churned earth

newsletter #68: does the perfect rain perfume exist?

This past week I’ve been waking up, with frightening regularity, at about three in the morning. It’s the kind of awake that is very, very hard to walk back from, an alertness that gives me a sick feeling as my mind lurches forward to how terrible I am going to feel in the mid morning, the late afternoon, the long slow drip of the day stretched so close to breaking. Don’t think, I tell myself, and whatever you do, do not pick up your god damned phone.

So I lie there, in the dark, not sleeping, and I listen to the rain.

It has been a week of endless grey. The rain comes and goes, violent downpours in the night that weaken to a drizzle in the morning. I love the sound of the rain. My house is bracketed on three sides by trees, honeysuckle and melaleuca and shedding palms with their wide thick leaves. In my bed in the night, the rain beats down on the leaves with a staccato thunking like a muffled drum beat.

In the morning when I’m forced to shoulder through the rain to get to work I will grumble about the water dripping down the back of my neck, splashing on my shoes. But safe and warm in my room, I can enjoy the sound of the rain outside. I can let the smell wash over me like a benediction.

It’s one of those sad ironies of perfumery that everyone loves the smell of rain and yet no one can seem to capture it in a fragrance. There have been plenty of attempts and I feel a bizarre urge to smell them all, to frown over yet another shitty petrichor perfume.

For some reason every modern rain scent smells nothing like rain and entirely like concrete that’s been electrocuted. The only two categories in the ‘rain perfume’ genre seem to be Santal 33 derivatives that try to gaslight us into believing that the smell after a rain shower is actually the smell of violet leaf (When The Rain Stops, Commodity Moss, Petrichor Plains...) or geosmin nightmares (Hermann à mes Côtés).

I lay there in the dark at three in the morning and mulled over this. It’s not as if any of these petrichor perfumes missed the brief. The thing about making a rain perfume is that there isn’t actually a smell to rain itself - the smell comes when the rain lands on something. Like perfume itself, the smell of rain is about how two things interact to create something greater than the sum of their parts - water and earth. And the smell of rain hitting dry earth is very different to the smell of rain in the jungle, or on the ocean, or painting the sidewalks into streaks of wet concrete.

The smell of dampness is easy to convey in perfume using any number of notes - patchouli, vetiver, iris. Combine this with an ozonic note and you’ll get a workable rain accord. The problem with this is not that it doesn’t strike the right chord - it does - the problem is that it doesn’t smell good. It doesn’t give you that sinus-clearing, scrubbed clean feeling that smelling the aftermath of rain shower does in real life.

Accurate, but bad. Competent, but soulless. That’s the problem with rain perfumes.

I have always felt that rain perfumes were not a subgenre for me, veering too close to the teeth-aching squeakiness of aquatics. But the more I listened to the rain and chewed on this, the more I reconsidered. If there was a great rain perfume, I think I would love it.

A really grubby, unpleasant sort of rain perfume - that’s what I want. I am a fan of damp, mouldery smells in perfumery. I love a potato-sack vetiver, a cobwebbed frankincense, a mothballed patchouli. I like things that smell like antique stores and yellowing books and sunlit rooms filled with dust. I love a smell that has age, character, patina. There’s such a beauty in unpleasant things.

Ah, I thought, nodding to myself in the dark. There it is. The thing the rain perfumes are missing, the chord of unpleasantness, the criterion of embarrassment all great fragrances need. The need to make a perfume marketable leads brands to balance the wet-soil dampness necessary in a rain perfume with the eminently marketable citrus-ocean aquatic notes that reassure buyers that you can smell like rain and not offend anybody in the office. It can be a rain perfume, but it has to be a happy perfume. The smell after the storm is done and not the smell of getting drenched.

I suppose it’s fine for a hundred perfumes like that to exist. But the more compelling perfume is the uglier one. And the more I think about it, the more ugliness I find in the rain. In Australia, rain speaks in the language of extremes, vanishing for months until the earth is cracked and dead and then returning in a deluge so strong that all the rivers flood.

Why is there this feeling in us that the rain comes through and cleans, purifies? I think what the rain does is drench the earth until it is bloated and fat like a leech. I think the rain makes everything slick and treacherous. I think the rain unsettles the earth.

Is there anything more ominous than a bank of slate-grey clouds on the edge of the horizon? It looks like Mordor over there, I say, when the storm bank threatens to roll in. My stomach clenches and I think of the washing on the line, which windows I need to shut, what plans I need to change. These are small and easily fixable things, but the instinct is older. There was a time when those clouds meant life or death. Are we really so far from those people who lived or died with the colour of the sky?

And you can smell it in the air, can’t you? Those moments before the rain comes? The anticipatory dread that curls like thick static in the air like a promise. That’s the kind of thing that deserves to be captured in a really great fragrance. That is so much more interesting than a half-cooked aquatic.

It’s hard to think back across all the perfumes you’ve smelled in your life to try and recall if there is one that meets a specific set of criteria. I spent a long, long time in the early hours of the morning trying to lull myself to sleep by thinking of a perfume, just one, that really smelled like the rain. All that dreadful promise, all that churned up earth. The much-hated orange light of my evil little hatch alarm clock were starting to streak across the room when I finally thought, well, there’s always Demeter.

Here’s the thing about the Demeter Fragrance Library. They are a brand that, in the great market hall of perfumery, would be sold for spare change in the gift section at the check out. They exist mostly so millennials who buy their coffee in depressing post-industrial cafes and who like to play Cards Against Humanity can gift each other little 30ml bottles called Kitten Fur and Play Doh and Pumpkin Pie and Sand Pit. The point seems to be the concept of the perfume existing more than the wearing of it, an ornament for a forgotten bathroom shelf.

Demeter scents are so cheap that the majority of their smell is an acrid alcohol-burn that makes you feel as if your nostrils have been momentarily turned inside out. After enduring that, what you’re left with is usually an accurate olfactive interpretation of whatever concept is on the label.

The original Demeter scents (many of which still have a cult following today) like Dirt and Rain were created by Christopher Brosius, who had been working for Kiehl’s and who has an uncanny knack for building true to life fragrances. For anyone who wishes that he would experiment in deeper waters there is, happily, his brand CB I Hate Perfume.

If you’ve never read the CB I Hate Perfume manifesto, please do so immediately. There’s something so 1990’s about this approach to perfumery, the end of history of it all, a challenging of norms that has now become almost a norm itself. But there’s a lot of interesting work to be sniffed in the CBIHP portfolio. It’s especially interesting if you view it as the next phase of evolution for Demeter, the homo sapien to its high-pitched Neanderthal.

Take, to pick a Demeter scent completely at random, the original Rain. Is it a good perfume? No. Does it smell like rain? Sort of. Is it the first draft of an idea that deserves more time, effort, and money? Undeniably yes, and when you smell CB I Hate Perfume’s Black March you are doubly satisfied by smelling both the completed concept from the half sketch and a very fine perfume indeed.

There’s not really any point in examining CB I Hate Perfume scents from the usual lens of top notes, heart notes, drydown. The brand exists to turn traditional concepts in the fragrance industry on its head. Let’s say instead that Black March is everything that I want in a rain perfume.

It’s dark and seamy, earthy and damp and waterlogged.

It smells like that empty field in every suburb on the outskirts of every city where kids gather to smoke, drink, make trouble, where the weeds grow unchecked and the fences are covered in creeping vines.

It smells like a storm that rolls on for hours, water trickling into every crack of the pavement, in the metallic crease where the door of your car meets the window, under the first layer of soil that hides the bugs and the roots and the bones.

Black March smells like the moment when I walk to the bus stop in the rain and there’s a part of the path that used to be dirt and is now a slick of mud, and I forget that the rain makes everything a touch more dangerous, and when I step forward my foot slides and slides and there’s a spike of adrenaline that shoots down my spine that warns me I’m about to fall.

There are some perfumes in the world that make you feel like you are prey. A thing to be hunted, a creature that runs in the forest. Our sense of smell first evolved as a warning system, a way to protect ourselves from the perils of nature. For thousands of years being able to smell a thunderstorm coming in was a matter of survival. Tapping into this instinct is simply not something a perfumer does if their goal is to sell a million bottles. It’s too immediate, too intense, the olfactive equivalent of grabbing someone by the throat and squeezing.

But it also seems important that there are perfumers who are making scents that whisper things to the animal inside us. It is easy, so easy, to spend our days in temperature controlled rooms, eating out of glass containers, staring at our screens.

How will you know that the storm is coming? How will you know when to run?

I have a tiny vial of Black March that I bought years ago. It’s in the back of my sample cabinet, with maybe a few drops left. It’s a perfume I smell more than I wear - the psychological pressure of feeling like someone’s boots are crunching over fallen branches behind you is not something I often like to bring with me into the office. I do like to wear it when I go walking on the forest path near my house, though. It seems to fit well there, in a place where I can hear the rustle of the animals moving beyond the trees,

I’m glad I landed on Black March in my quest for a great rain perfume. Giving up on the quest for more sleep, I slip out of bed to smell it before the storm passes. ▧