The Body Politics of Milk Perfumes

Newsletter #40: it's not just your body anymore

Are you familiar with the work of the musician Jackson C. Frank? The story of his life is a tragic one. When he was a child he survived a fire at his elementary school and was left with lifelong injuries and health issues. He released one album in 1965, a quiet and intensely beautiful album of folk revival songs that will haunt you for the rest of your life after you listen to it. One of these songs - my favourite from the album - is called Milk and Honey.

This is the song I hum to myself as I wander up and down the aisles in the beauty stores smelling the milk perfumes. There are more and more every month now. Gold and silver is the autumn, soft and tender are her skies; yes and no are the answers, written in my true love’s eyes; Gold and silver…. milk and honey…

You might argue that the tragedy-flecked moodiness of Jackson C. Frank contrasts rather poorly to the modern milk perfume. You would be correct. Tiktok and other social media would have you believe that milk perfumes are for the sophisticated gourmand lover, the person looking for something as sweet and warm as vanilla without the rapid blood sugar spike.

But why milk? The creamy-sweet perfume has existed for generations in many forms, all the way back to the Guerlinade. Lactonic notes are also not new to perfume - fantasy accords like peach and whipped cream are fairly standard stuff. Milk, though… milk’s a little bit weirder. It’s a difficult accord to pull off and almost impossible to center in a perfume with literally any other note structure - like adding flavour to milk itself, the substance of the thing sort of fades into the background. And milk - both the perfumer’s note and the consumer’s glass - has become surprisingly political in recent years.

All of this makes much more sense if you shift perspective and stop viewing milk as gourmand note and instead view it, like honey, as an animalic.

Milk, like all animalics, is a note caught up in the throes of life and death. It a note concerned with predator and prey, with possession and consumption. It is a note of comfort and desire, abundance and thirst. It is a note of Oedipean oddness and biblical imaginings; “and I will send an angel before thee unto a land flowing with milk and honey.”

An ancient smell. One of the first smells you ever smell. A milk accord is like a cheat code for intimacy in a perfume, because it’s a substance we all have a relationship with. That relationship becomes more complicated if you are in a body that can, under the right circumstances, produce milk itself.

Well, there it goes. An article about all those nice, cosy, pedestrian milky vanilla perfumes and I’ve gone and brought up lactation. But do you honestly think they’re not connected? Do you think your nose, the olfactive system honed by thousands of years of evolution, doesn’t smell this smell and wake up the animal inside you?

We think of the animal instinct mostly in terms of survival of the individual, but it’s also about survival of the species - protecting and raising the next generation. That is an instinct written on your bones. It’s an instinct that not all of us are comfortable to have a perfume pressing on, like a key on a piano that’s painfully out of tune. I think about that sometimes. I don’t know if there’s anyone in a body that can carry a child doesn’t think about it, sometimes.

And these new milk perfumes make me think about it whenever I smell them.

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I was thinking about all of this when I went out to lunch with a good friend of mine. My friend recently had a baby, and we had often spoken of what that can do to the relationship you have with your body.

She was telling me about the scariest place on the planet, new mother forums, when she said, ‘And don’t even get me started on the milk.’

‘What do you mean?’

'‘You basically get crucified if you admit to using formula milk It’s like a ten car pile up.’

‘Seriously? What if people can’t produce their own?’

‘Doesn’t matter. You’re fucking the baby up if you don’t go organic.’

‘That just feels like another way to make women hate their own bodies,’ I said.

We ate for a few minutes in silence.

Then my friend said, ‘It fucked me up for a bit.’

There are times in female friendships when someone has to say something and your job is to listen, even if you can’t empathize or even really understand. This was one of them.

‘It was just so much pressure. When it happened it hurt, like really hurt, and when it didn’t I felt like a failure. My whole body felt sore. Even the nurses were judgey about it.’

‘Even the nurses?’

‘Well, not all of them. But some of them. And it was just... it didn’t feel like my body. Even when I looked down at it, it was like I wasn’t there. Nobody ever tells you about this shit.’

I nodded. ‘’Cause we’re not in the village anymore, you know? It’s kind of like buying meat from the store. You’re so removed from the process that you don’t really understand it. No frame of reference. Back in the day you would’ve seen people giving birth and stuff all time, but now we don’t and so it’s this huge terrifying thing.’

‘Miccaeli,’ my friend pointed her fork at me, ‘did you just compare childbirth to mass meat production?’

‘As like, an ancestral memory thing. Anyway, I don’t think anyone should pressure you to do something with your body that you don’t want to do.’

‘Yeah. But it’s not just your body anymore.’

I thought about that for a long time after we went home. It’s not just your body anymore. I guess that’s what the milk smells like, right? Something from another body that you consume, or something from your body that someone else consumes. Do we wear these perfumes to soothe the animal inside us, or to call to the other animals around us, or both?

I decided to ponder this the only way I knew how: by wearing a milk perfume for a while. This really isn’t my genre of fragrance and I find most creamy-lactonic scents to be nauseating. But I reached into the Bin of Shame for the most photorealistic milk perfume sample I own: Hilde Soliani’s Latte Freddo.

I really cannot say enough good things about Hilde Soliani as a perfumer. It is no surprise to me that in an industry that sometimes feels overwhelmingly male, the two best gourmand perfumers on earth are women (Terri Bozzo of Kyse Perfumes shares this crown).

Soliani creates the kind of photorealistic gourmand perfumes that seem too perfect to be real. Smelling them always makes me think of the scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where Violet chews a piece of gum that tastes like a three-course dinner: wizardry in an unexpected format, an impossibly lovely thing.

So it is with Latte Freddo. This perfume smells, quite precisely, of a long thin glass of milk poured on a hot summer’s day, so crisp that water begins to condense on the outer surface. If you, like me, think there’s something a little psychotic about anyone who enjoys drinking unflavoured cow’s milk, you might understand the frisson of discomfort that wearing this perfume brings down on you.

This is not because it is badly made - it’s because it’s so well made that it is eerie. About half an hour in you feel a compulsion to look down at your shirt and make sure you didn’t spill some milk making the morning coffee.

You know the smell of milk, right? How would you describe it? Go investigate in your fridge and report back.

Rich, a little sweet, a little fatty. And underneath it all, under the taste on the back of your palate - there. A strange kind of muskiness, that unctuous barnyard smell, the residue of living things. The animal nature of it is more apparent after you’ve smelled an alternative milk like almond or soy, which lacks this dimension.

Milk might be the most horrifying animalic note because it’s like a chameleon, less obvious on the surface than ambergris or castoreum or civet or even honey. It growls underneath the surface, like an alligator with only their eyes above the waterline. There’s something insidious about how innocuous it is.

Many milk perfumes use a tonka note to give a creamy fullness - coumarin is excellent for this - and Latte Freddo feels rich and full in this way. Almost overbearing in its hyperrealism, in its obfuscated animalism. I spent a few days wearing it, because you can’t evaluate a perfume after one wear, and I felt strange the entire time. Off center. I felt more aware of my body - of the engine of my body, the moving parts that make up the whole - than perhaps any other perfume I’ve ever worn.

I felt so aware of the power and the horror of living in a body that can make life and sustain it - nourish it.

I don’t want to smell me when I smell like this, I realised.

It smelled like a body that was not my own.

If you’re in a body that can carry a child, it sometimes feels like that’s the only choice that matters in your entire life. You will be judged if you do it; you will be judged if you don’t. You will be judged when and how and why you make this choice. And there’s so much noise about it all the time, in the news and in politics, in the pointed questions from your own family or from complete strangers.

It’s not an identity, this choice. But it may become how others identify you.

What do you do with all of that? How is there room in the middle of the all the noise to sit down quietly with yourself and ask what it is that you want?

I don’t like thinking about these things. Thinking about them makes me feel overwhelmed, the way you feel when you’re caught at the back of an elevator full of people - no room, no air. The claustrophobic intimacy of the milk perfume, of possession and consumption, crawled up my spine with every step I took for every day that I wore it.

Some things are sometimes better left under the surface.

My answer, I thought, as I put the sample of Latte Freddo back in its drawer, is that I don’t have an answer yet.

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A few weeks after the Latte Freddo experiment, I went down to see my friend at a local cafe so we could try the matcha flavor of the month. The baby came with us this time and slept happily through our deep dive into the pros and cons of the matcha’s Neapolitan cold foam. (The verdict: delicious).

‘Do you remember when we were talking about the psychotic new mum forums, and about the formula milk?’ I asked. ‘Would you be okay if I wrote about it, in an article?’

‘Sure. But why would you write about that in a perfume article?’

‘I think it’s going to be about milk. Like, milk perfumes and body horror and stuff.’

She looked at me over the slow melting cold foam. ‘How do you come up with this stuff? There are milk perfumes now?’

‘There’s a perfume for everything. But yeah, they’re pretty popular. It’s like a vanilla girlie thing.’

‘Why the fuck,’ she said, ‘would anyone want to smell like milk?’

I swirled my straw to disperse the ice as it diluted. ‘I think it’s a comfort thing. Or people think it’s a comfort thing. They think it smells like cosy and warm. But I think it’s also a lizard brain thing, right? It’s this animalic smell that we’ve known since before we could even speak.’

‘That’s disgusting. You might as well try to crawl back into the womb.’

‘Maybe that’s part of it too. Like, imagine if you remembered everything in life from the moment you were born. Going from a place that was warm and safe and connected to someone else and then suddenly you’re out in the world and like... alone. It’s so violent. Don’t we all kind of want to go back to a place before that? Or at least the feeling?’

My friend drained the last of her matcha and thought about that.

‘All I’m saying,’ she said, ‘is that if you’ve ever had milk spat back on your shirt, you wouldn’t ever want to buy it as a perfume.’

And maybe that was the difference. I thought about that as I finished my matcha too, and we checked on the baby in the pram and walked down to the shops. The difference between being in body that feels so full of sickening and powerful potential like a loaded gun, and a potential fulfilled.

The chasm between our two bodies, the pathways of our lives, felt like such a very long distance, in that moment. Gold and silver. Milk and honey.

And then my friend said, ‘Have you seen those Sabrina Carpenter perfumes that are shaped like chocolate bars? So cute, right?'

'So cute. Should we go have a sniff? I think one of them has a whipped cream note.’

‘Oh, fuck off.’

Our laughter woke the baby. And then we spoke of other things. ▧