Have you ever wordlessly circled a plinth crowned with an amalgam of press-on fingernails, glitter, and hair extensions? Or approached the corner of a gallery for a closeup look at a pyramidal stack of fast food boxes? If you had any exposure to the art world in the late 2000s, I’ll bet you did.
At the end of the Aughts I was temping full time in a commercial real estate office and moonlighting as a freelance art critic(?) in New York for blog sites that no longer exist. That meant that for $100 a pop I was assigned to cover gallery openings and drink wine-flavored malt liquor in the company of other broke people surrounded by art made of trash. You know how boomers say the Manson Murders signaled the end of the 1960s? The American Apparel-wearing, Adderall-sniffing 2000s came to an end the first day Tumblr aesthetics permeated the white walls of the museum.
Whether or not it was the art we wanted, 2008 gave us the art we deserved. An aesthetic of emptiness, a fetish for artifice, and the hysterical miscellanea of a mood board coalesced to mirror, IRL, the humiliation of a life lived online. Correspondingly, it was also the moment the perfume blogs reached their critical apotheosis, with Luca Turin’s 2008 release of Perfumes the Guide written with fellow fragrance blogger Tania Sanchez. By that year perfume was officially a thing, and the message boards on Basenotes.com meant a dedicated space to commune with fellow enjoyers and die-hards. 2008 was also the birth-year of gourmand queen Hilde Soliani’s Fraaagola Saalaaata, a perfume that defined a moment as chaotic as Wiki Leaks, as synthetic as cryptocurrency, as indecorous as Ashley Dupré, and as deliberately overbearing as a Katy Perry music video.
With notes of iodized salt and artificial strawberry, Fraaagola Saalaaata smells as shiny, tacky and freshly stretched as saltwater taffy. It has the comforting chew of a vending-machine Twizzler and the of throat-coating sweetness of a room-temperature Red Bull. It smells like a strawberry magic marker, or a bad babysitter, or a Jamba Juice smoothie I just invented called “Berry Bliss.” It smells like if red Gatorade and Robitussin DM had a sexy, hyperactive baby. Fraaagola Saalaaata is equal parts artificial, seductive, and unpretentious and it’s how I want to smell all the time.
Hilde Soliani’s masterwork was a bellwether that signaled the beginning of niche as we know it and represents everything I love about perfume: neediness, fantasy, perversion, and confrontation. While the 2000s are best-known for duty free blockbusters like Coco Mademoiselle and Dolce and Gabbana Light Blue, Fraaagola is situated within a linage of Abercrombie Fierce and Aquolina Pink Sugar. These were frags that smelled like sex-scented Capitalism: topless, cloying, opinionated and loud as hell. Personally, I like to layer Fraaagola Saalaaata with Akro Smoke for a Stripper-Off-Duty vibe and nuclear sillage.
Today’s cultural schizophrenia paralyzes us with too much information, distracts us with too many images, and unmoors us with too many options. A spray of Fraaagola harkens back to the aesthetic derangement of a simpler time: before it was assigned to us, chaos was something we could choose. Fraaagola Saalaaata is almost quaint in this way, a strawberry-scented reminder that even in moments of catatonic over-stimulation, we’re still endowed with the inalienable freedom to make everyone around us confused.
Pleeaase don’t forget to try Burberry Her and especially Annick Goutal Petite Cherie since you love them creepy artificial babydoll plastic fruit scents as much as me.