crashing out in the bath & body works

Newsletter #65: the great american perfume

If there’s one thing on earth you can say about me, it’s that I’m a fan of Lana del Rey.

On the ever shifting list of live performances I want to see before I die, she is the immoveable number one. Lana makes my kind of music, hard to classify into any single genre. The melodious sound of her voice would be a soporific if the music itself wasn’t so disturbing. And the aesthetics, too, are so easy to get lost in, playing with power and femininity in a way that has spawned a hundred Is This Okay For Women To Enjoy? thinkpieces.

The same part of me that loves intensity in all its forms, from perfumes as black as tar to the darkest gothic romance, is the part that loves Lana. I am, resolutely, who I am.

The trap made by Lana del Rey is the same that was made by Nabokov, which is to be distracted by the aesthetics and risk missing the point. The music on every Lana album, but especially later masterpieces like Norman Fucking Rockwell and Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd is that they are doing work, real work.

There is perhaps no body of work that reflects the contradictions of seamy philosophical nihilism and stark beauty that come with being a woman in the modern world than Lana’s discography. There is an agony in songs like A&W and Venice Bitch, the pain of pouring so much of your identity into the performance of femininity in a patriarchal world that it feels like the performance is all that is left, that the illusion is the truer version of yourself because there is nothing underneath, the facade made concrete.

There is a reason that Lana has influenced every pop musician of the last fifteen years. Like Bruce Springsteen and Flannery O’Connor and so many artists before her, the one motif that flows through every Lana del Rey album and song and lyric and line is the great love and the unsolveable mystery of her life, the only question that matters:

What is America?

America.

Is there any word so weighed down with baggage in this world, this day, this minute?

America.

The shining city on the hill. The hero and the villain of the story. You cannot read the word America and stay neutral; you cannot see it and not react.

For an artist like Lana Del Rey - and maybe for every American - this is a word that must be examined from every angle, that must be torn apart and stitched back together to be understood. A country; a civil religion; an oppressor; a dream; a promise unfulfilled. An experiment. It can be all of these things, America. It is all of these things, and none of them. That’s the power of a country - it is a made-up thing. We all create our own versions. All of them are as real as any other.

America, the pillar of the soul. America, the hereditary fever dream.

Of course, for those of us who are not American, the word gives us a markedly different feeling. It’s been a truth universally acknowledged for thousands of years that it is in your best interest to keep one eye on the happenings of the empire. The name changes, but there’s always an empire. Ours has an eagle. Ours cries freedom.

So it’s safe to say, like every other person on the face of the planet, I spend a lot of time thinking about America. A couple of weeks ago I was walking through my local shopping centre, listening to Lana del Rey, when I walked past one of the outposts of the empire: the gingham and sans-serif banner of the Bath & Body Works.

There’s a quote by Werner Herzog that perfectly describes how I feel when I walk past a Bath & Body Works. It goes thus: “I’m fascinated by trash TV. Wrestlemania. The Kardashians. So I don’t say read Tolstoy and nothing else. Read everything. See everything. The poet must not avert his eyes.”

The poet must not snub her nose at the body mist. I walked into the store.

There is a terrifying scale to the perfumery being chugged out by the behemoth that is Bath & Body Works. (And before anyone wants to start arguing with me, of course it is perfume. Of course it is. You might not like it, but those cheap plastic canisters covered in sparkles and glitter are fine fragrance as much as any bottle of Chanel.)

The store operates on a sort of demimonde model, replicating whatever scent profiles are currently in vogue and packaging them in ultra affordable bottles with SEO garble names like In The Stars (Baccarat Rouge) and Covered in Roses (Delina). They are joined by the brand’s permanent scent lines like Japanese Cherry Blossom and Peach Bellini and Mahogany Teakwood, names that fill with me with an inexplicable and intense feeling of existential dread. There is an earnestness to the Bath & Body Works that sticks on the palette like the oleaginous film of palm oil covering the sweet-white crème in an Oreo.

These scents are then packaged in every format imaginable: body mist, hair mist, hair and body mist, candle (large), candle (small), candle (tiny), spritz, wax melt, hand sanitiser.

If I had to describe the overall vibe of a Bath & Body Works scent I would say sweet, and then I would say weak. There is a pallid inoffensiveness to every perfume in the place that somehow turns full circle and becomes detestable. In every store there is a lonely shelf for the Men, every bottle sitting handsomely square and blue. The scents in these bottles I would describe as simple and weak.

Bath & Body Works, it seems, like its men simple and its women sweet. Make your conclusions as you will.

There is one scent line in the store that I do like, and that is Black Cherry Merlot. This is because it smells of cherry cough syrup, a scent that I love at any price point. I have bought this scent in a candle (large), a candle (small), a foaming hand wash, and so many mini hand sanitiser bottles that I have one stashed in every single bag I own.

So I get it. If you do happen to love one of the scents from the brand, you will come back again and again. It’s a smart business model, and a successful one - Bath & Body Works made $7 billion dollars profit last year. Bath & Body Works is on the Fortune 500.

Bath & Body Works is the most successful perfume brand in America.

And could there be a brand that is more American than this one? The business model designed to scale, perpetuate, feed on capital. The recycling of scents that are given new names and new packaging and resold over and over again. The seasonal scents rolling out month after month as if it is a surprise when the Pumpkin Spice candle returns in September every year. The unsettling focus on hygiene, on smelling clean, on smelling like the freshly plucked fruit from an orchard tree, on smelling like the frosted buttercream on a cupcake, on smelling like anything other than the human that you are. Sweet and simple and weak and cheap. Buy three, get one free, buy, spray, scrub, buy, burn, clean, clean, clean, buy, buy and buy again. From sea to shining sea.

I walk around the Bath & Body Works and I think about the Monroe Doctrine, about manifest destiny. There’s a theory in geopolitics that the global dominance of America was inevitable because the geography makes it so. This is the only country straddling both of the world’s major oceans, with blue water navy ports open and accessible on both sides. Combine that with successive waves of religious extremists settling on the continent and you get the particular brew that would lead, in two hundred and fifty years, to cascading petrostate economic crashes and Peach Bellini foaming hand soap. Witness the American dream.

The thing about a dream is that it has to be dreamt by someone. And I wonder who was the first person to dream this dream that has fucked us all. The dream of America. It is, at its basest level, the dream of a meritocracy. The dream that there could be a society, a world, where it wasn’t where you were born or the family you were born into that determined your life but instead your skill, your effort, the work. It’s communism, really, just in a different font. The dream that if you tried hard enough and fought hard enough, you could have a good life. Maybe even a great one.

Gatsby’s dream. Washington’s dream. Lana’s dream. Maybe it was the Puritans who dreamed it first. They had time for it. It wasn’t empty, the land they landed on. It wasn’t their hands that tilled the fields.

So maybe it was poison from the start. Maybe the point of a dream is that it can never be reality. It’s the unreachable goal that the Americans, by the very nature of their being, are always running towards. I wish they didn’t leave so much wreckage in their wake. There is only so much Pumpkin Spice one can smell. Keep an eye on the empire. There is only so much destruction the world can bear.

Wandering listlessly in the Bath & Body Works, I think about The Great American Perfume.

Because they are a country that loves to self mythologise, the Americans are always looking for that one perfect piece of art that captures the essence of their country. The Great American Novel. The Great American Album. The Great Gatsby. What’s Goin’ On. Nebraska. Grapes of Wrath. Breaking Bad. Norman Fucking Rockwell. We can do this for perfume too - Youth Dew. Polo Ralph Lauren. Black Orchid. All indelible parts of American culture, interwoven into the fabric of ambition and expectation and oppressive splendour that pours from the fifty states like a toppled barrel of Brent crude.

But these are not the perfumes that the majority of Americans are wearing. The silent majority. They are not wearing Norne or Eternity or Aromatics Elixir. They are wearing Bath & Body Works. The shuttered shops on Main Street watch silently as people walk past covered in Vanilla Sugar. The suburbs of foreclosed homes haunted by the sillage of Pistachio Milk and Honey.

When I write about perfume, the only thing I tell myself is find the story. There is a story in the sillage of every scent ever made - this is something I believe completely. Some of those stories are worth telling, and some aren’t; some might be one sentence and some might be an entire book. Some perfumes have a story around their creation, the intention that brought them into being, and some are given meaning not by the people who created them but the people who wear them.

And that’s what I think about in the Bath & Body Works. Not the factory in Ohio where they are synthesizing a bargain version of Bianco Latte; not the gruesomely wholesome facade of the Bath & Body Works stores under the fluorescent lights of military bases in Diego Garcia and Korea and Kuwait. Beats in a sentence, but not the story.

I think about the women who shop at the Bath & Body Works, and the men who love them. I think about their children, their daughters. I think about raising children in a place where you send them to school and have to think about if they will come home alive at the end of the day. I think about how hard it must be to hold on to that hope that your children will have it easier than you did. I think about the endless gruel of choices, week after week - petrol or baby formula; food or new shoes; pay the mortgage or pay the bill from the hospital.

I think about how hard it was even before inflation to buy fresh fruit, fresh vegetables. I think about Amazon, and Meta, and Alphabet, and Palantir, and how the richest place in the world wants to cut welfare.

Is the dream enough to get you through when life looks like this?

What is America?

Debt, and hate, and fear, and taxes.

What is America?

The city on the hill that gets further and further away with every step you take.

What is America?

A closet kept frozen in time like a mausoleum to keep the last trails of your wife’s perfume on her dusty clothes.

What is America?

The first week in spring when the ground starts to thaw, and the new flowers bloom, and you know that the smell of pollen on the breeze means that soon the bees will come.

What is America?

The smile on your daughter’s face when you take her to the mall and let her choose her first perfume.

What is America?

A country, like any other. A place that would be nothing without the people in it.

I think sometimes beauty is relative. At the start of the 20th century perfume began to use synthetics, and fine fragrance expanded its reach from the ultrawealthy to the masses. For the first time in history we democratised the ability to smell good.

Nobody needs perfume. We won’t die without it. But it feels important, vital somehow, that fragrance does not once again become something that only the wealthy can afford.

By this point I had ended up swaying listlessly in front of the Men’s shelf in the Bath & Body Works. Lana still played in my ears. America. America. Almost by instinct I picked up the bottles, sprayed, smelled. We the People, in Order to form a more perfect Union… I don’t think I was even reading the names on the glass.

Then I smelled a perfume that brought me back into my body. I love when my olfactive system shakes me out of mind and says, pay attention. A spark of interest. A scented balm against existential despair.

I looked down at the bottle in my hand. Vanilla Noir. So blatantly a homage to Tobacco Vanille that it was almost charming, like the off-brand names on Aldi products that make you smile with their audacity. How do they get away with it without getting sued? Should we all learn to be so bold?

It’s a bit of alright, this Vanilla Noir. In the grand style of masculine gourmands, it balances its central vanillin-ethyl maltol in two ways: by pumping in a hirsute dose of tobacco, and making the whole thing feather light and translucent to avoid any implications of cupcakery. There’s some patchouli, too, always nice to see in a simpler formula because it provides plenty of earthy character.

Vanilla Noir is simple enough that a man would wear it, interesting enough that a woman would buy it for him, and affordable enough that you could justify it. It smells like a happy thing - an affordable luxury. Something you buy for someone you love.

It smells like a small, bright, sweet smelling thing in world that gets harsher by the minute. Sometimes perfume can just be that. Sometimes it should be that.

Sometimes we need small things to show us that all the good in the world doesn’t live only in dreams. ▧