don't wear this perfume on a plane

It is my belief that the entire canon of modern perfumery can be separated into two categories: perfumes you can wear onto a plane and perfumes you should not be allowed to bring within a hundred meters of the departure lounge.

You are of course at liberty to wear any perfume you like anywhere that you please, but there are matters of public decency at stake here. Small spaces, recycled air, and the stress of travel are all bad enough without having to sit next to someone who is wearing ten spritzes of Sauvage.

I’m telling you that olfactive karma is real. You’ve smelled this person. Do not be this person. It will come back to haunt you.

If there is content that is safe for work then there are perfumes that are safe for plane. It is good and important that we have and wear perfumes like these as a matter of public service.

But some days you don’t want to wear a nice perfume. Some days you want a perfume that smells like blood and thunder.

It’s been a while since we spoke about a real stinker, a pure animalic. Like many perfume obsessives, this is an area of fragrance that I find exciting to explore. Why does this category hold so much appeal?

There’s certainly the shock value. We are the most sanitised people to ever walk the earth. Our society, simply put, smells less than it ever has. When everyone is walking around smelling like dirty skin and unwashed hair, the scent doesn’t have much shock value in a perfume. When hygiene is a social norm, nothing feels more subversive. This is the gut punch that an animalic perfume gives the modern wearer, a confrontation with earthy and animalic smells that evoke the intimate or the obscene.

And then there’s the fact that when the world smelled more and cared less about animals the perfumes were a lot funkier. A modern, ethical animalic is the closest we can get to the vanished world of vintage perfume. This is catnip to the fragrance obsessive.

There’s a sense of victory in being able to enjoy an animalic perfume, too. If you have a modern nose and are used to clean streets you have to build up a tolerance to these notes like civet and hyraceum and oud. There are some you might never learn to love, and there are some with which you might only have an uneasy truce where you are comfortable to stare at one another across a room and avoid close quarters.

I think it’s a good thing, to be able to sniff out the nuance in an unpleasant smell. To ask yourself why you find it unpleasant, why your nose scrunches up in distaste. Is it really a bad smell, or is it only bad to you? Are there any truly bad smells? Or is it kind of like the German saying that there is no bad weather, only bad clothes, and our silly olfactive systems haven’t yet learned to appreciate the coarse beauty in a rotting flower, or a pile of dirt, or the sulphuric bite of overcooked eggs?

Or perhaps there is a smell that is universally considered bad that you find you actually rather enjoy. For example, I have always loved the thick-wet chemical smell of bleach - and chlorine, and turpentine, and petrol, and freshly daubed paint. One of the high points of my week is when I get to walk back into my freshly cleaned bathroom and am surrounded by the heady, clinical fug of freshly bleached shower tiles.

What is unwearable, unpalatable, unsmellable to you might be lovely to someone else. A shoe for every foot and a perfume for every wrist.

That being said, it’s good to have a working knowledge of perfumes that might be socially undesirable - perfumes that, in other words, are pushing it to wear on your next flight. I would safely say that anything containing real oud would easily fit into this category. (Many would say that about a synthetic oud accord as well, but perhaps for different reasons).

If you’ve never gotten your nose across pure oud oil, it is one of the things you must smell before you die.

There’s no better way to describe oud than to explain what it is, which is the residue from an infected tree. The way you are imagining this might smell is the olfactive world of oud, but as with all natural materials it contains more facets than a human nose can ever really comprehend. Oud smells like rotting planks, and cool tea, and sweet rot, and the mysteriously concerning sticky stuff spilled at the bottom of your medicine cabinet, and the damp mulch of the farmer’s acreage.

Oud smells like all of these things all at once, an entire perfume in a drop of oil. Oud is one of the rare materials that smells as expensive as it costs. It’s had a bit of bad decade in terms of publicity, with all those cut-rate oud accords flooding the market. Now that that’s died down and the appetite for luxury materials is growing there’s every chance we could have a revival. An oudissance. Give it a few more years to settle, and mark my words - we’ll be seeing oud again.

Amongst the great 2010s oud flood there are few truly great perfumes. Oudh Infini, from Dusita, is one of them.

If you are looking for a perfume to wear on a plane, look elsewhere. If you are looking for a perfume that is wearable anywhere, probably look elsewhere. But if you’re interested in smelling the result of what oud can do in the hands of a truly and fearless perfumer, look here.

Pissara Umavijani, the nose behind Dusita, is one of the great perfumers of our age. She crafts fragrance on the scale of the epics, perfumes so bold and luxurious that to smell them feels like an experience through all the senses. The sensation of wearing a Dusita perfume is like the first time you see that spanning shot across the desert in Lawrence of Arabia, a moment where you sit in awe at what human creativity is capable of.

Dusita perfumes are a sound reminder that beauty, often, is terror. This is what we are meant to be doing, you think. Humanity has evolved, precisely, to reach this moment. This artist. This perfume.

Oudh Infini is a fragrance made for vintage lovers, biological terrorists, and the criminally insane. It is oud gone supernova, an unleashing of the material in all its fecal glory, with an opening so vividly reminiscent of the barnyard that you will look down at your feet and be surprised that you are not wearing Wellingtons caked in mud.

When I first sprayed this perfume (yes, standing in a store; yes, with other customers around and the salesperson grimacing in my direction) my stomach turned so violently that I tried to take a step away from my own hand holding the blotter. You will be shocked to hear that my arm moved with me and I had no choice but to smell the thing from top to bottom.

When we were children my sister went on an ill-fated school excursion to The Sheep and Cattle Drome. What was meant to be a fun day feeding animals and learning about pastoral life has instead lived on in infamy in my family as the smell of the enclosure, the animal waste and the hay and the manure, traumatised my sister so violently that any whiff of an animal will immediately make her shudder and hiss, ‘The Sheep and Cattle Drome!’, before she recounts the entire story and the horror she felt to us as if she is in the field once again.

I was too young to go on the excursion, but no need. I smelled Oudh Infini and, for the first time in my life, knew exactly what my sister meant.

The thing that is shocking about Oudh Infini, and most animalics, is not that they smell like a latrine. The pissy facets of civet and oud are natural smells, neutral smells, and they make no statements about art or animals or the politics of the body by existing. It’s the format that makes an animalic shocking, the framework, the very fact that they are notes in a perfume.

A perfumer sat down and built this accord and put it in a perfume and charged $600 for it. Pay attention. A perfumer has said to you, this smell is luxury. This smell is beauty. This is a smell in a potion designed for you to wear on your body, and for you to project to others.

What does it say about you if you choose to smell like this, like a smell that is so politically incorrect? Who are you if you walk onto a plane smelling like The Sheep and Cattle Drome?

Oudh Infini is a challenge, which is refreshing in a landscape of perfumes that are so desperate to please. But the thing about a challenging perfume is that they, well, challenge you. To wear something that smells so scatological requires a lot of willpower. You will be distracted the entire day as your brain screams at you that something is wrong, that there is danger, that the smells of dysentery and sick wood are all around you. This is to say nothing of the looks you will, deservingly, receive.

It helps that this is a perfume with materials of incredible quality, in a structure that is deeply beautiful. Hiding underneath the piles of oud is what might be the loveliest ambered rose perfume of the last ten years. It is a floral structure so lush and complete that your brain thinks, ‘of course!’, the way it always does when you smell a perfume that is so in harmony with itself that it feels like a complete thing. The rose and orange blossom seem even more beautiful as the chaser to that most disgusting of ouds, like a punch that is followed by the sweet ache of a bruise.

There are no cliches here, no gimmicks. Oudh Infini is a perfume that smells expensive, and is expensive, and for once has the quality of materials and immense skill to back up the price tag. Never has one paid so much to smell like sheep droppings. A modern classic, and a benchmark oud that all perfume lovers should smell before they die.

Just be kind to your fellow citizens, and don’t ever spray it before getting on that plane. ▧