The smell of socialism has changed. A Cuban company called Labiofam has created two colognes that are inspired by, and pay homage to, Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. The Che scent is said to be ‘woodsy and refreshing’ with notes of talcum powder and is called Ernesto. The Chávez scent is ‘softer and fruitier’, with hints of mango and papaya.
They say the scent of a person is his olfactory signature. If that’s true, Ernesto’s makers may have misread the sign. By all accounts, Che was charismatic and influential. He wasn’t big, however, on bourgeois tasks like bathing or changing his clothes more frequently than once a week. In fact, as a kid, he was known as El Chancho, or The Pig. So ‘woodsy’ his signature may be, but ‘refreshing’? Surely not.
But then Labiofam has long been in the business of producing cleaning products. It probably couldn’t help sprucing up Che’s not-so-hygienic image. As Mario Valdes, who led the scent design team, said: “We didn’t want to create propaganda, but rather pay homage to them and help their names endure.”
Well, a scent definitely lingers longer than a tee-shirt, which is what most marketers appropriate Guevara’s image for. Psychologists say smell is the most powerful of all the five senses in triggering memory. The structure of the human brain is responsible for this: the olfactory bulb, which handles smell, sits snug both with the amygdala, which handles emotion, and the hippocampus, which processes associative learning, aka memories.
When we encounter a new smell, we instinctively link it with an ongoing activity or the person in front of us, or even the place itself. When we encounter the smell again, the old memory is revived. The smell of chlorine makes us think of swimming pools because that’s where we, most likely, encountered it first. A hint of jasmine conjures up visions of the aunt who braided her plait with the flowers. Sandalwood reminds me of the mini temple at the Sagar Ratna cash counter; citrus of a Thai spa.
Smells are in the business of emotional transportation, taking us further back in time than any verbal or visual cue could. Not all smells are happy ones, because not all memories are happy ones. For me, smelly socks bring back nauseous memories of an old chauffeur who would take off his shoes in the car; a seedy mix of tobacco and cheap alcohol puts me in mind of a bar near my first place of work. Delhi’s autorickshaws may work on CNG now but diesel fumes still remind me of never-ending auto rides in sweltering summer.
A smell doesn’t have to be a strong one to conjure up an image. But if I were a perfumer, I would put olfactive branding to work in reverse and create new scents to go with a strong image. I would give Amitabh Bachchan a fragrance in a tall, imposing bottle. The scent would go on and on; its flavour undiminished by time. A Chetan Bhagat would be inexpensive and omnipresent; stocked even by grocers. The Karan Johar would have a coffee flavour and a risqué joke on the all-black, slightly camp packaging. The Rahul Gandhi scent would come in a good-looking bottle but have no distinctive character. Indeed, users would be hard put to define what they smelt in it. Whiffs of socialism? Maybe, maybe not.
shampa@newindianexpress.com