Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 61

PeddlinR Eros

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world of colors, moreover, is backed scientifically. Colors can be
defined in terms of wavelengths; they form a continuous spectrum that
can be generated out of a small number of basic colors. All this is not
the case for smells. In fact olfactory categorization has been one of
the most challenging aspects in the field of odor research for decades,
especially so, as classification is probably intimately connected with
the perceptual apparatus itself and with the chemical structures of
the objects of perception.
Colors, however, in circumstances outside the sciences, especially
in the world of fashion and luxuiy production and consumption (where
perfumery also belongs), have shown—and this is not even a
particularly recent phenomenon—a trend toward auraticization.^®
Instead of the good old red, white, and blue we may find stone or
pumpkin, sand or acorn, bottle or hunter, flax or graphite heather,
putty or lagoon, pool and spruce, nut and eggplant as color
designations.^^ Bittersweet and driftwood, chutney and milkweed,
potpourri and surplus, together with military and fatigue, teal and
paprika, pigeon and pebble are further examples.^® What emerges,
in other words, is a deliberate attempt to (re)create aura in the realm
of color designation, to connotate as well as to denotate, to evoke as
well as to inform. What the sense of smell has "to go through,"
literally, namely the detour through the material world of objects
(the smell of . . . ) is done deliberately and playfully for colors in an
attempt at a new, auratic fusion of signifier and signified.
This effort at re-auraticizing colors—in the realm of fashion
above all—and to link colors more directly with the concrete sensory
world of objects, preferably natural objects (but this, of course, depends
on the fluctuations of style), is a deliberately selected strategy in
addition to and partially replacing the existing sense-specific
vocabulary of red, white, or blue. In comparison, then, the olfactory
reference structures—in advertising as well as outside of it—are
downright honest, for there are no other ways of talking about scents
than those leading through the world of matter. The commonly used
denotative figure for the designation of smells is based on spatiotemporal or metonymic and associative proximity of tenor and
vehicle in the speakers' mind. This situation accounts at least
partially for the idiosyncrasies of olfactory references. "It smells
like" or "the smell o f expresses relations of combination and