The Centerfolds (1981)

On my abiding love for Cindy Sherman and Maddie Phinney's delightful debut perfume for Hollywood Gifts

As much as I love to read, and do often try to keep up with the latest editorial and self-published writing in the world of niche fragrance, it is frustratingly hard to get me to listen to podcasts. I’ve tried for a long time to become the type of person who can throw on a fittingly intellectual podcast while I eat, or shower, or drive to work, but for some reason the practice has just never stuck with me. There are only two podcasts I will try to regularly keep up with when time allows, and this is to me a great honor. The first is Nymphet Alumni, which does not so much feel like a scripted radio hour publication but a sleepover with three of my friends I grew up with in the deep south, in which everything from the history of Tiki Bars to the cross-cultural legacy of Tokidoki is up for discussion. The second is Maddie Phinney and Chloe Coover’s Nose Candy, which is about niche perfume I guess, but has such an erratic and hilarious energy it feels much more like a seismic-level salacious ki than navel-gazing clout farming or dry educational content. I guess I am allergic to podcasts that take themselves to seriously, given it is probably the most meme-able and ridiculous creative side hustle in the history of modernity. That said, the community built around Nose Candy has been programming tons of fun events in LA, sometimes in association with the mecca of DIY perfumery the Institute of Art and Olfaction. I’ve never been latitudinally west of Springfield Illinois, but I have seen David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive upwards of fifteen times, so I think I have a pretty good idea of what Los Angeles is all about.

When I heard that Phinney was releasing her first fragrance in association with LA-based t-shirt whisperers Hollywood Gifts, a dated sleazy ode to the fantasy persona of a semi-fictitious Playboy cover girl, I was all in. The tagline on Hollywood Gifts’ website is a quote from model and Playmate Dorothy Stratten: “It’s a fantasy. The girl in the centerfold doesn’t exist. She’s like a dream.” There are clearly Lynchian undertones here, but even moreso I see a clear connection to second wave political feminists like Gloria Steinem, or even the psychoanalytic theories of my favorite post-structuralists Kristeva et al. This is clearly a conscious embodiment of patriarchal fantasy, a hypertrophic play-acting at 20th century signifiers of surreptitious sex, luxury, and Tinseltown movie magic, and the erosion of a cohesive sense of self that comes with it. The olfactory signifiers of mass-market beauty products: chocolate, candy, cherry chapstick, all indicate the gap between promises of upward mobility to young women with very few options towards independence, and the drug-addled handsy pitfalls of glossy reiterations of high-octane businesses run on the inert potentiality of the female body. Immediately I go to perhaps my favorite series by my favorite photographer of all time, Cindy Sherman. Made in the wake of the institutional success of her Untitled Film Stills and named after the long landscape two-page photographic spread in the middle of a pornographic magazine: The Centerfolds (1891). Sharing the same title as Phinney’s perfume, these photographs are a temporal update from the Noir-era film stills that made Sherman’s career, and instead present huge two by four feet color renditions of then-contemporary pseudo-cinematic softcore scenes. Sherman once again stars as both model and photographer, assuming distressed or languid dissociated positions in moments of ambiguous exploitation. This is exactly the visual landscape I see Centerfold operating within: the smell of a woman who perhaps just got back from her job as a dancer, waiting on a heavily tattooed boyfriend slash promoter to storm loudly home demanding sex, lamenting the strange circumstances that brought her from a small town in doesn’t-matter Mississippi to Los Angeles. Maybe her mother was right, and she should have taken that position working at the local schoolhouse, maybe her congregation didn’t prayer circle hard enough over her head before she caught a redeye out to California…

This brings me to the scent itself. The opening is a blast of paper-sheer amaretto, not unsimilar to Hilde Soliani’s gorgeous Orgasmo. This is hardly one-note, however. There is a super fun more savory nut note Phinney describes as “Fancy Mixed Nuts,” which reminds me of the little bowl of snacks they serve at hotel bar counters. The most arresting accord, however, is an interplay between musk, styrax, and cherry, that smells exactly like the ChapStick name brand cherry chapstick. Plasticine airy and sweet, it takes me back to a time when I was too young to actually wear makeup, and I thought using the slightly melted cherry chapstick in my moms purse counted as licentiously dolling myself up. Into the drydown the styrax-musk cherry cloud continues, and I’m left with a sheer layer of waxy balm that feels like being sheepishly kissed all over by a slightly left of femme chapstick lesbian, a smell I selfishly covet like it were made of gold. There is a chocolate note that primarily takes shape in the opening, described as “heart-shaped box of milk chocolates,” but it feels far less like other more notable cocoa puff scents like Chocolate Greedy, and moreso like a general lactone milkiness that reminds me of those Dove brand milk chocolates that have stupid phrases written on the wrappers like “be authentically fearless,” meant to make up for years of misogynistic diet culture advertisement correlating women eating candy with being a very naughty girl. For her first perfume, there is a ton of sophistication here, and even though it employs tons of gourmand notes it never feels overly simple. I am reminded of the consciously girly cloud of powder and almonds in Goest’s abidingly lovely Dauphine. Almost humorously, it may moonlight as sleazy and cheap, but this has all the subtle hallmarks of a perfume made for people with more refined taste. If Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls was a perfume, this would be it - a tasteful, stylized, outside-in self-aware portrait of homosocial competition between women in vacillating states of campy empowerment and cynical exploitation.

I’m willing to accept I may be reading into this concept too deep, but I do think between the gorgeous sexed up vintage-style advertisements and the imaginative tangents fragrantica reviewers have been embarking on, there’s something special happening here. I’ve found this perfume extremely easy to wear to work and very long-lasting, commanding a warm presence on my skin and enticing those around me. Surprising to those aware of my general vibe, I don’t often opt for hyper-femme fragrances on my own body unless they are as self-aware as this one. When I was little, before I really knew what perfume was, I longingly looked up to older girls I knew in school-halls or older sisters’ rooms, who all seemed to have a sort of intoxicating heart-skipping smell to them, one at the time I just assumed came naturally from being older and way more pretty than me. Others have picked up on this, but there’s a really unique sort of dated smell to this that feels like a young child’s idea of what cool girls smell like. Modern women would of course find this tacky and woreish, and opt to douse themselves in toxic levels of “your skin but better” perfumes and gleefully buy the same reiteration of the dry pickle smell taken from Santal 33 and transposed into the new mindless Glossier flanker. Wearing Centerfold, however, takes me back to a time in which girls didn’t poop and your sister’s friend takes you back from school in the back of her trashed sedan, while you catch upsetting and confusingly enticing glances of her long highlighted hair and deep brown eyes through the reflection of the rearview mirror. I guess when all is said and done this is a sort of plastic cherry chocolate perfume with some passing similarity to Vera Wang Princess, and I am waxing poetic ad infinitum because I used to love that scent, but again, if this is the kind of thing you like, or even the kind of thing you used to like and now think you’re too good for, I think you’ll find yourself taken against your better instincts along for the ride as well.

I for one, am excited for the era of scent-critics turned perfumers, and am eagerly awaiting what Phinney decides to do next. As much as I am sometimes frustrated with the overproduction boom of people trying to market perfume to a new hyper-conscious group of collector prosumers, when it hits it really does hit. I personally think you should pre-order a bottle of this perfume, and maybe while you’re at it I personally think you should stop getting waxed and help bring womankind back to an era where Miss July could rock full bush on the dollar store magazine’s centerfold. It’s personally motivated yes, but it’s also what Hugh Hefner (PBUH) would have wanted.

Centerfold can be preordered through Hollywood Gifts. Bottles will ship in August/September.

---

‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.