Someone doesn't like Jicky

[recessional]

I feel like this is the place to share this deeply amusing thread.

Comments

[recessional]

It did seem to me like the one person in the thread that asked about how it would go over BO and smoke and the other odours of the time might be onto something.

[feldman]

I've been thinking about that idea all morning now, how the landscape of scent has changed so much, not just as a backdrop but as a constant calibration of the sense itself. Wood and coal smoke, horses, dust, wax, iron fittings, machine oil, manure, starch, just thinking back to the old ubiquity of cigarette smoke, and the way the weather changes a house's smell when it's not closed up for HVAC.

It makes these old scents poetry in translation, or half of a conversation.

[recessional]

Yeah. Plus just a mingle of them: cinnamon smells different when it's mixed with the smells of apple and sugar than it does when mixed with bleach, you know? Even if it's "just" their smells. So.

[rydra_wong]

Yeah, it's definitely true that older perfumes often have a much higher "skank" level, and people's exposure to and tolerance of body smells must have been higher.

[recessional]

I'm also just thinking that like . . . we know that even just straight body-chemistry radically modifies a scent. And obviously we know that scents mixed TOGETHER are in fact different than scents by themselves - that's the whole point of perfumery.

So even beyond tolerance: in a world where there's a huge amount more wood-smoke, shit, piss, sweat, cigarette smoke, manure, etc around, it's entirely possible Jicky PHYSICALLY SMELLED DIFFERENT, in the same way that cinnamon smells different mixed with sugar and apples than it does mixed with vinegar, mustard and ham.