Post-Fragrantica Manifesto

This essay is part of Scent Access Memory, our editorial series with Dirt.

It is impossible to separate the recent rise in consumption of niche and experimental perfume from the internet platforms which have enabled its propagation. Chiefest among them is the high-contrast camp visuality of Fragrantica layouts. 

An independent internet database and self-hosted publication, Fragrantica allows users to look up most perfumes on the designer and niche markets, creating space for mostly anonymous community contributions on performance, subjective impressions, similarity to other perfumes, and––most importantly, in my eyes––lists of individual notes. 

Designed on and for the flat visual GUI of electronic screens, the neatly ordered, brightly-colored representation of ephemeral smells via Fragrantica’s notes breakdown mirrors the mimetic language of software iconography at large. This deliberately coded and retweetable language, borne of the smooth, rounded contours of app icons and turn-of-the-millennia pictography communicates not only an aspect of a given smell (the lilac icon feels watery, the incense serene) but an additional affect of flatness encoded within the innate politics of screen representation itself. 

Following the longstanding tradition of trompe l'oeil and pictorial realism in both painting and graphical representation, the geometric flatness of Mid-Century Modernism served to draw attention to the visceral materiality of representation: challenging the hypocrisy of Romanticist painters’ attempts to create realism via a strictly ordered geometric language.

Early developers of graphic user interfaces (GUIs) such as Apple often touted Modernist influences, but the visual language of screens is far more postmodern and self-defeating than it may at first appear. In his 2019 manifesto “In Praise of Drop Shadows” painter Christoper Page describes the language of digital trompe l'oeil, or the same slightly uncanny attempts at digital realism as “indeterminate shallowness that keeps our eye oscillating between looking at and through the screen.” 

This is the same skeuomorphism that made the notes app on early iPhones so paperlike. On Fragrantica, digital trompe l'oeil manifests in the textured dimension of lilac leaves and the perspective dimension of woods, countered by the sharp outline of whiteness. There is a distinct contrast between a note’s image and the background of the website – of how these individual images relate to each other–that orients our eyes to create a neatly ordered, unified whole. 

Between Toskovat-posting and scent of the day (#SOTD) posters I believe we have begun to reach a critical mass wherein the distinct poetry of this one unified whole that is a notes layout icon matrix is becoming a parallel language to the ethereal and hyper-dimensional sensorial aspect of perfume itself. 

Certain perfume houses have begun to find viral success on the merits of their Fragrantica layouts alone. All it takes is a choice screenshot posted to Twitter with the caption scent of the day, and people from all over the world take the suggestion of notes like credit cards, priests’ clothes, and butter, and run. 

In my own storied career as a poster under the hashtag #sotd–I’ve found that the posts of mine that travel the furthest, that have the most hold over the wider public, have very little to do with the caliber of my own writing, and much more to do with the unique visual sway of the notes breakdown screenshot I post. Take, for example, the difficulty of posting about niche perfumes which have not yet been logged on the website. It provides enough of an interest barrier to get thousands of likes with no caption, or drive users to photoshop their own entries. In this sense, the visual artifact of a Fragrantica layout has begun to function in place of the irreplaceable and immaterial nature of smell. 

While a number of industry professionals understandably swear off Fragrantica in favor of Parfumo and other cataloging sites that privilege less qualitative and image-based descriptions of perfumes, I would challenge the current generation of Fragrantica prosumers to think of the website's layout like a visual artist might think of a show catalog. 

While, regrettably, perfumers have little control over how their work is represented, I find the times in which I especially value Fragrantica as a creative resource is when the specific viscera of a perfume lost in translation actually creates something different than the sum of its olfactory parts. I wholeheartedly enjoy the sort of serene, visual haiku of a Fragrantica layout as an internet artifact on its own, and oftentimes feel that people are drawn to how these representations function within the two-dimensional screen environment irrespective of the perfume they are made in reference to.

There is a sort of accelerationist imperative here. Withdrawing from this function is essentially impossible, and the only way forward is to apply the memetic sampling culture of the internet even further towards remixing, editing, and building upon this format among perfume creators and collectors. I want to encourage deliberate use of this visual language, with the underlying understanding that the distinct form of screen representation it stands for is inherently inescapable in the present cultural climate. 

Consider something like the impact of the camera upon the culinary landscape, or what the standardization of the album cover did for the discipline of recorded music. This might indeed be too tall of an order to entrust to an entirely third-party internet service with not entirely reputable politics and cliquey systems of internal organization. I admire what Fragrantica has done to connect perfume obsessives around the world, but am more fascinated with what I feel to be a grassroots movement towards a feeble and flawed visuality in scent curation that will in my eyes continue to exist with or without specific websites. 

I love seeing people photoshop their own note breakdowns, edit in their own words, play with the arrangement of icons, etc–and think this rigid form of organization is most beneficial to us as posters and creative netizens when it is destroyed. While I understand artist concerns about their work being oversimplified or incorrectly represented, I hope to communicate a message of cautious optimism for what Fragrantica has and will continue to do to the landscape of perfume criticism and creation. 

I am interested in how and why pictures are chosen to represent certain notes, in the lexical gaps between when something as commanding, as pungent as castoreum is represented with an image that appears both cute and reminiscent of nature documentaries. I can imagine these choices are not labored over intensely, but they do indeed produce effects for many consumers that matter. 

In his thesis on “The Truth in Painting” Derrida asserts that the truth of representation “is no longer itself in that which represents it in painting, it is merely its double”–a painting of a rose is a rose is a notes list image of a rose is a rose.

The smell of rose–all powdery, lemony, and regal–is not truthfully represented in the layered image of a bright pink rose which populates fragrantica’s UI any less than Renoir’s roses or New Order’s Fantin-Latour sampling album sleeve Power, Corruption & Lies indicates to you in what manner a real rose might impress upon your spirit, but rather produces within you a feeling that might resonate alongside that experience. If the history of modern art can teach us as conscious consumers anything–it is that all images, especially those seen by the masses, carry an immense degree of power.