hot banana summer

newsletter #72: Nanatopia

When I was in Melbourne a few months ago I spent a rainy afternoon ducking in and out of stores and smelling through entire collections of perfume. This, to me, is as close to perfection as an afternoon can get. When I have time après sniff I like to find a cafe, order a dirty chai, and spend an hour or so resniffing through the blotters and writing down my thoughts.

Cities are the best place for this, as they have the highest ratio of exclusive perfume bottles to acceptable cafes per capita. When I’m in the city not a minute is wasted and not a bottle is spared. I’m locked in, baby - I will smell them all.

There’s a peculiar feeling you get when you smell an entire perfume line one after the other. There are some perfume brands who build their collections like an artist curating songs for an album; one bleeds into another and you can’t really understand any single effort without the context of the whole. When you smell these collections together there’s a sense of artistry, like you’re looking at the entire roof of the Sistine Chapel instead of just one panel.

Other perfume brands are like the songs we get nowadays that are designed around a single catchy hook. They are designed for social media virality, big on flash and small on substance. There is no big picture, only small fragments that cannot be pieced into a whole. Modern perfumes, like modern songs, are built for the attention economy.

I had plenty of time to think about this on that Melbourne afternoon as I smelled my way, drip by drip, through the BornToStandOut collection.

BornToStandOut, stylised B2SO (which is, at the very least, much easier to write), are a Korean perfume brand that shot up out of nowhere about five years ago. They have since embarked on a frankly exhausting schedule of releases - they now have over fifty perfumes in their collection.

The ruthless pace of the brand is both a huge red flag and frankly certifiable. As you might expect the vast majority of these perfumes are olfactive garbage. BS2O excels at loud attention grabbing names in loud attention grabbing fonts on bottles that hold loud, attention grabbing top notes that fizzle down to a house special of ambroxan and hot glue. This is perfume for the algorithm era. This is what happens when you make perfume and take out the soul.

I was about twelve B2SO’s deep when the existential dread began to hit me. The perfumes are all named in the Tom Ford style, white sloped-shouldered bottles lined up like stormtroopers on the Death Star. I found my pen hand shaking as I wrote out Dirty Rainbow and Dirty Milk and NSFW and Naked Neroli, like I had landed in some kind of bleak alternate reality where I was Kafka reading out perfume names on OnlyFans.

The only suitable response to smelling through these perfumes is to close one’s eyes and grieve, for a moment, that God is truly dead.

It’s not that the perfumes are bad (though they are). It’s that they are pointless, thoughtless - the kind of crass that isn’t even fun because it exists not to speak to a human but to grow capital. Some perfumes smell great because they are built on accords and harmonies greater than the sum of their parts. Some perfumes are great because they’re made with fine, expensive materials used well. Some perfumes are great because they’re a result of ruthless creative direction, a conversation back and forth between perfumer and director until the original concept is taken to a deeper and weirder and more brilliant place.

There’s lots of ways a perfume can be good, it’s just that it’s very hard to do. Much easier to make a bad perfume. At the end of the day, bad perfumes are all alike.

It’s important when you hit moments like these, when your nose is full to the sinuses with bad perfume, to keep sniffing. And so I did, continuing down the long, long line of straightjacket-white B2SO bottles, until I found something interesting.

I am as surprised as you are that there was a perfume from this brand that I wanted to linger on. But there was. The perfume in question is called Nanatopia, a loathsomely stupid name, and I sprayed it with no hope of a happy return. This was partly due to the fact that I don’t particularly like the brand, and also because the smell of bananas is easily in the top five smells I hate most on the planet Earth.

The Cavendish banana. What an evil little fruit. If you befriended an alien who just landed here, how would you describe the smell of a banana? Like most scents in nature it is complex and multifaceted, and it depends at what stage of life you smell it. Green bananas have a sharp, almost bitter tang to them; fully yellow bananas are full bodied and creamy, almost cloying; bananas gone brown have an overripe sweetness that can almost smell like cloves at the back of your throat.

Above all, a banana smells so… yellow. For me it is the smell of humid tropicality, a sickeningly thick fruity-creamy mash that is almost like a white flower, a ylang-ylang. It is sweet and dense and cloying all the ways that I hate.

Let’s pause for a second and consider the small tragedy of modern life when you don’t like bananas. These fucking things are everywhere. Do you know how many times the algorithim has tormented me by offering up a video of an ‘easy 2-ingredient recipe!’, getting my hopes up, only for me to be immediately crushed when someone starts forking a banana into pulp? The injustice of it all. The indignity.

So you can only imagine how I felt when it became apparent that banana is the new flavour the month in the world of perfume. The era of the pistachio is over. Now we have Banana Rush and Banana Milkshake and Maui in a Bottle and Marc Jacobs Daisy Wild. And on and on. The ever-hungry machine of the gourmand-vanilla industrial complex has realised that there is olfactive interest to be mined here, so it has decided that we’re all going to smell like a banana for the summer.

Must all corners of my life be invaded by this evil, evil fruit? There’s nothing I can think of that sounds worse than suffering through a heatwave surrounded by the half-life of a dozen different banana perfumes. That would earn its own level in Dante’s hell. I fear that this year’s summer might be the worst I’ve yet seen.

I can’t do it, I thought to myself, watching article after article talking about the banana perfume trend appear online. Australian summer begins in December. If I’m walking through the shops at Christmas, in summer, when I’m already overstimulated and cranky, and I smell someone who is wearing a perfume that smells like when I throw something in the bin at work and have to open the lid and am accosted with slowly rotting banana peel...

They haven’t invented a level of unhinged I will reach in that moment. It will measure on the Richter scale.

All of this emotional baggage I brought with me to that store in Melbourne, and I sprayed Nanatopia anyway. As always in the world of perfume, we follow the guidance of Werner Herzog and do not avert our gaze.

And it’s good that I did spray it, because it eased my fears about this new banana mania somewhat. Ah, I thought, as I sniffed the blotter, that’s not a banana. That’s banana candy.

You might be familiar with the urban myth that banana candy - those weird little faux-bananas with an airy, styrofoam sort of texture - doesn’t really smell or taste like modern bananas because they’re based off an old variety of banana that went extinct. This is based partly in truth. Banana candy is flavoured mainly using isoamyl acetate, which occurs naturally in bananas and was apparently much stronger in the variety of banana named Gros Michel, which was nearly wiped out from a banana virus in the mid 20th century.

So it is truer to say banana candy is flavoured using a small subset of chemicals that naturally occur in all bananas and was more prominent in an older variety that was popular when the candy was first invented - though this is, admittedly, less fun of an anecdote to tell at a party.

It’s pretty safe to say that any smell or flavour you can find in candy can be found in perfume. That we don’t have hundreds of banana candy-scented perfumes to choose from is probably because nobody thought there was an appetite for it on the market.

That was in the beforetimes. That was when a gourmand was someone who had a taste for fine dining, and if you said GLP-1 everyone would think you were speaking gibberish. But now we are here, and gourmands are big money, and nobody is eating, and there are more and more banana candy perfumes on the shelves every day.

I’m lost in the sauce thinking about Gros Michel and banana republics and the weird rippled-glass bizarro world that gourmands are dipping into as I smell Nanatopia that I only realise a few minutes later that I don’t hate what I am sniffing.

It’s a weird fact about myself (or maybe this is true for many people?) that I don’t like banana or watermelon but I don’t mind their artificial counterparts. I mean, I’m never going to reach for a foam banana candy if I have the choice of the entire pantheon of confectionery in front of me, but my stomach doesn’t turn at the flavour like it does with banana proper.

It’s like isoamyl acetate contains only the pleasant parts of the banana scent profile, sweet and mellow and creamy, and none of the nasties. As perfume people we tend to worship the complexity of natural materials, but sometimes it’s kind of nice to enjoy the low, humming simplicity of a synthetic isolate.

I compare this to the feeling of relief I feel when I take off my glasses. Sometimes seeing the outline of every leaf on every tree is a little too much, and it’s nice to give my eyes a break and let things be blurry for a bit. I’m never going to eat a banana, but I’ll have a few bites of the candy.

This is all to say that Nanatopia is a not-terrible perfume. It’s a sort of boozy banana-gourmand amber with tons of nutmeg and allspice, sweet but not saccharine. This is a different approach from the more typical banana-tropical style of perfumery, as in Bana Banana, less plantain and more banana bread.

But it is also important to say that like every gourmand, this perfume is the same perfume that the big oil houses have been churning out for twenty years. Which is to say it the old vanillin-tonka-amberwood chassis that gets a new paint job by adding different flavoured top notes.

The top note never lasts more than thirty minutes, and it doesn’t need to - the theatricality of it, the ‘oh!’ moment when you spray it in store and recognise that foamy-sweet smell of banana candy, is the point. The amber-gourmand perfume underneath is what you’re actually going to wear, so it’s important that a potentially irritating top accord lingers around just long enough that you feel confident This Is A Banana Perfume, whilst not annoying you too much by the fact that This Is A Banana Perfume.

It’s a fine dance, the modern gourmand. And I have to say that Nanatopia performs it excellently. I can’t fault the thing (except for its laughable price point - $361AUD for 50ml). The banana candy opening is pitch perfect, so recognisable that it smells like a freshly opened packet of candy complete with sugar rush and plastic rustle. The amber-vanilla underneath is a little boozy, a little dirty, and very fun. It’s brash and synthetic and playful in a way perfume so rarely allows itself to be.

I’m still wary about the thought of a banana scented summer, but Nanatopia has reassured me somewhat that I might be able to survive the horrors.

I guess that’s another way a perfume can be good: when it doesn’t take itself too seriously. When it reminds us that sometimes perfume - like a handful of candy, like a summer afternoon when you spend too long in the sun - can simply be about having some fun. ▧