 20's were even more aldehydic than Chanel No5, they adopted them immediately. This note was filling a recent gap inside their unconscious and this essential note became "beautiful".
Cigarette and strong aldehydes were the sublimated versions of two notes found in an universe both beloved and rejected - the small poor house before the arrival in the new Metropolis.
Scented candles are easy to produce and very effective to scent a room, but their popularity came much later. When electricity was new and was the symbol of modernity in the 20's and 30's, why would women buy a candle when other were still using them in their less modernist houses?
Something even more spectacular happened in the past 10 years. Aldehydic perfumes became old fashioned, but also "fat" became less popular. People became more conscious about their weight through diet. Meanwhile, they washed their body as they never did before, eliminating everyday the small molecules with a subliminal scent of fat / wax. Natural furs, with their faint "fatty" note, hidden behind the animalic connotation, are no more fashionable. Even cosmetics used other ingredients, as I explained in a different article. The modern universe has completely eliminated the wax / fatty note. The immediate response was the burst of the candle market. In fact, a candle in a very modern minimalist apartment, where cooking and heating are done without direct contact with fire, has a profound symbolic meaning. Another change was the success of a certain type of note indirectly related to wax that has been used widely in the past 10 years (it has been rarely a dominant note in perfumes).
Another big change is about to happen in our society. As smoke is seen as unhealthy and even forbidden, something else is replacing right now this element.
Our society is ruled by archetypes and these "rules" are as old as religion. The beauty of the perfume is universal but the adoption of a scent by a market follows the archetypes of scent, their relation and their presence within a specific scented area, from fragrance to the scent of home and the scent in your streets. Everything is lost and reappears under a new form. Everything is rediscovered.
Photos: Chanel dresses 1923/1924 from my collection
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Fragrance is the 8th Art - Octavian Coifan - Le Parfum est le 8ème Art
