London was farting. On a Wednesday morning in April, London was farting and belching, breathing its stale-onions-and-liver breath, and here in Mayfair, refuse and dog crap were being washed off its cobbled streets. London smelled of stale cigars and bad body odor, moldering cabbage and pungent Limburger, when along came Roja Dove, striding in a bright, perfumed cloud, floating across the street to avoid the fish-market offal and sanitation truck, the diamond rings on his fingers glinting, his Hermès scarf the color of an aqua-and-violet rainbow. In a teal silk jacket, he smelled of cinnamon and leather...and something else, something powdery but unplaceable, and yet somehow familiar. He smelled of some otherworld, a place where everything was connected to a deep, fond, moving river of Memory.
But for now, let’s just say the man smelled damn good.
I was trailing Roja Dove through his hometown, wafting my own lame hotel soap, trying to ride in his fragrant wake, for on this day, at this hour, in this post-hedonistic landscape of stinkiness, there truly was no better, or safer, olfactory place to be. Roja—an arcane spelling of his given name, Roger, which he chose for himself at age 11—was leading me to lunch at The Wolseley, one of his spots, and he was walking and talking briskly, mind aflame, nostrils alert.
Roja Dove—who, at 58, is a stock-straight six feet and handsome with lantern jaw, blue eyes, and impeccably combed silvering hair on the sides of an otherwise tanned bald head—may possess the finest nose in the world. It is modest, bulbous only in the slightest way, with two different-size nostrils (the left being larger, as well as being the one with which he claims to smell most). And through it, remarkably, he says he can identify approximately 800 different scents, an entire history of fragrance, really. But even before his thirty-three years in the business, his nose did magical things. For instance, it once saved him and his home when he caught the faintest whiff of smoke in time to prevent a full-blown fire. And in its professional capacity, his nose has brought him as a guest to Buckingham Palace, 10 Downing Street, the Kremlin.
Along with his other accolades and honors, he was the first Professor of Perfume, a title he was given during his twenty years with the Guerlain family, for whose fragrance company he worked as its premier "nose." He was the first perfumer to be asked to open a shop at Harrods, where tucked away on the sixth floor, in a warren of glass and glitz, he sells not only his own line but a carefully curated collection of other small-batch makers’, his own statement against the tyranny of industrialized perfumes. To date, there are eight men’s fragrances in his line: Fetish, Scandal, Enigma, Reckless, Danger, Goodman’s, Vetiver, and the eponymous Roja, a fragrance he designed for himself to wear. The demands on his schedule are myriad: On this spring day, he was just in from Baku, Azerbaijan (a place that fascinated him for its mash-up of Belle Epoque and Communist-era architecture), with plans to visit Italy and then New York.
When he’s not traveling, training his employees, unveiling new scents, lecturing at museums, and teaching us—all of us who’ve forgotten—how to smell again, or really smell in the first place, he’s working with up to ten clients a year from around the world to do something seemingly preposterous: create a scent that is the essence of that person, that they can wear, ideally, forever. The process involves meetings and soul-searching, sniff tests and months of trial and error. Often an intense intimacy develops that ends in Dove presenting his client with a bespoke fragrance, costing more than $40,000 for 3.4 ounces, dear for both the finest raw materials therein and the master’s time. "There are typically two types who come to me," says Dove. "The really wealthy, who want what no one else can have, and then those who scrape and cobble everything they have because fragrance plays such a central role in their life."
Back here, on this spring morning in Mayfair, Roja Dove—like the rest of humanity—found himself in a war zone of skatole and skunk. "There are real disadvantages to having this nose, too," he said. "Smells can be crippling. I had to stop taking the Tube years ago. I walk instead—as best as possible, on the fragrant side of the street."
Now he paused, did a little scuttle step to avoid a still smoldering cigarette in the street, a muddy hunk of something else. Fetid water ran in the gutter; an invisible war raged between the bright cloud of violet and cedarwood that haloed Roja Dove and the rest of the world’s reeking of bad vinegar. "Some people can’t live without putting on their fragrance each morning," he said. "And I happen to believe it makes you infinitely happier if you do."
With that he winked, leapt the curb to cross the street, then quickened his pace to outrun all the misery and dreck running down that Mayfair drain.
I always fancied myself one of those who could live without. A scent, that is. I’d never bought a bottle of cologne in my life, never dabbled in Drakkar Noir before the big high school date or Polo before the prom. As a kid, I watched Bugs Bunny cartoons, and for some reason Pepé Le Pew, the indomitable French skunk pursuing his would-be kitty paramour, left his mark on me, became an instant emblem of odoriferous hubris, hedonistic bad behavior. He was an entry-level Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a rookie Marquis de Sade.
However ridiculous that sounds, it’s true: I’m blaming a cartoon character for a lifetime spent in a fragrance-free desert.
But then, it would appear that Pepé Le Pew didn’t have the same effect on the rest of the populace. And maybe this is part two of why I once so eschewed eau de toilette, or by my translation, "the water of toilet": I didn’t want to smell like an old man, or worse… an actual toilet. (In this usage, toilette, of course, means water for washing, or some such, but again, my misguided association was with the actual porcelain bowl.) Besides, the fragrance wearers I most noticed, who demanded attention with their horrific torrents of "scent," seemed to always overdo it.
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All of this was my unenlightened thinking, set in amber over decades, before meeting Roja Dove. But then, when I first caught a whiff of the man at tea in the little café next to his Harrods parfumerie, the universe expanded a little and my whole paradigm shifted. What would it take for me to smell so good? thought I. And how much better would the days of my life actually be if I did?
If nothing else, Roja Dove believes that everyone deserves to smell good. Yes, he said, everyone deserves to find a scent, big or small, bright or complicated, fougère or chypre, made of beautiful materials (the lavender of Grasse; the vetiver of Réunion island) that might mix with your skin and alchemically bring you closer to "your truest self." For him, this wasn’t the whistling piffle of a snake-oil salesman, this was what he’d staked his life’s work on as a student, historian, maker, and lover of scent. Roja Dove believes that by test and experimentation—by a sort of psychoanalysis via fragrance—you can find the flavors and smells that connect you both to the here and now and to memories of the past.
And yet he knew such talk sounded perhaps overly idealistic in an industry that has turned to mass production and, in his opinion, crass circus barking. "In the end, I think most people don’t really smell perfumes," he said as his tea was delivered and poured. "We smell marketing—and that’s why I think so many people end up unfaithful to fragrances: because they’re buying into something, which is other than how something true smells." He stirred his tea precisely, fiddled with the diamond brooch on his teal jacket. "What I love about fragrance," he continued, "is that it’s nonjudgmental. It ignores age, gender, race. It’s kind to everybody. And it’s capable of really truly changing you."
At first I was reflexively skeptical. But that thing he was wearing, that wafting spice and fig, had me nodding my head yes, yes.
"When you really smell, you smell with your brain," he said, "with the primitive parts of your brain where all emotion and memory is processed. If most people are trying to find a scent for their ego, I’m trying to make a scent for your id."
Then he asked, quite curiously, why I’d never worn a fragrance myself. I told him about overly smelly people and Pepé Le Pew and some of the uptight stigmas that once and still govern our masculine culture. He tsk-tsked at the last of what I said. "I have so many men who come up and say they wish they could dress like me," Dove says, "and I ask back, quite seriously, ’What’s stopping you?’ "
He said that he wanted to take me through the sort of ercise he performed with his bespoke clients by way of introducing me to the real mysteries and joy of perfume, something he had planned for me the next day at his Mayfair home. It would involve scent sticks, conversation, and trying to find "a fragrance family" for me. So would this be his effort to convert me?
Most Popular"The really interesting thing about this work," he said, "is that you have no idea how people are going to react. They’ll suddenly smell something, and something crashes back at them. It really takes them by surprise. People say it’s like going to see a shrink. I’m not meaning to, but I’m making them think about things—memories of people and laces—that they would have sworn they had forgotten." Scent was like this, too, he said, a portal to some place inside us that contained risk and revelation. "The smell brings it back in Technicolor," he said. "Some of my clients end up in puddles."
His obsession, as he remembers it, started with the bottles that sat on his mother’s vanity. The bottles themselves were intricate, antique, full of alluring liquid. One night she came through the door to put him to bed. She was backlit and wore a floral scent; around her was an aurora of light, and her gold necklace was glimmering. If he thought himself visited by an angel, his fate was sealed the moment her lips touched his head. The fragrance, the gold, his mother’s love—all became one thing, leaving their Proustian mark.
Soon he was visiting local shops in Brighton and Chichester and stores like Harrods and Selfridges in London. Everywhere he went, he spent his hard-earned money to collect the bottles. (Even today, Roja Dove’s collection is outstanding, including Lalique’s first bottle and Jean Patou’s Normandie, as well as gems like Chanel Nos. 2, 11, and 22.) He was a smart child, a precocious one, who went on to Cambridge, where he began his studies in medical research, but shortly dropped out to pursue a modeling career. All the while, though, he was driven by this growing fixation on fragrance.
Five Scents That’ll Drive Women Wild
Most PopularAramis
Aramis
A beautifully structured chypre, it balances leather with freshness and the sweet sensuality of white blossoms. As much of a legend as the hero it was named after.
Santos de Cartier
Cartier
This creation blends ultra-soft balsams, which give an incredible lingering effect, with smooth, soft leather scents, resulting in an effect that seems effortless.
Antaeus
Chanel
Antaeus redefined leather notes in the modern fragrance. It was a victim of its own success and sadly has been forgotten.
Terre d’Hermès
Hermès
I love this creation. Its self-assured character has an unmistakable presence through its diffusive, spicy aspect, but it is never intrusive.
Reckless Parfum Pour Homme
Roja Parfums
I imagined an irresistible, dynamic man who always gets what he wants and isn’t frightened of taking risks. Reckless maybe, foolish never.
He wrote letters to the House of Guerlain, one of the oldest and most famous parfumeries of France, firing a fusillade of questions. What is Mitsouko? How is Sous le Vent made? A fan, yes—but with an incredible grasp of fragrance and its history. The letter writer surely couldn’t be so young. But he was. On his twenty-first birthday, he visited the Guerlain parfumerie in Paris as a gift to himself.
"That changed my life," Dove says. "I smelled a lot of rare scents that are now discontinued. It seemed so exotic and grand—somehow otherworldly. I imagine it was the same sensation as a Catholic might experience when meeting the Pope. It truly was like entering an olfactory nirvana. I knew from the minute I walked in the door what I was going to do for the rest of my life."
Soon after, he found himself working for the Guerlain family itself (they claimed he knew more about their history than they themselves did), traveling back and forth from Paris to Grasse, known as the world’s perfume capital, in the South of France. It was heady stuff, and the Guerlain partnership lasted two decades, during which time the perfume business changed in radical ways. Where the best natural materials were once harvested and processed on small family farms and at local businesses, larger international conglomerates and detergent companies moved in, buying up everything, relocating operations abroad, substituting synthetic materials for the natural ones.
"Of course, we need some synthetic materials in perfumes," says Dove. "If I gave you a 99 percent cotton T-shirt with 1 percent elastic or spandex, I’m using this synthetic ingredient to give shape to the natural one. When I work, that is sort of what I do. But if I were to make a T-shirt that was 99 percent spandex or elastic, it won’t breathe, it isn’t comfortable. Synthetic perfumes will always smell artificial. That’s because it’s just sitting on you. It’s masking, not mingling, with your skin."
And yet this was the other shift that Dove witnessed: With the rise of the big brands came a crushing hegemony, and monotony, in the market, an utter lack of derring-do. "Everything has become very boring," he says. "I think most men still will look at an ad to see if the scent is for them. And that said, I’m sure in the American Midwest or the Midlands of Britain, some of the old [masculinity] stigmas are alive and kicking.
Most Popular"You’d think that the French would be the most open-minded, but French men are so inward-looking. Really, it’s Middle Eastern men who are the most adventurous. You’ll go somewhere extraordinarily alpha male, like Saudi Arabia, and see two men in a shop talking about how they want to smell. They don’t distinguish between male and female fragrances. They’ll wear Chanel No. 5 if they want."
What Dove has always thrilled to, then, is the quest: to try to introduce his clients to a fragrance they’ve never actually met before, even if its composite parts are pleasantly recognizable or break a certain mold of cceptability. But it took leaving Guerlain, and the cataclysm of his parents’ deaths—both in their eighties—to launch him on his own trajectory.
Powerful as Roja Dove’s ghost was in the industry, he’d had no physical presence. No parfumerie to call his own, no product. So he’d taken a tireless year to think and plot, to meet with friends and begin a full sketch of what would become Roja Parfums, a small, personalized line of fragrances with his touch on everything from the handmade bos to the oversize crystal bottle top that looked a little like the diamonds his mother once wore. The rollout in England in 2011 was a smash—"There was my life savings in bottles and caps, but it felt right"—and less than two years later, he found himself at Bergdorf Goodman, in New York City, before the press, for the U.S. rollout. It was a moment, he says, when destiny sort of sneaks up on you. "I was so overcome I couldn’t speak," he says.
When he came home, his longtime partner, Peter Causer, pointed to his bruised arm, asking what on earth had happened. "And I said, ’What do you mean?’ It turned out, I’d been pinching myself and I bruised my arm—not figuratively, but factually."
Dove hadn’t seen this coming in 2004, when George Hammer of Harrods invited him to have a cup of tea and discuss Dove’s opening Harrods’s iconic haute parfumerie. (Dove’s fragrance, Aoud, would later become one of the largest rollouts in the store’s history.) Clients, both bespoke and otherwise—Dove protects their privacy, but he’ll name them by labels such as "my Russian gentleman" or "my East End actress"—have been known to drop $50,000 in a shopping trip. And yet each phase of his career has been governed and sparked by the same ever abiding olfactory curiosity, the search for some new ideal: the jasmine from Grasse, the amyris from Haiti.
"Sometimes I think about Cleopatra," he says. "Master of one-third of the world. I’ve always wondered, really, how beautiful was she? Or was she just the world’s greatest manipulator? It was said you could smell her approach from miles away. So just how redolent was the air?
"I mean, what did she smell like?"
Truth be told, I’d been a little uncertain in Roja Dove’s presence. It wasn’t just his polymath mind or maxim-making, his personal brand of charisma and amazing wardrobe, all that I lacked. I kept wondering if the actual smell of my body—I didn’t seem quite worthy of having a scent yet—was displeasing to the greatest nose in the world.
Most PopularBefore seating ourselves in the living room of his petite Mayfair town house, then, before "my little ercise," before Roja Dove unfolded a leather case on his desk to reveal 200 or so glass bottles with dabbers, before he set a contraption on his desk that looked like a miniature metal windmill to which he attached feather-shaped scent-stick blotters, Roja had done a remarkable thing at lunch. He’d gazed out at the people congregated in the buzzing dining room at The Wolseley, and for fun he scanned the crowd, identifying people he didn’t know and then guessing at what scent family they might be wearing, just by their style of dress or how they comported themselves. He did this with an astrologer’s panache, by dividing personality types into families of fragrances: fougères (including citrus and lavender), chypres (warmer scents of patchouli and bergamot), orientals (the most sensual, often overdosing on vanilla), and florals.
"Take this gentleman," he said, discreetly motioning to a man across the room. "Dressed in a showy way, a little loud, confident—I’m going to guess he’s wearing an oriental fragrance. People who like these types of perfumes tend to be a bit larger-than-life." And why was this? he asked, stabbing the asparagus on his plate. "Because usually underneath they’re a little insecure. When you come across vanillic scents, whether the association is with ice cream, cake, or biscuit, the vanilla subconsciously makes somebody feel very secure. We learn that security is a kiss and a treat. So the big character, who inside is vulnerable, loves these very large perfumes, because inside it feels like a safety thing."
Sure enough, when the man walked by, Roja tilted his head a little, drew in the air as he passed with his left nostril, and smiled. "Exactly," he said. "Fragrance is all about the secret underneath."
By way of example, he offered one of the many remarkable requests he’d entertained through the years, this one in 2007, which perhaps gilded his legend as the Pornographer of Perfume, as one fragrance blogger had it. There was to be an exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London focused on social attitudes toward sex from antiquity through the modern era. "It wasn’t a salacious exhibit," Dove assured me. "It was more dignified. They asked me if I would create a scent that was sex itself, and I said, ’Well, of course.’ How could I not?"
What Dove had in mind wasn’t an in-your-face sort of "shocking smell." "If a man is looking at a woman across the room," he said, "and her blouse is open and she bends forward, he hopes to see a bit of her breast. He can be transfid by it—and will keep looking for it. I wanted to put on the idea of suggestion."
So he played with various scents for months. "Jasmine and ylang-ylang give a lot of indole," he said. "And we humans produce indole wherever we have pubic hair. It’s gathered at the base of the hair shaft. Traditionally it’s why women remove their body hair, because of the indole. It’s why hairy men have been considered more virile. So I took a lot of materials around an indolic structure, and I also used a material called skatole, which I’m sure you can imagine is a very ugly molecule that makes a feces smell. A man and woman’s genitals are right next door to the anus, so a little whisper of skatole in the background and you’re right there, getting down and dirty."
Most PopularThe key, of course, was proportion, he said. "If you up the volumes, what you make is vulgar, apart from maybe one or two people who might like it. I wanted it to whisper a little."
Dove described being at the gallery on opening day as both proper old ladies and mod hipsters arrived. "I sprayed the scent on each person," he said, then let it linger. After a while, he said to those he sprayed, "Do you mind if I say something a little candid? In a minute, that scent will smell like a crotch. And everyone, I swear on my mother’s grave, went—’Oh yes.’ And then, a moment later, they said, ’Well I quite like it!’ Whether the person was a man or woman, gay or straight, everybody smelled this smell as the smell of crotch. It was everybody’s experience of going toward the hidden land."
Now in his living room realm, sitting among fresh-cut flowers and antique perfume bottles, among glass and light, Roja Dove put on his reading glasses and began to dab the scent strips. His trade seemed equal parts science and art. And a little bit of alchemical suggestion, too. So—was he going to make me smell like sex or a tennis ball, whale vomit or beaver anal secretion? And what if he did? As we sat there, he returned to Topic A, the impositions placed on our wildest inclinations and senses by society. Or as he put it: "I think it’s a shame that most people don’t allow themselves to succumb to abandonment. There is something in the extreme, fascinating and fabulous, about the idea of wanting abandonment, because society tells us you never should."
So was wearing fragrance—as opposed to drinking an exotic bottle of wine or gorging on tiramisu until you resembled Marlon Brando—a means to achieving it?
Most Popular"Of course," he said.
Dove, so animated and quick to laugh until now, turned very calm and serious, and handed me two scent strips. The idea was to have them face off in a blind sniff test, picking my favorite as we went but without a clue as to what the ingredient actually was.
"Take one in either hand," he began. "When you put it under your nose, the scent in your right is really going to smell quite fresh and slightly citrus with warmth behind it. Keep it under your nose—and when you swap to the scent in your left hand, you will smell something very deep, with very little freshness, lots of leather and spice, warm. When you come back to the first scent, there’s a brightness and freshness, with movement, not as sweet as it was before, but a touch of sweetness. And if you come back to the other now: Here you get this leather, spice, with very deep accord; at the same time it’s soft and balsamic, not a hard scent, a roundness. Choose which one and keep it.…"
And so our ping-pong went as follows, Roja intoning—This fragrance is very soft.… This has huge depth…thinner, higher up…warm, with tobacco…very structured, tailored.… This one is a rocket!
And in response, I said things like: Wow.… If I could turn this down a couple of notches…my father’s pipe…a glass without the red wine in it… I feel as if I’m about to get married.… A library book … That smells like the back of my mom’s closet where I hid as a kid playing hide-and-seek….
At the end, I was left holding one scent stick in my hand.
"We have a winner," declared Roja Dove, beaming.
I sat there with the victorious scent strip in hand, wearing a pleased if slightly befuddled expression—was I or the scent strip the actual winner here? Then the perfumer asked me to look at the bottom of it, where I saw three little stars etched in pen. Why?
He said he’d put the stars there that morning, to signify the one he knew I’d pick. But how? I felt almost like that patron at The Wolseley. Was I that transparent?
It was the vetiver, the warm Indian grass known for its smoky and earthy oil.
But what did it say about me?
"Well," said Dove, "I’m going to go out on a limb—something I wouldn’t normally do with most clients—and tell you a few things from your various responses." Already I’d forgotten my various responses, for whatever I blurted had been reflexive, without censor. Throughout, however, Roja Dove had been Sherlock Holmes-ing me, writing deliberately in his notebook.
Usually, he said, he’d run through 200 scents like this with a client. And the whole process of making a bespoke fragrance could last a year or two. It started with the scent strips, the client winners being gathered, a fragrance family picked. Then Dove would sit and daydream, for months maybe, dabbing raw material on the scent strips, attaching them to the metal windmill and spinning it to see what found its way to his nose. He worked on discovering the fid, or base, notes, the most long-lasting; then the heart, or middle notes, that act as the real character of the scent; and finally, as Dove puts it, "the fireworks on top, the welcome at the door," meaning the first volatile scents that boldly meet your nose and soon dissipate. Once he felt he had a suitable rough combination, he began making a small batch in a test bottle to see how it really smelled when mingled with skin. "It’s like sketching. You keep doing it until the painting announces itself," he said. "Sometimes you send it to a client and go back to the drawing board. Sometimes they can barely speak because the scent so overwhelms them, in a good way."
Most PopularEven in our truncated ercise, with our test run of thirty materials, he claimed there were things he could guess about me, directions he’d otherwise go if he were to build me a fragrance from scratch. "Indulge me," he said with oracular confidence. "I think you grew up in quite a new house, if not brand-new. I think that your parents most likely liked the idea of modernity but liked the traditional, too. I think your father was a very pragmatic man but would embrace change when he thought the end result was much better. His approach to modernity was a practical one. I think that your mother was maybe a little tiny touch, not alternative, but more liberal than your father. In another life, she could have been a hippie, or at least empathized. When you were a small boy, your parents bought citrus-based washing products for you, soaps and bubble baths."
At first, the patter struck me as almost universal, applicable to anyone, except as he kept talking, he’d homed in on pertinent specifics. I kept coming back to the scent of the clothes at the back of my mother’s closet. From that alone, he’d positioned her on some political spectrum, both in relation to my father and to the surrounding town. But really, how had he determined this based solely on, say, whether I liked the smell of spice or not?
Everyone has scent imprints, Dove said, established when we are very young. In my case, my responses to the patchouli and sandalwood had been most telling when it came to my mother. The clothes at the back of the closet bearing this scent (a) were clearly no longer in daily rotation and (b) suggested some other epoch or affiliation from her life. And those smells, in his experience, could be attached to people of certain leanings and proclivities. In this case: hippies. Or some hippie spirit. Then he began to read back some of my other reactions.
"Interesting how scent is so personal," he said. "I gave you a blotter with one of the rarest roses on earth. It’s called Rose de Mai. This rose flowers only in the month of May, hence its name. It’s grown in the town of Grasse, and the same rose grown somewhere else smells different. It takes over 300,000 blooms to make 2.2 pounds in weight of oil. It’s extraordinarily expensive. It should take you to the South of France and rose fields, but it took you to—" here he perched his reading glasses on his nose to review exactly what I’d said—" ’More beachy, more suntan lotion…1970s Cape Cod. Essentially a smell from childhood. Cottage-y.’ "
As he went along, he became contagious and kinetic, conveying a first-time wonder at what was unfolding. Of course, we were talking about me, in a strange, oblique way that no one ever had, so I sat like an empty vessel, being filled with the secrets of my own inner thoughts and life. "Not to be ingratiating," he said, "but your nose picked up on a very particular quality of the raw material, a certain jasmine that less than five perfumers on earth have the pleasure of using in their fragrances, and you said, ’Yes, that’s a little too much. The last gasp before the flower dies. Something like the flower is dying inside it. A bit of decay.’ And what you’ve picked up on is the indolic note inside the jasmine. I believe there is something about a flower just before it dies. Lilies, in particular, very much give off this last breath. And there’s something about a vase of lilies just before they die, where I think the scent is the most beautiful, and the flowers look their saddest, and they’re giving you this wonderful last gift."
Most PopularIt went on like this, all of it swirling together: my mother and father, childhood, sex, the beach and blooming, then cloying flowers…and right there, too, ever present death. There was one scent strip in particular that had turned me instantly existential. It smelled so much like that boyhood church where I’d been an altar boy for Father Champagne, one of the good ones, in all his robed splendor. Trouble was, I saw him one day at the YMCA before my swim practice, in his sad black bathing trunks, and somehow couldn’t quite square that Father Champagne—pale, soggy, saggy, and altogether too human—with the resplendently robed conveyor of Christ’s body and blood on Sunday mornings.
"It’s one of the most expensive raw materials on earth," said Roja. "You were smelling something that costs $70,000 a pound, several times more expensive than gold. And you said it made you think of ’church and incense, the clanking of the censer, the robes, Father Champagne,’ and then you said, ’It makes me question God.’ The pathological secretion from a whale—ambergris—made you question God. And we’ve come back to Cape Cod again!"
He burst with a short report of laughter. Whale vomit had made me question God! Indeed, each scent was its own mystery. There was the reaction—and then an association behind it. And behind that, too, another story. "I could sit for hours doing this!" he exclaimed. And so he read on. Castoreum (beaver anal secretion): Like a garbage heap in a hot place. Skatole: Weird, milky. I don’t love it. Methyl ionone (a replica of the violet molecule): My dad’s shoe polish. Ready for work. Frankincense: Orangey, ocean cottage.
After reading the last, Roja Dove paused. "See," he said, "if you came to me and said, ’I want an orangey, seaside smell,’ there’s nothing in frankincense that would make me think that. That’s why I never listen to people. It’s a soft, balsamic, woody scent. But scent is as subjective as a lover. So the great thing about this method is I learn about you absolutely from the raw materials."
There was one other thing that made Roja "very, very happy" during our test, a particular reaction by me to the raw materials that signaled, to him at least, that I was capable of being "a hedonistic sensualist."
"This is how you described civet: ’Like hot tar, sweeter, I don’t love it, I don’t like it.’ Interesting, this repetition here. ’A little fecal, sweetly unpleasant. Further away, I like it.’ " He removed his glasses again. "That was really quite interesting. The raw material is fecal. That suggested to me that there’s an intrigue or an appeal."
Or an ambivalence? I ventured.
"I’d say a fear," said Dove. "If I was working on a formula for you, I’d have a little of this in there. I’d want the effect that you can feel it there, but you can’t smell it. Enough to metamorphize you. A touch would do the trick. The material tells me that something from your upbringing has you a bit stuck, and you’d like to break free. So I would really play to that, the hedonist in you."
Most PopularSo in other words, Roja Dove, the greatest nose on earth, was telling me it really was time to get in touch with my inner Pepé Le Pew.
At our parting, Roja Dove and I were talking about particular scents, like when a wineglass comes out of a dishwasher smelling more like wet dog than lemony fresh. "Yes, exactly!" he exclaimed. "It’s a very, very peculiar smell. The aqueous mid with something briny. It happens from time to time, and I have to redo all the dishes. I can’t stand it!"
He gave me a bottle of his own Vetiver as a gift, and I put it on straightaway. He’d made the recipe for his partner, Peter, two years earlier, and Peter had worn it ever since, along now with thousands of other clients who bought the fragrance in parfumeries around the world, from Baku to New York City. "It has a sensuality that’s not as overt," he said, "but it’s very fresh."
It was way better than hotel soap, I can say that much. And the next day I put it on again. And the next after that. Because I could smell the cottage and the oranges, my father’s faint pipe and my mother’s groovy ’70s tunic at the back of the closet, the mossy night and citrus dawn. I felt a little elevated walking the streets, floating just slightly above the debris of our days, the gutter of stink. When I came home, my wife sniffed her nose twice at me, then buried her face in my sweater and said, "You smell good."
I took it as a sign.
Here was the idea that came crashing, then: Hedonism, sensuality, abandonment—we might take these opportunities every day, in a hundred small ways, without showing up at a Roman orgy. We let in the smell of warm bread. We gaze at the diamond with every color inside. We brush our lips against warm skin.
So, then, yes, if this was hedonism, I wanted more of it. Maybe, really, what we were talking about, too, was some sort of more absolute presence: of finding a way to be fully present in two worlds, this one here and the past, woven as one through memory and emotion, catalyzed by scent.
As we went to leave Roja Dove’s town house that spring day, as we walked to the door that led downstairs, something drew him backward. There was a scent strip sitting on his table, and his pinwheel full of others. Some new fragrance in the making. But he took it up in his hand—that strip of some perfect flower he’d maybe sniffed hundreds of times before—and drew a deep breath, inhaling through his nose. He closed his eyes, and his face looked like that of a child’s, and for just that split second, he vanished to some faraway place again, riding the current of something unexpected in the blossom, perhaps contented by some bright, lost memory he’d just newly discovered.
Michael Paterniti (@MikePaterniti) is a GQ correspondent. His collection of essays, Love and Other Ways of Dying, will be published in February.
Michael Paterniti is a GQ Correspondent.Related Stories for GQColognes and FragrancesGrooming