Hi Arabelle! What perfumes would you recommend for someone who wants to smell like a robot/cyborg? I hate smelling like a fleshbody!!!

arabellesicardi:

There’s plenty to choose from in the antiperfume family. Comme des garçons has a bunch of weird shit i like. I wear garage and tar; they’re a bit hard to find now though since they are from series 6 synthetics from the early aughts. There’s heretic poltergeist that smells like demons (I always shriek opening the bottle) and etat d’libre’s most famous perfume, which some people say smell like sex and tears and sweat and whatever and smells horrible to lots of people but I think it’s a very interesting work of art. I wouldn’t wear it unless I wanted to be obnoxious but it doesn’t smell like any of those things to me and is just like, kind of… weird garbage that slowly unfurls. I adore it and I mention it because it smells untraditional which might be what you want, I think. But to be honest perfume recommendations are entirely subjective. You might say you don’t want to smell like a flesh body but so you know what you naturally smell like? What does being human smell like to you? Some of the best perfumes, like molecule 01 series, are basically very simple and rely on iso e and smell different on everybody but it’s a very kind of instinctual smell. You know how umami is like the fifth taste category, it’s like the depth of flavor you taste in good broth? I think molecule 01 is kind of like that for bodies. It’s funny: take space for example.  the actual smell of space is more of an almond and gunpowder (I wrote about it once) and I think the perfumes that translate that well do so because the warmth, which is very connected to human memory even in this literal lifeless void translation. actually…. like the smell of someone you love’s neck when you hug them….you know that warmth? it’s like smell umami. Sorry I’m on a tangent

This is a fun question but I think you can have a lot of fun learning different frangrance groups yourself by buying tiny samples of indie fragrances online and learning what you like by smell and not by story. You will probably be surprised at how things don’t correlate in execution to what you imagine. This is fine and fun, you just have to be curious.