Beauty has always been a direction marker. In his essay "Privacy in the Films of Lana Turner," the writer Wayne Koestenbaum describes it as a vector—and one that may not have a clear trajectory. In The Secret History,
Donna Tartt writes the same and goes further: To her, death is the
mother of beauty, and we endlessly seek its capture because we want to
live forever. Appropriately, much of the history of beauty—and in
particular, of perfume—has been a one-way ticket, paid for in alcohol
and essential oil, straight into the afterlife.
We
could start in most countries when it comes to death by perfume—it's
actually a tale older than Christ. People were poisoning each other for
political gain and biological warfare many thousands of years before
Jesus walked.