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‘Skank: derogatory term for a (usually younger) female, implying trashiness or tackiness, lower-class status, poor hygiene, flakiness, and a scrawny, pockmarked sort of ugliness. May also imply promiscuity, but not necessarily’ states the online Urban Dictionary.

But for perfume lovers, ‘skank’ has taken on another meaning. We’re not talking white trash here: we’re talking about what stinks. And we mean it in the nicest possible way.

Cumin: sweat. Jasmine: poop. Civet: ditto. Narcissus: horse dung. Mimosa: used nappies. Costus: dirty hair. Blackcurrant bud: cat pee. Honey: public urinals. Grapefruit: BO with a hint of rotten egg (it contains mercaptan, the sulphurous molecule used to scent the odourless natural gas so that we can detect a leak).

It was my friend March Dodge of the Perfume Posse who gave the word ‘skank’ its new meaning for perfume aficionados in a post about, of all things, some of the most widely revered masterpieces of perfumery, in which she detected something she termed ‘the Guerlain Skank’, ‘a rump-grinding, head-shaking invitation to a booty call, no matter how politely the scent’s been dressed up at the opening.’

No need to call in Dr Jellinek and his theory about erotic materials: perfume lovers, scrambling to catch up on all the classics and on the new, weirder niche stuff, had figured it out all by themselves. The love of skank is one of the most intriguing manifestations of the community’s relational aesthetics dynamics. It isn’t only a convenient term for ‘somethin’ dirty in mah perfume’, as March says: it’s a standard by which perfumes are judged, but also by which perfume lovers position themselves. And it’s probably telling that the notion of skank originated in the hyper-hygienic USA.

In France, everyone’s got at least one beloved family member who sported old-school scents, many of which featured the pungent animalic notes that have been edited out of contemporary commercial products: it is part of the Gallic cultural heritage. But when the American perfume aficion set out to explore the classics, especially in their vintage form, there was some dismay but also a challenge to prove one’s mettle by actually embracing the skank. Perfumers often say there are no stinks, only odours to explore. Perfume lovers take the same attitude, along with the touch of snobbery every hipster cultivates – the general public may turn up their noses at the whiffy stuff, but we know better. In the words of one of the Marquis de Sade’s libertines: ‘We love what no one else loves, and this adds to our pleasure.’

This desire to push back one’s limits in order to experience new forms of pleasure is reminiscent of certain sexual scenarios, but I believe there’s something else at play in the impulse to sublimate our interest in smells into an aesthetic pursuit. Overcoming our aversion to stink through its incorporation into beautiful compositions could be a way of not renouncing our more primal instincts; of drawing the pleasures that Western civilization considers base, and that our education leads us to reject, into the life of the mind – hence the miles of words written on perfume by enthusiasts. Of course, not all of those words concern skank; very few, in fact. But our very obsession with scent does point towards a peculiar form of libidinal investment, which doesn’t mean we derive sexual pleasure from our scented pursuits, but that perfumes engage some deep-seated vital energy, the libido. Skank is just the ultimate expression of that drive; its tell-tale symptom.

It also provides an excellent excuse for a well-educated group engaging in a refined, costly hobby to indulge in some cheerfully regressive pee-and-poop talk. Listen in to the chat. The most iconic perfumes in history are treated, literally, like crap. Roudnitska’s leathery, cumin-laden Eau d’Hermès smells like ‘Robert Mitchum’s jockstrap in Grace Kelly’s purse.’ Guerlain’s Jicky, ‘like the cat crapped in a lavender patch’. Shalimar has been said to evoke nappies (used, N°2). Joy? The adult version of the excrement. Mitsouko exudes the sour smell of unwashed old ladies. Bandit is redolent of old ashtrays and soiled female undergarments. My mother’s own Bal à Versailles also ranks high on skank: it has become the very epitome of ‘unwashed panties’ or, in the words of one Posse reader, ‘cat butt morphing into cured horse manure’. To which March the Skank Queen replies: ‘Maria is a true perfumatrix. She smells something that goes from cat butt to cured horse manure, and does she burst into tears? Run away screaming? Saw her arm off? Nope. She takes notes and waits for the drydown. My tiara’s off to you, Maria.’

As for myself, I’m not averse to a bit of skank, but then, I’m the type who sniffs her lovers greedily and turns around to take in the wake of attractive strangers. A little blast of eau d’humanité never hurt. I’m more put off by fragrances bleached of anything that could smell remotely gamey, the anorexic juices that feel like they’ve gurgled fabric softener.

My own entry in the unwashed panties category is the vintage version of Elsa Schiaparelli’s 1937 Shocking. ‘That Italian artist who makes dresses’, as Gabrielle Chanel sneeringly called her, introduced Surrealism into couture by collaborating with Salvador Dalí on some of her more outlandish models (lobster-adorned jackets, a shoe worn as a hat, another hat resembling a lamb cutlet, complete with frill). The hot-pink box that shrouded Shocking expressed the indecent intensity of desire sung by her Surrealist friends. The scent itself was as flamboyantly immodest as its namesake pink. The perfume bottle expert Jean-Marie Martin-Hattemberg (quoted by Richard Stamelman in Perfume: Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin) calls it ‘the first sex perfume’. And it is. Imagine a Parisian woman who has just spent a night in the arms of her lover. It is too late in the morning for her to go home and change, too late even to take a shower. She hurriedly splashes on a rose and lily-of-the-valley fragrance, even dabs a touch of it on her silk briefs. When she comes home and slips out of her silken lingerie … She smells of Shocking.

Shocking does reek of gousset, the small triangle of fabric sewn into the petite culotte. Its combination of rose, ambergris, honey, civet, musk and sandalwood is possibly the closest evocation of the female bouquet ever devised by classic perfumery, barely veiled by the green floral fig-leaf of a lily-of-the-valley and gardenia heart. One can only imagine the effluvia wafting up from Schiaparelli’s place Vendôme salon as the artist Christian ‘Bébé’ Bérard ‘put scent on his beard until it trickled onto his torn shirt and the little dog in his arms’ or ‘Marie-Louise Bousquet, the witty hostess of one of the last Paris drawing-rooms, [pulled] up her skirts and drenched her petticoats with it,’ as the designer recounts in her autobiography, aptly entitled Shocking Life.

Mainstream perfumery has veered as far away as possible from skank, with a few noted exceptions (the late Alexander McQueen’s now discontinued, cumin-laden Kingdom was a flop). Niche perfumers, however, have often explored the territory with such animalic blends as the infamous Muscs Koublaï Khan (‘unwashed Mongol warrior after six months on the saddle’) or L’Artisan Parfumeur’s Al Oudh (‘camel driver’s armpit’). But the Swiss indie perfumer Vero Kern definitely raised the bar with Onda, possibly one of the most challenging – and ultimately rewarding – compositions in that particular genre.

Vero, a warm, rangy woman with expressive features and an exuberant laugh, came to perfumery after having worked for Swissair, converted into massage therapy and veered off into aromachology. She found out she loved the essences she worked with for their beauty even more than for their therapeutic properties, took a course at Cinquième Sens and launched her tiny house with Kiki, Rubj (pronounced ‘ruby’) and Onda. Vero’s perfumes have soul and, like souls, they’re full of sublime beauty and dirty secrets. Her Onda is about earth, flowers and flesh smeared in spicy honey. The honey and musk wrap the earthy notes of iris, patchouli, oak moss and vetiver in a human funk that makes you feel you’ve sunk your nose in the lustily worn and discarded garments of your lover – there is more than a hint of the petite culotte in there …

Onda’s earthiness, in both the literal and figurative sense, points towards another area of skank: the zone on the olfactory map where overripe fruit, rotting flowers, decaying vegetation, mouldy earth and stagnant water conjure the miasma of similarly corrupted animal flesh. This reminder of the destiny of all living things – a memento mori like the skulls Flemish painters placed in their vanities – stirs more anxiety than the odd hint of whiffy briefs, uncouth armpits or lavatories. Perhaps because its vegetal origin makes it more inhuman: Nature swallowing us whole.

‘I put it on, OK, good enough, big swampy flower, and then … the decay goes … deeper? Sharper? Wiggly? Something happens to make the swamp sweeter and more smothering in a way that I find vaguely panic-inducing,’ commented a Posse reader about a fragrance that has gained cult status, Sandrine Videault’s Manoumalia for Les Nez.

Sandrine Videault, who was taught by the great Edmond Roudnitska, has always straddled the frontier between art and perfumery. She has done very few commercial fragrances, but has collaborated with artists like Fabrice Hybert and Hervé di Rosa in olfactory installations and authored several of her own, most notably at the 2000 FIAC (the French International Contemporary Art Fair); she is also an olfactory archaeologist of sorts, who re-created the ancient Egyptian kyphi for the Cairo Museum. She also stands apart from the industry geographically since she has settled in her native New Caledonia, a French territory in the Pacific. This was the springboard for the first ethnographic perfume, based on the rituals of the islands of Wallis and Futuna, in a move reminiscent of the Cubists when they reached for African art as the means to break down the codes of figuration. Built around a reconstitution of the fagraea flower which grows on the ‘Taboo tree’, Manoumalia reprises the notes of Wallisian rituals: fagraea, sandalwood powder, vetiver, and an old French perfume Wallisians are so fond of they often wash their hands in it, L.T. Piver’s Pompeia. The result is both suave and strange: a creamy tuberose-frangipani-gardenia accord ripe with mushroom and gasoline notes on a bitter, leathery vetiver base and a buttery trail of sandalwood; the offspring of Bandit and Fracas gone native.

Manoumalia is a sophisticated composition yet it is also so primal that it elicits amazingly violent reactions. Rubber, drain cleaner, faecal matter, rancid butter, cheese, mothballs, formaldehyde, urinal cakes, ashtray, rotting animals and even the ‘sweetish, faintly bloody and meaty’ smell of afterbirth … There isn’t an evil stench Manoumalia hasn’t been compared to. But as an online commenter points out, these amazingly negative reactions are actually a testimony to its stunning realism: ‘I am always struck by the rotting, faecal, vegetal, death/birth/death/ birth smell of the tropics. I think it’s because they are touted in the media as being sweet and charming/flowery when in fact they are savage and terrifying in their desire to regenerate.’

‘Manoumalia stirs up passions and that seems positive to me,’ Sandrine told me in an email after reading these comments. ‘All the associations are either accurate or justified … Sleeping with tuberoses or fagraeas by your bed can be unbearable because they are so powerful and can unfold faecal or rotten facets. Those unpleasant facets are not olfactory hallucinations … The point is to get back to the form of the fragrance rather than staying stuck on facets. All of this depends on our state of mind, or even the state our soul is in at the moment of olfaction.’

And this may well be what lies at the core of the powerful feeling of repulsion the insanely beautiful Manoumalia induces in some wearers: the obscenity of flowers exposed as perhaps never before; a trail of damp, red-in-tooth-and-claw tropical nature that could send you off muttering, ‘The horror, the horror’, Apocalypse Now-style … What Manoumalia conjures is an olfactory archetype, and one that speaks deeply to us. But the emotional tenor of those reactions is cultural: what triggers anxiety in Americans causes Wallis Islanders to break out in a huge grin; it can make a sixty-year-old biochemist from Southern India gush with tears in his eyes that he’s been looking to capture that smell all his life … It is precisely because Manoumalia was born of a quest to renew the vocabulary of Western perfumery that it includes odours that would have been sandblasted out of a more commercial product.

The need to avoid overtly unpleasant notes marks the limits of perfume as a contemporary art form. There is, however, one notable exception: Sécrétions Magnifiques, conceived by the maverick niche house État Libre d’Orange for its shock value. The scent is based on the smells of blood, saliva, semen, sweat and maternal milk. They are designated as such in the notes list, with an ejaculating penis as a visual to drive the point home.

Playful provocation is part of État Libre d’Orange’s DNA. Their products bear names like Putain des Palaces (‘Fancy hotel whore’, a tribute to a song by Serge Gainsbourg), Charogne (‘Carrion’) or Don’t Get Me Wrong Baby, I Don’t Swallow. Some of their visuals are correspondingly graphic. Both overtly display what the perfume industry has been selling itself on for decades: sex. But they throw something into the mix that the industry has never allowed itself to draw on: an iconoclastic sense of humour. By putting together irreverently clashing concepts such as jasmine and cigarettes or incense and bubblegum, the scents themselves often play on the Surrealistic process inspired by a quote from the French poet Lautréamont: ‘the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table’.

But none are as deliberately shocking as Sécrétions Magnifiques, which has achieved such iconic status among perfume connoisseurs that it is the benchmark against which everything gagworthy is gauged, including by people who haven’t actually smelled it. The fragrance blogger Katie Puckrick has even put out a YouTube video where she applies it live as if it were a stunt – the perfume-world equivalent of the MTV reality show Jackass.

But why do skank aficionados who pride themselves on having overcome human-cumin-phobia and gloat at indole overdoses reach for sandpaper whenever a molecule of Sécrétions Magnifiques brushes their skin? All the notes it contains are notes they contain – many of which they’ve actually swallowed. True, Sécrétions Magnifiques is disconcerting with its odd metallic and iodic notes, but not quite as literal as the visual implies. Could it be that identifying its notes as blood, sperm, maternal milk and so forth, rather than saying ‘metallic’, ‘marine’ or ‘creamy’, is what triggers such exaggerated reactions? In the London niche perfumery shop Les Senteurs, the fragrance adviser dons a latex glove to spray a blotter, as though the scent literally contained the bodily fluids listed and therefore presented a medical hazard.

Sécrétions Magnifiques breaks the boundaries between the liquids we squirt on and the ones we squirt out, but its author Antoine Lie never envisioned it as a literal rendition of the smell of semen. In fact, that was a point on which he disagreed with the owner of État Libre d’Orange, Étienne de Swardt. Lie says he was ‘much more interested in what was happening inside: on the story of the internal fluids that provoke desire’. He therefore structured Sécrétions Magnifiques around a fictitious ‘adrenaline accord’ with saline, mineral aspects, ‘which acts as a conductor body where all the other substances can soak’.

Sécrétions Magnifiques had been conceived as a buzz-generating oddity; both Lie and de Swardt thought it might only please five people in the world. It went on to become one of the brand’s best-sellers, though some might buy it as a novelty item (the État Libre d’Orange flagship store sits at the edge of the Parisian gay quarter, le Marais). Still, I have seen some people come to the shop to replenish their stock. But Lie is well aware that the buzz is closer to lynching than love-in: ‘I even read that someone like me should be locked up in an asylum…’ he told me. ‘People say it’s disgusting but, for me, the mechanics of internal fluids represent beauty in its purest state. Because in fact, that’s what’s true. When you feel an emotion, it’s triggered inside, hormones circulate, blood pulses, you sweat, you get goose bumps … That’s what I wanted to express: that what happens inside smells like that. It’s not disgusting. It seems disgusting to you, but it’s something true: you don’t cheat.’

Who says fragrance could not be as disturbing as any other art form?