In conversation with Steven Gontarski of Luckyscent for an upcoming podcast, we were talking about the different things a perfume could do. I proposed that a perfume could work magic via, in increasing order of complexity, (1) a tune (Cherry Bliss), (2) a development (Ganymède) and (3) an orchestration (ARC), or of course all three. Later I thought that I had forgotten the zeroth degree—the axioms of the degré zéro beloved of Continental philosophers.
I was reminded of this omission when a Polish friend kindly gave me a small bottle of Być Może (meaning “maybe”), a cheap Polish fragrance. Smelling it on my hand gave me a peculiar emotion, which I’ve been trying to figure out. The first thought is that much of the time any perfume is better than nothing. I know that my audience of fragheads will wonder whether I’ve gone soft, but hear me out.
Suppose you have spent a month in a place with no fragrance whatsoever: say, a little holiday retreat in the hotel on level 3 of the Wieliczka salt mine, breathing the clean, cool air in the utter quiet, reading all ten volumes of Landau & Lifshits. You come back to daylight via the lift, and the first person you encounter on the way to the bus to Kraków is wearing Być Może. I defy you not to be moved to a quiet tear, because it is music to your nose, and therefore better at that moment than endless silence.
Robert Parker, the great wine critic, classes wines on a hundred-point scale, and gives every wine fifty points “just for showing up.” The Parker scale is logarithmic, the difference in quality and price between 90 and 99 being far greater than between 50 and 60. Nevertheless, it embodies the general idea that any wine at all is better than no wine. Być Może is a Parker 60.
But there is something else. Być Może is a floral containing a huge slug of Magnolan, a Symrise material that defined early 1980s florals, like Ivoire and Madame Carven. Had I discovered it, I would be very pleased with myself. I can just imagine the little celebration with bubbly they must have had in the coffee room of the Symrise chemistry tower when they came across it. Magnolan is a creamy floral, strong, tenacious and unusually complex for a single molecule. It is also cheap.
Cheap fragrances, like cheap bubbly, cheap clothes and cheap hostels, are the prerogatives of youth. Expensive things come with age, i.e., with the loss of youth, and are therefore consolation prizes.
When you smell Być Może, you know instinctively that this is someone’s first perfume, that it will put a soundtrack to someone’s first encounter with love, with evenings out, with holding hands to cross the street, with stepping out of a cinema together, with knowing glances exchanged in a crowded tube carriage, with standing in front of a painting and preferring to look at each other, with being silently blessed by strangers who can see the light around you both.
They say smell is about memory, but that is an Aristotelian final cause, the emotional cart before the fragrant horse. Memories have to be made before they can be enjoyed. The fact is that perfumes encourage, indeed demand the creation of memories. A Siberian friend of mine, when faced with pretty dresses, love songs, heady fragrances and any prospect of a good time, would intone the word propaganda in her Russian accent, and then dive in happily. Być Może, maybe, is the lure that makes us live.
Hi Luca,
beautiful article, but it is a deep mistake to consider Byc Može as someone's first perfume. It is the opposite, it is a "great lifelong perfume" of women of the communist bloc. Actually, as you write above "any perfume is better than nothing".
Many women of my mother's age were accompanied by it to their children's graduations, to the theater, to concerts, to weddings... in my country, in the former Czechoslovakia.
It was difficult, almost impossible, to obtain any goods, including perfumes, during the Cold War for people hermetically sealed inside the heart of Europe. It is often written that people of the Eastern Bloc had everything they needed, except luxury goods. But "luxury goods" in our country were any deodorant from Coty or Revlon worth 2€. Dior or Chanel perfume was an unaffordable dream that did not come true for most women (even though Dior was produced in Czechoslovakia for a long time). Sometimes even menstrual pads were luxury goods.
But make a long story short: imagine a small closed country where nothing is allowed to be imported, except oranges from Cuba for Christmas, and bicycles on the waiting list from Russia (Soviet Union).
We couldn't go shopping abroad, we had special passports that allowed us to travel only around the Russian bloc of Europe (event not the whole of it) with a very small amount of money (yes, customs officers looked for money in the car at the border and ).
The socialist economy was completely near bankrupt for many reasons, the state was not able to develop and produce anything on its own. Cosmetic companies produced only the necessary things: soap, detergents, washing powders.
Everything else was considered "super-standard" - we know that a dictatorship does not want to treat its inhabitants to better things, because they could cause a desire to "have something more", a better smell, a better taste, a better experience, a better life... and more, which then follows (revolution, check, done :) ).
So in the countries of the entire Eastern Bloc there were only a few - a units - producers of very bad fragrances. And Byc Može was the much demanded IMPORT - foreign goods - that Czechoslovak women could indulge in.
They probably didn't think it was the best perfume in the world - but they couldn't get any other.
As the main gift under the tree, women received tin sprays of Impulse, smuggled from East Germany or Hungary where the regime was for 1% more polite. :)
(Interestingly, they Russians didn´t export relatively decent Novaya Zarya perfumes - they probably couldn't cover domestic demand).
BTW - your "Rose" is some kind of modern flanker, but the original Byc Može was without an adjective and was an aldehyde imitation of No. 5 - simply "No.5 Women of Communism".
I don't know why they still produce it today - probably nostalgia. None of the young women in Poland will definitely take it on as their first perfume when they can have some Arab miracle supported by an influencer for the same money.
Yes, we all need to start somewhere. Even Blue Nun is a wine, technically.