Like many teenage girls, I was a committed boy-sniffer. By which I mean a Lynx-sniffer, since this delightfully cheap but heady deodorant was synonymous with all the raging hormones – and the promise that went with them. Even the geekiest, ugliest, runtiest of the litter could be transformed into an object of mystique and allure by the waft of Lynx – perhaps Apollo or Voodoo, the two late nineties variants I remember best.
Even today, I can’t entirely shake my soft spot for male cologne, and I’m embarrassed to say that when it’s plastered on some vulgarian on the Tube sporting a gallon of hair gel and one of those puzzlingly horrid moustaches bleeding into beard, I fail to recoil. And while a Lynx-esque blast on a successful middle-class man – a KC, say, or a thinktank executive – would be odd, a clear hint of Calvin Klein or Zadig & Voltaire is not only welcome, it’s downright erotically charged.
All of which makes me more sympathetic than most to the otherwise hugely embarrassing revelation that Emmanuel Macron wears ‘industrial’ quantities of Dior Eau Sauvage.
Macron’s daily self-dousing in the stuff was revealed in a new book called The Tragedy of the Élysée, by Le Parisien journalist Olivier Beaumont, which put his Dior daubing down to the belief that stinking of designer pheromones is ‘an attribute of power’. So desperate to project power is the famously small-statured, childless Mr Macron that he is said to apply Eau Sauvage ‘at all hours of the day’, so that ‘less-accustomed visitors may find themselves overcome by the floral and musky scent, as refined as it is powerful.’ Some workers in the Élysée told Beaumont that they knew when Macron was about to enter a room, because they could smell him first.
Excessive amounts of cologne, whether on teenage boys or heads of state, always conveys desperation; sometimes (OK, always) for sex; sometimes, as in Macron’s case, for power and respect. It is this that is the pitiful, off-putting part of Macron’s overpowering lady’s-man-at-a-night-club smell – far more than the smell itself.
That said, when it comes to the allure of the lothario’s scent, even I have my limits. I like a clearly scented man, but ‘industrial’ quantities of cologne? It is one thing at a school dance or nightclub when you are a horny teen. Outside of these contexts, it can be a nauseating, terrible thing. Overpowering in all the wrong ways, dominating everything else, including what is being said. Cloying cologne becomes the only story in the room, but an awkward one at that. It’s telling that Macron has no aides willing to suggest cooling it a little on the Eau Sauvage. Perhaps the scent of power really has gone to all their heads.
Excessive amounts of cologne, whether on teenage boys or heads of state, always convey desperation
There’s nothing new, of course, about perfume and power; scent, especially men’s scent, has been intermingled with royalty since at least the medieval period. Cologne had many virtues that matter less today, from the medicinal to the practical. It masked nasty undertows of smell caused by infection, lack of plumbing and refrigeration – and was obviously an artisanal luxury. Most European kings and queens had their own perfumers.
It is interesting then, given the longer history of elite scent, that Macron is so keen on something so mainstream, so literally industrial. A French leader might, one would think, go for something more openly, proudly elite, since he is not hamstrung by the modern British obsession with appearing to be one of the people. Why is Macron’s signature scent not by some arthouse parfumeur that makes only small batches? At the very least, how can Brigitte tolerate years of Eau Sauvage?
The truth is Macron, as well as being politically weak and physically short, has revealed – through his obsession with Dior cologne – that he is also a little bit immature. Perhaps he is confusing the Élysée Palace with the school where, at 14, he first encountered and fell for Brigitte, planting the seed (or perhaps it was the scent?) that would eventually lead her to return his passion.
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