Thread by @add_hawk

If you're looking for some weird aesthetic exploration to fight off the COVID boredom blues, can I recommend: avant-garde perfume. No, really. First:

1. Not all perfume is cloying mall crap. There's world of indie, experimental weird-ass perfume.
2. It's cheap.

Thread:

First: there is this whole world of weird, fascinating, unexpected perfume. Perfume that smells like burning leaves on an autumn afternoon. That smells like a dairy farm. That smells like a distant Tuscan town in winter. Like the coming snow. Abstract scents.

One of my favorite weird scents: Room 237, a scent that is based on the creepy room from The Shining. It is weird, unsettling, synthetic, fascinating.

luckyscent.com/product/69303/…

Second: perfume is actually cheap as hell to explore. Bottles are expensive, but luckyscent.com offers $5 samplers of any perfume. A sampler bottle is actually 10-20 doses. I have bought zero whole bottles in my life. It's actually one of the cheapest aesthetic realms.

The weird wing of the perfume world thought: "Well, the rest of the art world doesn't have to be pleasant, so why do we? Can't we be punk, interesting, jolting?" Thus a scent like Asphalt Rainbow, which is: wet pavement, car exhaust, street food, aerosol

luckyscent.com/product/67301/…

There's also really pleasant stuff, but interestingly pleasant. My absolute favorite is Winter 1972. I like their description: "A field of untouched new-fallen snow, hand-knit woolen mittens covered with frost, a hint of frozen forest & sleeping earth".

cbihateperfume.com/shop-vpwdj

CB I Hate Perfume has lots of really emotional scents - scents of burning leaves on an autumn afternoon, the memory of a mother's kitchen, clean ocean breezes, the clear air before the snow:

cbihateperfume.com/shop-vpwdj

A lot of dudes who are like, "Perfume is all flowery crap", you should know that there is a whole world of perfume in the space of manly crap like scotch, cigars, rye. Lots of interest in smoky, musky, dense, rich.

Other things to know: for the people who are into this thing, you just put a bit on your wrist. It's for you to smell. Perfumes are very skin-reactive - what works for one person doesn't work for another.

And "serious" perfumes take a while to activate. A lot of mall perfumes are designed to smell nice for a second, then they turn to chemical crap. A lot of this stuff takes 10 minutes to wake up, and then actually changes interestingly for hours

Some more favorites: Lampblack, an artistic impression of the smell of India ink.

luckyscent.com/product/69300/…

Along similar themes: Coal, which is based around the smell of artist's charcoal drawings.

luckyscent.com/product/52807/…

The Molecule series from Escentric Molecules, which are very clean/airy and abstract. Kind of like the perfume version of a Rothko painting:

luckyscent.com/product/30800/…

I really like LuckyScent's sampler packs, but I think you can ignore the masculine/feminine/unisex distinction. They're all good.

luckyscent.com/search?gsearch…

Every time I teach aesthetics (except this year), I always ask my students if they think perfume can be real art. 90% say no. Then I bring in a few of these, let them try them, and they are almost all instantly convinced. I've had people cry from some of the nostalgic scents.