Skin Scents

Perfumes evoke a fantasy—the perfect summer garden, a romantic dinner at dusk. But what could be more transporting than the smell of your lover’s skin? Today’s most sensuous fragrances wenhance a woman’s natural scent instead of covering it.

- Rebecca Mead

When Helmut Lang asked Maurice Roucel to create a fragrance for him, the designer gave the perfumer a very specific brief: “He said he wanted it to have the smell that the partner who slept with him left behind on the linen sheets,” says Roucel, who has made scents for Guerlain, Hermès and Gucci.

To create an olfactory impression of dishevelled sheets and lingering sweat, Roucel blended several ingredients, the most important of which was an expensive synthetic musk, a factory-built substitute for a substance that, in nature, is produced by musk deer. The use of the real thing, which comes from a gland near the musk deer’s rectum, is for the most part banned because the animal is an endangered species. But Roucel has been in the business long enough to have worked with the original. “It is absolutely disgusting on the top note— shit, urine,” he says. “But after the top note has gone, you have something that is extremely sensual, like the smell of young skin, and very erotic.”

THE NAKED TRUTH

The proximity of the attractive to the revolting is never closer than in the smell of skin: If the best smell in the world is the crown of a newborn’s head, one of the worst is the stale body odour of the person in the economy seat next to you on a transatlantic flight. The smell of skin can have delicious connotations—the sensual pleasure of being close to ones you love— and it can have off-putting ones, too, like the irreducible odour of decay and mortality. “We have this aversion to the actual smell of our bodies, but at the same time we find that this is a very sexual kind of thing as well,” says Rachel Herz, an adjunct professor of psychiatry and human behaviour at Brown University who specialises in the psychology of smell.