The Perceivedness of a Perfume

Heidegger, Intentionality, and the Structure of Scent

A friend recently told me that Le Dix by Balenciaga reminds him of Une Fleur de Cassie by Frédéric Malle. It struck me. I own both. I have worn both extensively. And yet I never made the connection. That gap in perception is exactly what I want to explore today.

Let us start with the facts. Fragrantica describes Une Fleur de Cassie as a powdery, yellow-floral, woody scent with mimosa, sandalwood, rose, musk, and aldehydes—although the aldehydes are buried deep in the note list. Le Dix, in its earliest and most faithful formulations, is described as floral, powdery, woody, aldehydic—with aldehydes right at the top. It does not even list mimosa. And yet: mimosa is absolutely there. Not just present, but structurally significant. In the heart of Le Dix, it converges with Une Fleur de Cassie almost seamlessly.

If you strip out the initial aldehydic distortion of vintage Le Dix, you arrive at a middle section that is nearly identical to Une Fleur de Cassie. The Malle is brighter, more linear, more modern in its finish. Le Dix eventually descends into a darker, more animalic base. But through the centre, they are strikingly close. If you have mourned the loss of Le Dix, Une Fleur de Cassie might offer unexpected consolation.

But the real point is this: how is it possible to know both fragrances well and never notice the resemblance? That is where Martin Heidegger becomes very relevant.

Perception is not passive. It is structured by intention. So does it mean that if mimosa is not listed in Le Dix, we do not think of it, or if no one has drawn the comparison, we do not make it? Does it mean that the perceptual field is shaped not just by scent, but by language, discourse, and framing? Yes, but things are more complicated than this.

This is not a failure of memory or nose. It is the ontological structure of perception itself, but also a particular case of fragrances, or anything that functions as referent, representation—that is, a thing that exceeds its thingness, or rather obscures it from our perception by drawing our attention to something that it is not. Today I want to reflect on passage five from History of the Concept of Time by Martin Heidegger, where he tries to illuminate the basic structure of intentionality by examining how we naturally perceive objects.

He breaks down perception into categories: environmental thing, natural thing, thingness, and finally, the being-intended of the thing. The first three relate to the entity itself, to the object before your eyes, to the formula of the scent, to what is. You can think here of an actual bottle of the fragrance, as well as the smell—whatever you make of it upon initial encounter. Heidegger actually values these unfiltered encounters; he believes in our ability “to have no difficulty in taking the immediately given just as it shows itself.” Fragrance is also an environmental thing, as we all know. We love discussing these aspects in blogs and public discourse, because it concerns the brand, the price, the shop, and all things connected to that particular bottle of fragrance. But in the end, the final category refers to the thing as it is perceived—to its perceivedness. And this is often overlooked. This is not about what the perfume is, but how it shows up for us.

This distinction is crucial, because fragrance is not perceived like a chair, I think, but more like a picture of a chair. It means that what we consider as being-there-for-us—i.e., the bodily presence of the perfume, its formula, its sum of parts—is not what is actually communicated. Because in terms of structure, perfume is what Heidegger calls a ‘picture-thing’.

In acts of representation, we create what he calls “empty intending.” The picture of the bridge is the empty intending of the bridge. The picture-thing becomes irrelevant, because when I see a picture of a bridge, I do not see a picture of a bridge—I simply see the bridge itself.

Therefore, this perception must be entirely distinct from picture-consciousness. A picture-thing is apprehended only by what is pictured on it. We do not first grasp an image, and then somehow arrive at the object behind it. We go straight to the object, bypassing the pictorial stage. So we bypass the ingredients of the fragrance, and with ease, especially when they are nowhere mentioned in a marketing brief.

So intention fundamentally shapes perception. We do not simply receive data passively, we engage the world through directedness. But in case of perfumes, and because perfume is a referent par excellence, we perceive fragrance as a picture-thing, that is we perceive only what is implied by the smell, the intended thing that exists behind the actual smell. In case of Akro’s Bake that would be lemon meringue and if instead of meringue we perceive ethyl maltol, it is either a failure of a fragrance or a professional deformation.

That is the reason why bridging Le Dix and Une Fleur de Cassie requires professional deformation, so to speak. And in general why we cannot perceive perfume as its formula. I only perceive that transcendental object that is intended for me. It takes a special effort to bring the picture-thing back into perception—to think, for example, of the quality of paper rather than what is represented on it. People who smell dihydromyrcenol in fougères do not perceive the molecule, but the idea of masculinity it represents. And the structure of our perception is beautifully attuned to making these jumps. The marketing thrives on this ability of our perception to skip to what is being intended, because it also ‘creates’ what is being intended, and often I have a problem with it.