Priming Yourself Perfect
- M.P.S Simpson
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
Longevity, sillage, and the fictions of perfume.
You might have seen this crop up from time to time in perfume-related online spaces: What are the best ways to keep one’s perfume on for as long as is physically possible? The newest trend, funnily enough, is using makeup primer, preferably a really sticky one like the viral NYX Face Glue Primer. Fragrance experts advise that you apply a bit of the primer on your wrists and neck before applying perfume to the intended points. Claims of “everlasting smell” often adjoin these perfume “hacks”. You’ll smell incredible all night, through sweat-soaked clubs, through dinner with friends, through love affairs well into the quietest hours of the night.
It’s striking how this mentality of desiring ever-lasting perfume has occurred in recent months within the online discourse of perfumery; from Twitter groups to reels and TikToks, there appears a clamouring call for the pernicious desire to use perfumery in this way. This desire and pervasive argument is a re-formulation of the central concepts of the Clean Girl aesthetic into the olfactory realm of perfume. You must be constantly bettering yourself through the consumption of products. You must be rigidly organising your life and daily routine around the concepts of beauty. You must conform to these concepts of beauty as a veritable lightning rod casting electric rays outward to signal your moral superiority. You smell good, so therefore you must be good. And, above all else and without fail, you must not be human — at any cost.
Using primer as a base for your perfume fundamentally elides the nexus of skin-scent that creates the foundational crux of perfume’s transformative capability. Primer, as its name is taken from the material products of paint, (to which the whole semiotic web of makeup as paint and skin as canvas reveals a wealth of interpretation of how we view our own faces and bodies), smoothes out and neutralises a base product. With traditional painting materials, one applies a primer base coat to smooth out the textural fibrous quality of canvases, so that the additional top layers of paint have a surface to stick to, and also to cover the natural fibres, filling in the natural gaps of the material. Gesso, the most familiar priming product for painting, creates a surface through combinations of glue to which acrylic paints can more readily stick without the paint seeping into the natural woven material of the canvas sheet.
But, why would you want to do this with perfume?
Perfume’s transformative capability is nestled within this combination of one’s natural scent blending with the chemical complexity of the perfume’s construction. This is why some perfumes will smell incredible on one person and terrible on another. The perfume itself, in isolation, could smell divine and wondrous but sit uncomfortably on the skin. It is a personal communion. Your skin is as much the component of perfume’s beauty as the scent itself. Perfume can transform the muted smell of your skin, influenced by a whole array of physiological characteristics, into a site of true olfactory pleasure — the pleasure of memory, the pleasure of desire, the pleasure of sociality. Perfume releases these pleasures precisely through and by its contact with the human organ. Without the organic fabric of the skin to hold the scent in such a way, the essential cornerstone of beauty is lost in the vaporous air.
Mentioning the Clean Girl aesthetic hints at where this trend of everlasting perfume means culturally and politically. The concept of the Clean Girl or "minimalism" has often been attributed to the rise of conservatism and fascism throughout particularly the United States and my native England. The Clean Girl — hand in hand with culturally pertinent concepts of cleanliness as a representative of good moral fibre and hygiene — is utilised as a status emblem highlighting the originator’s belief in beauty as a moral value judgment. Clean Girls look effortlessly beautiful in their deluge of online presence. They wear "minimal" makeup, none of the frills or extravagance of the 2000s party girl, neutral colours, natural hair, perfect skin, and straight white-cut teeth. They are ubiquitous and uniform, an expression of a beauty climate that has, in recent years, prioritised and privileged "health" and "wellness" as signifiers of moral hygiene. Lifting that half-dark veil of this aesthetic reveals its falsity almost immediately — makeup found in the form of long-lasting tints, hair extensions, extensive to the point of fanatic skincare routines, veneers, and cosmetic surgery. There is typically nothing "natural" and "clean" about any of what this aesthetic pretends to align itself with.
Utilising hacks, such as the primer hack, to elongate a perfume’s efficacy and sillage is a reflection of this climate in olfactory terms. What the Clean Girl signifies is the idea that these women are essentially ready-made perfect. They are born hairless, teeth-glowing, eyes-bright. Think of the concept of the "everything shower," in which influencers online discuss their bathing routine with the language of taming some sort of feral beast or maintaining a mechanical engine. You must look beautiful, but without showing all of the work. Extravagant, avant-garde, or plentiful makeup immediately signals effort and work. But look at a contemporary Clean Girl, and they present a veritable optical illusion. Whilst current discourse found online attributes the Clean Girl and
minimalism as a "recession indicator," this argument is less convincing than that of rising conservative attitudes found in online spaces.
One only needs to look back to the outlandish fashions of 2008 and 2009 to realise that minimalism and recession or austerity do not go hand-in-hand. But the difference between 2008 and 2025 is the political climate. 2008, in both the U.S. and in the U.K, was a signal towards a re-packaged liberalism with both Democrats and the Labour Party in control of the respective countries. Following the deluge of incalculable violence found through the dirge of the Iraq War in the early 2000s, both the U.S. and the UK seemed to tilt toward a liberalised framework for the political landscape. But the 2008 financial crash added salt to an already blackening wound. In the UK, following the crash, we had over ten years of Conservative rule that decimated public services to the point of an inertia fouler than any, house prices have skyrocketed, wages stagnated, and Brexit added further insult to injury. Take ten years of perma-austerity, anti-immigrant xenophobic rhetoric, and poor standards of living, and you get racist pogroms targeting immigrants and asylum seekers televised for all the country to see. We do not live in liberal times now. A large part of these online trends are reflective of political landscapes that abet, contribute, and are informed by economic policies.
Moving back to the quality of perfume with the political backdrop dancing in the distance, we can see the interlocking facets of particular qualities of the Clean Girl and the desire to treat perfume in this way. Consumption of perfume and its longevity has figured as a central concept in maintaining the illusion of perennial perfectness that dominates our understanding of conservative fictive womanhood. Smelling good as a symptom of good moral grounding is, not by a long stretch, a new phenomenon. In Victorian England, it was commonplace for bourgeois and higher-ranking households to covet precious smelling materials in their homes as a signal to guests of their wealth, status, and cleanliness, during a period where bathing habits differ drastically from ours today.
This lean-in, fostered through constantly trying to elongate fragrance through "hacks" such as this, reformulates this Victorian usage of scent for a contemporary context. Rather than using the quality of perfume to inspire intimacy, through the subtle exchanges between people found in burgeoning romances or budding friendships, this method instead intends to spread the scent far and wide. It is, for the most part, a symptom of expressing one’s status symbol through the power of scent. Here I am, late at night, still smelling as fresh as when I woke up. It is used as a signifier of one’s, not only good taste but physiological superiority. Instead of focusing on the direct personal intimacy afforded through the close smell of another one’s scent, this typology of stretching the sillage of a perfume to the end of its capacity removes intimacy for a sort of blanket statement about the wearer. It is a repackaged desire to walk through the world ready-made and perfect. This is not to say that the impulse to smell a certain way is always connected to an inherent conservative worldview and political drive, but this manifestation found so commonly in online discourse plants itself firmly in the well from where the Clean Girl sprang.
Perfume cements the fiction that we create about ourselves. This is perhaps why perfume finds such a bedfellow with the world of literature, with so many contemporary houses, from Anaïs Binguine’s Jardins D’Écrivains to Cherry Cheng’s Jouissance Parfums, delving into the literary world as a fount of inspiration for their olfactory creations. But, in its components, perfume amplifies the fictitious aura that we create about ourselves when stepping out into the world. We wear certain scents to amplify or signal certain elements of our personhood, our interests, our desires, and who we are as people. Think of how many scents are attached to benign stereotypes, from Baccarat Rouge and the "female manipulator" to the more obvious Dior Sauvage and its toxic masculinity connotations. Perfume, in this way, functions like an olfactory magnifying glass in the very way in which we view ourselves and how we wish to be perceived by another’s gaze.
But to purposefully elongate the longevity of a fragrance by utilising methods such as priming reveals an added layer to this matrix of desire. By not allowing the skin, and by obvious extension the body, the ability to interact with the material, we create a blank canvas devoid of mood or sensuality. We remove the sensual component of perfume’s transformative capability and instead install a fictive artificial essence onto our personhood. We privilege the object over the subjectivity of personhood. We dare not let the sticky mess of being alive interrupt our carefully orchestrated narratives of ourselves. We invite others to read us as perfectly formed creatures, who even through the toils and trials and trifles of the day wandering through smog and smoke, remain poised, voluptuous, and ready for consumption. 🌀
M.P.S is a writer, zine-maker, part-time urban researcher, full-time perfume over-thinker, maximalist fashion enjoyer, and creature from East London. You can find her looking gorgeous on Instagram as @_femmedetta or giving unsolicited opinions as @cyberyamauba on X.