Speaking of Angels

Ben Fama in conversation with Poet & Perfumer Marissa Zappas

“Perfume is unconscious prayer”

Marissa Zappas is a perfumer, poet and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. I was introduced to her work recently when she reached out to my friend and author Rachel Rabbit White to collaborate on a perfume to accompany the deluxe release of Porn Carnival: The Paradise Edition (I have smelled the samples, and they’re incredible, to my simp’s nose). 

I caught up with Marissa recently to discuss poetry, prayer and perfume.

Ben Fama: When we were talking about the samples you were making for Rachel you mentioned you can design scents without even smelling the ingredients. How does that work? 

Marissa Zappas: I have the ingredients (raw materials) memorized by smell. Like a cardex of smells in my head. A bit like cooking, you don’t always need to try the ingredient to know it’ll work.

BF: That’s really interesting to hear you compare it to cooking. I could run really far with that metaphor, but let me try to keep it chill here. Is there a baseline of your favorite ingredients that you build from? What is the perfume equivalent of snacks? 

MZ: Maybe accords? An accord is a short formula. Accords usually have 3-10 raw materials, whereas perfume formulas can be anywhere up to 100, or even more. And yeah, I definitely have my favorite ingredients that I tend to use in every formula – my “signature” if you will. I really love ambrettolide for example, a synthetic musk inspired by ambrette seeds, which come from the hibiscus flower.

BF: Can you tell me how you approach collaborations? 

MZ: I find out what the client is looking for and give them a few olfactive ideas, places for us to start. Accords eventually turn into perfumes. They pick the accord they like most and I just keep developing that with them, getting their feedback, until it’s done. 

BF: There are a few artists I know who design or work with perfume, Dena Winter, Kim Rosenfield... Could you tell me a little how you see your perfume work as fitting into your greater aesthetic vision? 

MZ: I read somewhere that the most common experiences people have with encountering ghosts are through random and mysterious smells. We smell from the same part of our brain that processes memory, so I approach smells as memories, and in this way they’re a really powerful tool for accessing the unconscious. It’s like what Diane Ackerman said: “Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines, hidden under the weedy mass of many years and experiences.” I’m also interested in glamour beyond the visual realm. As for my art, besides perfumery, I write poetry and make short videos where I cut up and rearrange footage from Elizabeth Taylor movies.

BF: Lots to return to here, but first: you mentioned the visual realm. We live in a culture dominated by visuals, but that is just one of the senses. My dominant senses are visual and auditory. Do you consider smell to be one of yours? And then how does that inform the foods you like to eat? Taste seems so related to smell.

MZ: My dominant senses are also visual and auditory. Smell is more unconscious, even for me, but probably just less so. I’m more discriminating with smells than with food. I’m Greek, so I mostly just eat olives and feta.

BF: You mentioned Elizabeth Taylor twice. Tell us about her relationship to your different practices. Also… can we see a video? 

MZ: Sure, here’s one. I used footage from The Driver’s Seat, this bizarre 1974 film where she goes to Rome to find a man to murder her, with overlapping audio from an interview on Oprah where she’s talking about her near death experience. 

It started in 2nd grade, I was obsessed with National Velvet and used to write her love/fan letters. She actually replied once. I memorized that movie verbatim, would transcribe it for writing assignments and even answer people out of context IRL with lines from it. During that time I was really shy and in a way she helped me speak. She has just always been this powerful guiding force in my life, not to mention her perfume empire... She was the first celebrity to have a wildly successful perfume collection and she put most of what she made from that towards the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. She contributed more than $270 million dollars to AIDS prevention and care at the time of her death. 

BF: So, safe to say National Velvet is your desert island Elizabeth Taylor film? 

MZ: Either that, or Secret Ceremony.

BF: Now I have to ask: what’s your desert island scent? 

MZ: Shalimar. Do you have one? 

BF: Hawaiian Tropic… SPF55? 

MZ: Responsible.

BF: This isn’t about me though! You mentioned prayer – do you want to talk about that? Or saints, or angels? 

MZ: Perfume is unconscious prayer; I think when we choose a perfume we imbue it with meaning and the act of applying it to our bodies can activate a wish. A lot of people wear perfume to feel more desirous, not necessarily desired. One thing I do is understand my clients’ scent preferences, which is tricky in part because there’s no language for smell (we use more subjective words, like tastes and emotions) – so speaking olfactively and writing about scent is very difficult, but also more creative. Poetry and prayer use language as incantation, whereas perfume is wordless feeling. Words are powerful, but the nature of not using them allows for the wish to remain more flexible or abstract. Words can be binding. 

In Che cos’e la poesia? (What is poetry?) Derrida says poetry is “memory of the heart” and also that it “commemorates amnesia,” both of which apply to perfume and smell. He says that a poem must “disable memory, disarm culture, and know how to forget knowledge.” Perfume also relies on amnesia and a disarming of oneself. We have to be able to forget a smell in order to continue experiencing it, especially in new ways. How often have you sprayed a perfume and then not been able to smell it after a while? Part of the joy in perfume is forgetting it and then being pleasantly reminded later. Perfume is, in this way, something to be forgotten. Derrida goes on, “You will call a poem a silent incantation, the aphonic wound that, of you, from you, I want to learn by heart.” This makes me cry and is ultimately why I do what I do. Poetry and perfume are both deeply concerned with healing aphonic wounds.

Speaking of angels... Angel by Theirry Mugler was one of, if not the most groundbreaking perfumes of the century. I don’t think that is a coincidence...

BF: Speaking of poetry, how did you distill Rachel’s book into a scent? 

MZ: I actually first went through and marked every line where she mentioned flowers, because I’m literal. But after talking to her, it made more sense to try and capture the feeling instead, which is drama… romance… seduction… you know, all RRW things. So we went for an opulent, white, velvety floral. But then we decided to make it more ozonic and airy because that was her olfactive preference. I think despite the drama in her writing, there’s also a sense of detachment, of almost, floating… plus, we’re both Venus in Aquarius, it just felt right... so the final perfume wound up an airy-fresh-ozonic-jasmine-white floral.

BF: I saw the designs for the packaging. Do you want to talk about the concept there?

MZ: We wanted something more sensual and reusable than just a cardboard box, so we opted for velvet pouches, screen printed with some of her poetry. 

BF: What’s the Marissa Zappas signature scent?

MZ: Whatever I’m working on. But otherwise, Queen Nzinga by my own brand, Redamance.

BF: Can you tell us more about Redamance and where you’re taking the project?

Redamance is a collection of perfumes (right now it's just Queen Nzinga, but I will release another next year) that are olfactive portraits of overlooked women from history. I also wanted the brand to celebrate the history of perfume somehow, because I find perfume from the first half of the 20th century to be endlessly fascinating. Commercial perfume used to be much more relevant to cultural conversation and closely tied to the art world. Bottle design was also a really big thing and a lot of jewelers and artists (Dali, for example) began designing perfume bottles. So it was really important for me to have a custom carved bottle, which is incredibly laborious and why it took so long to get the project off the ground. My friend, jeweler Jonas Bowman, carved the bottle for Redamance and I think it's really special.