PEKJI

Smells like paint, baby head, android, bug spray, saliva on skin, mom's purse...

Trust your nose.

Ceci n'est pas une parfum

In the reset collection, the notes are stricken through as a reminder that they are far from being what the perfume is. Also, instead of the pseudofactual concentration signifiers, the actual percentage of the essence is on the box. If that's not enough, you can actually wipe away everything on the bottle itself.

Today I saw two wonderfully relevant posts in my instagram feed so here's me adding my voice to that sentiment.

1- A post from quoting

"...Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is what's left over after you've explained everything else."

2- A post from saying "...Sure, notes are helpful, but they can sometimes be a barrier."

Labels, genres, taxonomy etc. are only helpful when they are. Like how the bottle of a perfume, the packaging of a perfume etc. are not descriptive of the perfume itself, neither is the note list. You can create note lists for a perfume in wildly different ways. As far as I'm concerned, they are simply "listed notes" that are there to suggest something to you or to provide something to attach to your sense if that's what you need. They are useful in creating expectation and it can be employed in a benevolent way, though often that is not the case.

The notes can definitely be a barrier, as explaining away things takes away the immersion and gives us the illusion of understanding. While I greatly enjoy hiding intention behind the functional and product guise of perfume, I am glad more of us are moving away from the dominant language while talking about perfume.

Perfume and arts in general are excellent domains to exercise our subjective perception and personal truths. Maybe if we do that more often we can stick to the facts in our currently post-truth shared reality.

-Omer