The scent of imagination

[sathari]

Over in the welcome post, synecdochic  and I had a bit of a discussion about scent and imagination/synaesthesia, as a result of which I promised to post the following questions for the comm to play with!

- Do any of you have synaesthetic effects around your perfumes and other scented things? (For those who aren't feeling like clicking links, synaesthesia is when you have two or more senses that overlap or interact--- some of the most common ones are associating colors with letters or numbers, although just about any combination is possible--- the link is to a book called The Man Who Tasted Shapes, in which an MD was inspired to research synaesthesia as a result of a friend who could tell that chicken was undercooked because "it didn't have enough points on it". In this case, we'd be talking about sounds, colors, textures, etc., that your perfumes and other scents call up for you--- or other scent-related overlaps: did you buy a perfume because it smells like your favorite song, for example, or your favorite color?)

- Relatedly, do any of you associate particular scents with fictional characters (ones you follow in others' work, ones you work on yourself, ones who are both, etc.?)

I'll post my answers down below as an example, if anyone's curious.

(Suggested tags: meta; maybe something related to "things we relate to scents" or "ways we experience scents")

Comments

[sathari]

hypothetical fictional people that come to mind just wearing/smelling the perfume

That's incredibly cool!

And the perfume you referenced sounds like another one that could be for Princess Ashe--- cool! (True Confessions of a Lurker time: in one of my recent forays through the DW site search function looking for FFXII fic, I stumbled upon your "Troppo", which is fantastic! And by fantastic I mean, "I suspect this has entered my headcanon for Vayne in some ways.")

[sathari]

Oh, wow! Sound-to-smell, um, sounds neat, pardon the pun! (Now I'm thinking about Brave New World and the scent organs they had that made "symphonies" of scents.)

I have been searching for the scent of Midgar....

For some reason what popped into my mind as my own scent-association for Midgar when you said that was BPAL's No. 93 Engine. Which I have not smelled in a while, come to think of it!

[sathari]

Usually it's someone I haven't met before

You're the second person who's had this--- that's neat, getting to meet a new character through a perfume! And someone else in this thread is going to try to write fic around scents, too--- very cool!

[sathari]

So "small room with a warm stone floor and a leather couch" is a possible response to a perfume.

Cool--- and see above, that is almost my exact description of BPAL's Dee!

[sathari]

how many here can recall scents when you're not smelling them? I can, but the spouse cannot--however, he's a hundred times better at identifying scents, as in, "there's a hint of rosemary in this". I find the ability to verbally identify scents magical.

Seconding the ability to verbally identify scents as a form of magic! Ditto tastes for me; I can describe what things taste like, often synaesthetically, but identifying ingredients in common parlance? Not so much. As for remembering how things smell... I think I can, but I'm not sure how reliable it is, if that makes sense.

[synecdochic]

See, to me, No 93 Engine smells like Sunday morning at the Renfaire apothecary booth I used to work at -- many of the herbs in there were part of our hangover cure ;)

[feldman]

From my notes for No. 93 Engine, "I smell like a fur and brocade cloak on Darkover."

[lunabee34]

Oh good. :)

[lunabee34]

Yay! Me too. :)

Re: about point #2

[lunabee34]

Yes! He cracked down on all the debauchery etc. and ushered in an era of peace that outlasted him. If HBO can be believed, he was also sleeping with his sister. LOL

I love what you came up with; I bet that would smell delicious.

[byzantienne]

Oh my god, that fic is so OLD! I'm glad you liked it. (I always meant to write more Vayne, but it never quite worked out. Somewhere on my hard drive is a never-finished WIP entitled 'Notes Toward A History of Ivalice' which was meant to be the Vayne Is A Terrible Colonialist Emperor fic...)

And yeah, I get snapshot personalities off of perfume! It's part of why I love it, I get to be Other People while I wear certain scents.

[byzantienne]

-- Grigor Vorbarra. I have been trying to figure out who Gris Claire is, and YES.

[byzantienne]

I can if I have a strong association with the scent -- an image, a scenario, a person, a color. Then I can call up the scent via that hook.

[sathari]

Ooh, that's awesome! (I just went and sniffed my bottle of it again, and, yep, smells like what I imagine mako would smell like, lol.)

[sathari]

LOL! That's awesome!

[sathari]

Loved it so much! Just... Vayne. (I... have all the Vayne feels, all of them. So that fic, unfinished or not? Relevant to my interests is putting it mildly.)

Perfume-as-persona sounds amazing!

[synecdochic]

Hee. Yeah, I have too strong a scent-memory with it to have it stand in for Midgar for me. I never thought I had fabulous scent-memory until I started working through all this BPAL. (The one I'm wearing right now -- Brimstone -- has gone through several stages of "bonfire at Pennsic at midnight when it's blazing brightly enough to light up the whole camp", "bonfire at Pennsic at 2AM when it's died down some", and "bonfire at Pennsic at 4AM when you're the last person awake in your camp and really should just bank the damn thing already but you're enjoying the last little bits of it too much to let it go", and is now at "bonfire at Pennsic at 7AM when you stumble out of your tent to discover it rained and the stones around the firepit are wet and ashy". Not just any bonfire: a bonfire at Pennsic. Earlier on I swore I could hear the drums.)

[musyc]

Thirding, fourthing, n-thing this. I'm considering it for myself. I need something to boot me back into daily writing and/or fan_flashworks and this idea could help loads.

[musyc]

I tend to get visual images and/or colors most when I'm associating with scents. I don't think I'd call it a form of synesthesia, or it's a veryvery minor form of it? *shrug* But, frex, BPAL's The White Rider on its first sniff was light purple to me. The purple of the horizon at sunset. Ave Maria was 'dustmotes in sunlight' gold.

[sathari]

Wow, that is really amazing! And fascinating how well that scent actually moves through the evolution of a specific kind of fire--- it's not like, "Okay, right now it's doing 'bonfire at Pennsic at midnight' and now it's '4th of July fireworks'" or something else random, it's actually replicating this specific sequence of experiences! (That... seems like the sort of thing the folks at BPAL would actually be trying to do, even if it's not a guarantee because scents interact with our own body chemistry etc.!)

[sathari]

Sounds synaesthetic to me, and some very pretty effects at that! :) Thanks for sharing!

[synecdochic]

Ha, yes! There have been a few things I've smelled in this quest that have invoked a very specific sense of time and place -- in some cases bringing back memories and experiences I thought I'd completely forgotten. (I do not have a very good memory.)

I'm bidding on an imp collection on eBay right now that has something in it that might work for Midgar. Mind you, it's an extremely discontinued, extremely rare scent that regularly goes for a lot of money when bottles of it even come up, so in some ways I'm hoping it won't work. Heh.

[sathari]

That is very cool--- I know scent is supposed to be a strong memory cue in general.

Oh, wow--- the whole rare-and-discontinued thing is just ugh, so I am simply going to wish you luck in a very generic way, as in luck with a good outcome, whether it's having the scent work or not, whichever would be best! (I have feelings about some of the things that got discontinued from BPAL over time, including at least one layering that was absolutely perfect on me. Sigh.)

[synecdochic]

Ha. Yeah, I am resisting acquiring decants of LEs and discontinued scents SO HARD. I know myself; I know how easily I could turn this into a Pokemon game.

[sathari]

My own BPAL collection, admittedly a few years old, is a testament to the fact that this is a good idea. (I don't so much have the "gotta get 'em all" feelings as the "must hoard multiples of soon-to-be-discontinued things I love" feelings, which is just as bad if not worse!)