Jouissance: The perfume inspired by your favourite erotic literature

While scent can powerfully evoke memories, it can also stimulate fantasies. Our most beloved perfumes are often as much about escapism and aspiration as they are about treasured recollections and associations. New perfume house Jouissance was created by Goldsmith’s student Cherry Cheng during lockdown two years ago, not only from a desire to escape and feel unbound but also from a desire to compose fragrances inspired by our longing for the kind of heady, transcendent experiences we may have only encountered in the pages of our favourite erotic novels.

Cheng believes literature and perfume converge because they “are both created to enrich and beautify our imaginations and help us to surpass the mundanity of our day-to-day realities”. She explains, “I’ve always believed in the unique and instant ability for our sense of smell to transport us, not just in terms of space or time, but also transform how we feel when we adorn ourselves with perfumes.” 

The name Jouissance – a word first coined by French literary theorist Hélène Cixous –  relates to what Cheng calls “the mystical abundance that connects the feminine capacity to experience surplus erotic pleasure to one’s creativity”. So often, our sense of smell bridges the gap between our corporeal reality and the interior landscape of our imaginations. “Scents are intimate because they enter and linger inside our body when we inhale, and our responses to them are always immediate,” Cheng tells us. “I think when people seek out new olfactory experiences often they’re also searching for a renewed relationship with their bodies. I find this urge to return to the body echoes Cixous’ encouragement of ‘écrire le corps (writing the body)’ – by smelling and writing with intention, both to help us to momentarily surpass the dominance of vision and rational thinking, and lean into our subconscious, emotional being.”

As she points out, translating literary experiences into scent isn’t a new idea – Guerlain launched Vol de Nuit (Night Flight) in 1933, inspired by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s eponymous book, and the much loved Frédéric Malle perfume, Portrait of a Lady (created by the feted perfumer Dominique Ropion) takes its name from the Henry James classic. But Jouissance elaborates on this impulse in their own way, focusing on elucidating – in scent – erotic literature written by women. 

The debut trio of offerings from Jouissance take inspiration from particularly provocative 20th-century publications, attempting to translate the textual world of each book into a series of olfactory worlds to be inhaled. “A lot of time was spent on reading, researching, thinking about very abstract ideas, but at the same time materialising them, distilling them into sensory triggers and presenting them in beautiful packages,” Cheng recalls. 

La Bague d’O pays hommage to Story of O – the controversial 1954 novel of submission and domination by Anne Desclos (originally published under the pen name Pauline Réage). An ode to the “beguiling beauty” of the book’s heroine, Cheng describes the fragrance as opening with “metallic notes of steel chains and O’s ring, ‘defiled’ by warm, animalic and tar-like castoreum and woody notes” and centring around a “heady and voluptuous bruise-coloured bouquet consisting of rose, jasmine, geranium and violet”.

En Plein Air, a perfume inspired by Catherine Millet’s erotic classic The Sexual Life Of Catherine M (2001), recalls the eponymous heroine’s “alfresco exploits” with white flowers, and fresh, earthy rain notes. Meanwhile, an “overdose” of sharp citruses recall the acerbic wits of the austere art critic and author, Catherine M.

Finally, Les Cahiers Secrets is a homage to the queen of the louche, libidinous literati, Anaïs Nin. Cheng describes this scent as a “timeless, nostalgic ‘grandma perfume’” centring around “the powdery and luxurious orris (iris root), enriched by the warmth of cumin and other spices to evoke flushed skin – a homage to the use of spices in Rochas’ Femme and Guerlain’s Mitsouko – the latter being one of Nin’s favourite perfumes, which she wrote about in her diaries.” 

Jouissance stays faithful to the sentiment of its name. “We pay tribute to some of my favourite female writers who explore eroticism, or as Cixous puts it, the ‘dark continents’ of their desires and sexuality through their writings,” explains Cheng. So, while we’re warned never to judge a book by its cover, we should also perhaps avoid judging Jouissance by the innocent connotations of its pale pink, silk-lined box which belies the subversive undercurrent at the heart of its creation.