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Welcome to Back of the Napkin, musings from Serviette for the cultured world. In New York City and many other places, sweater weather has arrived and, along with it, the gnawing desire to re-read Edith Wharton while luxuriating in perfume. What is most substantive of this shift in season is putting on a sweater that hasn’t been worn since the spring, and—sniff—what is that particular scent?
If you, like me, put away garments that have been perfumed before their seasonal retirement, this can occur rather frequently. How, exactly? Fragrance performs differently when sprayed onto fabric. Droplets can travel along yarns and into spaces between fibers. Fragrance molecules can also associate with fiber surfaces or partition into the fibers themselves. This is called sorption; the reverse process, their release back into the air, is desorption.
Now that we have the science out of the way, let’s turn to the rather more interesting matter of why this feels so good. There have been untold conversations around the rise of gourmand perfumes and a concomitant yearning to be comforted by our scents. Spraying a sweater isn’t as prescriptive. It may, however, be considerably more evocative. “I prefer to smell someone’s sweater that’s been on the body than to look at a picture of that person,” Anicka Yi, a conceptual artist whose practice brings together fragrance, cuisine, and science, once detailed in a very fascinating interview.
Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that Serviette’s guide to spritz etiquette recommends spraying pile rather than person. This sentiment is shared by many cultural figures: actress Chloë Sevigny (“I usually spray it on my wrists and then behind my ears on top of my head, and then sometimes on whatever garments I’m wearing.”); fashion photographer Richard Burbridge (“Often, I sprayed [perfume] randomly and not only on my skin, but also on clothes.”); and model and designer Inès de la Fressange (“Perfume should be discreet, like a little secret. I spray perfume around the neck, on my wrists, and on my scarf”).
There may even be something medicinal—or medicine-adjacent—about the scented sweater. Would you believe there are more than a handful of academic papers about olfactory comfort? “Olfactory Comfort: Smelling a Partner’s Clothing During Periods of Separation” is one such example. The researchers asked undergraduates who were in, or had previously been in, committed heterosexual relationships whether they deliberately smelled a partner’s clothing or slept with it during periods of separation. Participants of both sexes reported that smelling the clothing provided positive emotional reassurance. Science, at last, catches up with the borrowed jumper.
In a separate sleep study published in Psychological Science, 155 people slept with T-shirts as pillow covers: two nights with their partner’s scent and two nights with a control scent. Participants slept more efficiently with their partner’s scent, gaining the equivalent of roughly nine extra minutes per night. Huzzah!
We tend to choose perfume for how we want to smell today, with little thought for who might encounter it months later. Sometimes, that person is simply us, pulling a sweater from a drawer. Perhaps this is perfume’s smallest form of time travel: a few molecules caught in wool, waiting patiently for autumn. We thank you for reading this week’s newsletter, and suggest passing it to a friend in much the same spirit as passing on a worn, lightly perfumed sweater.