GUMAMINA: Universal Flowering & Marissa Zappas

On Perfume, Ballet, and Doppelgangers

Hello all! Welcome to this very special exclusive. Paid subscribers receive access to my audio interview with Marissa Zappas and Courtney Rafuse (above!). Hear them talk about their olfactory processes, their beautiful friendship, and GUMAMINA. Everyone else gets to read this sort of profile-cum-musing. The best experience is to have BOTH, so I encourage you to upgrade your tier :)

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Gumamina is slowly revealing herself to Courtney Rafuse and Marissa Zappas. Her unraveling can only be discovered in the friendship of these two perfumers. A portmanteau sort of name, Gumamina was born from a stray graffiti tag on a dumpster and the Italian singer Mina. They see her as something of a deity or goddess, either way, as Rafuse puts it, “Gumamina gets what she wants.”

I have known Courtney of Universal Flowering for some time now, and last year I profiled her for Airmail.¹ We both live in Toronto and have dogs around the same age—and Toronto people in-the-know have at least one Universal Flowering scent (my first was Fig Leaf). I had wanted to interview her for this newsletter similarly to my studio visit with Jeanine Brito. After many rescheduled dates and us going back and forth between New York (and never at the same time), she asked to call me on the phone.

“I don’t know why I asked to call, I guess I could have texted you,” she says laughing. She pitches Gumamina as my new subject and I jump at the chance. Gumamina is the new fragrance house made in collaboration with Marissa Zappas, separate from their own brands and purposefully so. Zappas had been on my mind lately, as I had recently made a trip to Scent Bar on Elizabeth Street to smell Flaming Creature. I had seen that the two of them were spending time together and could feel the anticipation of their combined fanbase. They were all waiting with baited breath. Would they make something together? And when? What would it look like, better yet smell like?

What becomes clear is whatever path Rafuse and Zappas took, they were destined to meet. Speaking to them together is a glimpse into an artistic friendship, simmering and always on the brink of new ideas. There is an excitability which feels child-like in its impatience. Artistic partnerships are nothing new, one of my favourites being Elsa Schiaperelli and Salvador Dalí.² It is what I love about the French salons. They brought thinkers and artists together letting them feed off each other and fight, all in the service of creating MOVEMENTS! It is simply the magic that comes when people commune freely with each other.

I’ve been thinking a lot about doubles and doppelgangers, to the credit of Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger (If you confuse her with Naomi Wolf, this is Klein’s point). She writes, “The way the twinned self stands in for our highest aspiration—the eternal soul, that ephemeral being that supposedly outlives the body. And the way the double also represents the most repressed, depraved, and rejected parts of ourselves that we cannot bear to see—the evil twin, the shadow self, the anti-self, the Hyde to our Jekyll.”

Rafuse is a self-taught perfumer who once, in her very early days of creating formulas, gave herself contact dermatitis. After trial and error, Rafuse found her stride and was launched into the hearts of many a perfume enthusiast. Her style of creation is a marked contrast to Zappas, who learned under the tutelage of French perfumer Olivier Gillotin. This difference aids the creative harmony they find working together. “Courtney is much more avant-garde,” Zappas gushes. Rafuse describes it perfectly, her approach being nailing a piece of art to the wall, and Zappas having the work beautifully framed and hung.

There are so many parallels to mention, and even though Zappas and Rafuse confess to using swans as a commercial decision, the choice of naming their first perfume release Odette and Odile from Swan Lake makes my mind reel. The number of abstract associations I have would make the two laugh. The two swans generally played by one ballerina: a simulacrum, a double, the other self. As Klein writes, “Doppelgangers, however, are not only forms of torment. For centuries, doubles have been understood as warnings or harbingers. When reality starts doubling, refracting off itself, it often means that something important is being ignored or denied.”

Photo: Dena Winter

In Russia, Swan Lake has an entirely different significance to what North Americans may think. It is not only a ballet that exhibits Russia’s mastery of form, Tchaikovsky’s genius (though Swan Lake was a failure at first), and Russia’s constant stream of prodigious prima ballerinas. Over the course of the Soviet era, its appearance signified regime change, upheaval, and dissidence.³ Swan Lake was broadcast when a political figure died, and more famously in August 1991 during the failed coup d’etat against Mikhail Gorbachev (Only months later the USSR would collapse). During the August Coup, Swan Lake played over and over again on television for three days. It feels so incredibly Russian that a tragic story of two Swans—a malevolent doppelganger and the true Swan Queen—would be what was broadcasted to the Russian public.

I only recently watched Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan for the first time. If I had watched it as a younger person, maybe the more seductive elements would have overtaken my view of it. What struck me was its handling of what I always like to call the Feminine Grotesque. The self-sacrifice women undergo for beauty—and even further—art. What all this talk of Girlhood⁴ misses out on is how femininity is really a grotesque and painful business. It is bloody! And it starts young! Even the rigidity and inhuman perfection of ballet is made up of all kinds of ugliness to achieve the pinnacle of its beauty, and in itself a perfect example. All you have to watch is Odile’s 32 fouettés in the Black Swan Coda, one of the hardest variations for prima ballerinas.

I can only laugh when I see all these pieces of writing on how vapid and silly, and perhaps arrested development-y young femininity is. They all fell for the trick! That this is all easy and effortless is perhaps the ultimate goal of femininity—with those in on the joke sharing glances and laughing under their breath. I feel it is my prerogative to continue to remind people of the historical implications, lineage, and IMPORTANCE of femininity. Though I will note, taking something purely on the surface aesthetics of it (ballet, for example) without curiosity or wanting a deeper understanding of it devalues such art forms.

Perfume is in some ways the ultimate frivolity and yet it has remained. As I wrote in the Airmail piece, “It is one of the few things that threads us together with the natural world and human tradition, with many materials recognizable to what was used centuries past, from the burning incense of Ottoman mosques to the fragrant oils popular in the thermal baths of ancient Rome.” And as many fragrance enthusiasts know, the scents we love often come from unsavoury places (urine! glands! secretions!). That kind of seedy underbelly is what makes it so fascinating, and also in a way, a trick. Whether it is attracting someone to a scent that is not wholly your own, or the trick of having you smell the glands of a civet cat—in its own way, fragrance acts as a doppelganger, too.

Filmmaker Pedro Almodovar and painter Francis Picabia loom large in the friendship between the Gumamina perfumers. Rafuse first meeting Zappas in person while on her way to see the 1991 Almodovar film High Heels. Zappas having a Picabia print hanging in her New York apartment, Rafuse having a tattoo of one of his paintings. The bright, ostentatious colours of Almodovar films influenced how Gumamina’s branding would look. There is a sense between the two that they recognized a certain uncanniness, a thorough line that connected them to each other.

Picabia (top), scenes from High Heels (below)

Gumamina’s Odette has the spark of a bite of grapefruit, and after it settles, warms with the tonka and musk. I tell them I wear it in the day time, on my way to the studio, as a bright spot of optimism that I may achieve what I set out to do—at least for a couple of hours, or as long as the perfume lasts. Testing Odile felt much more suited to night. It is heavier and has grit, pathos. Very much the “sophisticated nemesis”⁵ of Odette. I wear it with my full length mink coat. This is the scent Zappas had to rein Rafuse in for using a large amount of Pyralone, a strong rubber note. On looking at the initial formula Zappas laughs, “I just thought, that’s so crazy.” She would have never thought to have added Pyralone. “I feel like [Courtney] brought the intensity to the scents, and I rounded the edges.”

On evenings I’ve found myself running from studio to some event and I’ve rushed home to change, I will spray Odile on my wrists on top of my daytime Odette. Not purposefully, but because Odette still lingers. A third more potent scent appears—an unnamed third figure. It is more powerful as the combination of the two. The luminous protagonist becomes grounded and touchable, while the velvety doppelganger is now safely disguised.

Rafuse and Zappas may fight me on the significance, but it makes all the sense in the world that their first venture was the story of Odette and Odile. Are they not the two swans? Gumamina now becomes the third figure in their friendship, but only when they are combined—becoming “the twinned self” of “highest aspiration.” From how they speak of it, they know it too. We come to the end and the curtain falls as the swans take their bows. Whatever their next performance, I plan on having box seats.

Photo: Max Lakner