Plutonic Rainbows

Calvin Klein launched a men's fragrance in 1981 that most people have never heard of. Not Obsession. Not Eternity. Not even Escape. Just "Calvin" — lowercase on the bottle, uppercase nowhere else — marketed with four words that constituted the entire advertising proposition: "Fragrance for Men." The Fragrance Foundation gave its packaging the 1982 Packaging of the Year award. Then the decade moved on, and Calvin Klein moved with it, and the scent that started everything quietly disappeared.

I spent a week researching this fragrance through primary sources — print ads, packaging photos, database reconstructions, corporate sale documents — and the thing that kept surprising me was how little survives. No press release from the 1981 launch. No named perfumer, just a house credit to IFF. No official note pyramid, just database approximations that disagree on whether the base includes oakmoss. For a brand that would soon become synonymous with cultural provocation, Calvin's debut masculine was almost aggressively understated.

The bottle tells you everything about the original intent. Deep blue-black pack, silver typography, rectilinear glass designed jointly by Klein and Fabien Baron. This was modernist packaging in a decade that hadn't yet decided whether it wanted modernism or maximalism, and Calvin bet on restraint. The industry noticed — that Fragrance Foundation award wasn't for the juice, it was for the object. The design language predates Baron's more famous work with Klein by nearly a decade, which means the aesthetic DNA of CK One and everything that followed was already present in 1981, just waiting.

The scent itself sits in the aromatic fougere space. Citrus-herbal opening — bergamot, neroli, chamomile, depending on which database you trust — into an aromatic floral heart of tarragon and orange blossom, settling on a woody-mossy base of patchouli, vetiver, musk, and possibly oakmoss. "Possibly" because no one has an official note list. Fragrantica includes mugwort in the top. Parfumo adds cinnamon leaf and vervain. The structure is consistent with what prestige men's fragrance looked like in the early 1980s: clean enough for an office, complex enough to signal intent, nothing that would overwhelm a room. Perfume Intelligence classified it as an "aromatic masculine fougere edt" and moved on.

What makes Calvin interesting isn't the composition — it's the advertising strategy that would later become the brand's entire identity. The 1981 print ad is product-led: bottle, carton, dark background, the "calvin" wordmark, and nothing else. No model, no lifestyle aspiration, no copy beyond the descriptor. By 1985, the execution had shifted entirely. An intimate couple-in-bed image with the same minimal overprint — "Calvin Klein" and "FRAGRANCE FOR MEN" — established the template that Obsession would detonate across every magazine in America the following year. The move from product shot to sensual lifestyle happened inside Calvin's short advertising run, and almost nobody talks about it because Obsession eclipsed everything.

I keep thinking about the ingredient list on a boxed aftershave that surfaced in a collector listing. S.D. Alcohol 39-C, water, fragrance, P.P.G.-20, methyl glucose ether. "Calvin Klein Cosmetics Corp., Dist., New York" with a Vol. '85 marking. Five functional ingredients and a corporate address. The entire identity of a prestige men's fragrance reduced to a label that could pass for industrial solvent. There's something honest about that — the gap between the image and the chemical reality laid bare in a way that contemporary fragrance marketing would never permit.

Calvin was discontinued around 1990 and reportedly relaunched in limited form worldwide on 4 October 1999. I remember buying a bottle in the UK in September 1990 before heading off to drama college. The evidence for both events is thinner than you'd expect. Basenotes says discontinued. Parfumo says it "disappeared" in the early 1990s. A Fragrantica editorial notes the 1999 relaunch claim but adds that the brand never confirmed it. Some Basenotes reviewers say the 1999 bottles were "not quite the same." Others say spot-on. Without analytical chemistry, the reformulation question stays unresolved, and the oakmoss issue — EU regulatory tightening around Evernia prunastri extracts — means any modern version would likely differ from the original regardless of corporate intent.

What happened around Calvin is more documented than Calvin itself. In 1989, Minnetonka's deal transferred Calvin Klein Cosmetics to Chesebrough-Pond's, a Unilever unit. The 1989 business reports note $158 million in sales, 82% domestic. Obsession, Eternity, and Calvin were listed as portfolio assets. By 2005, Unilever sold the entire Calvin Klein fragrance business to Coty for $800 million. Calvin the scent was long gone by then — a footnote in a deal worth nearly a billion, its name identical to the corporation that created it and therefore impossible to Google with any precision.

Vintage bottles surface on eBay occasionally. A boxed 50ml aftershave was listed recently at $185. Whether that reflects genuine market value or the optimism of a seller with a clean box and no comparable sales data is anyone's guess. The collector market for pre-Obsession Calvin Klein is effectively nonexistent as a structured category. It's just bottles that sometimes appear, priced by people who know they have something unusual but aren't sure what it's worth.

Nine years. That's how long Calvin existed as a live product in its original run. Nine years of quiet authority before Obsession rewrote the rules about what a Calvin Klein fragrance could say, and how loudly it could say it.

A carbon atom in the glass of a fragrance bottle sealed in 1989 was already four and a half billion years old at the time of bottling. Older, probably — most carbon on Earth formed inside red giant stars during the asymptotic giant branch phase, long before the solar system condensed from its molecular cloud. The bottling line didn't create that atom. It merely borrowed it. Arranged it alongside a few trillion others into glass, filled the vessel with a solution of aromatic compounds and ethanol, crimped a spray mechanism into place, and shipped the result to a department store counter where someone would eventually carry it home in a bag with tissue paper. The atom didn't know it was part of a perfume bottle. It doesn't know now that it isn't.

This is the strange thing about matter. Atoms are not bound to a particular year. The hydrogen in a glass of water is mostly primordial — produced in the first few minutes after the Big Bang, roughly 13.8 billion years ago. Every other element in your body and mine was forged inside stars that later exploded, scattering their contents across space to eventually become planets, oceans, perfume bottles, and people. Carl Sagan's line about being made of star stuff wasn't a metaphor. It was a literal description of nucleosynthesis. The calcium in your teeth, the iron in your blood, the carbon in the glass of a thirty-seven-year-old fragrance bottle — all of it was manufactured inside a dying star. The manufacturing happened billions of years before anything resembling human consciousness existed to care about it.

And the atoms endure. On any timescale that matters to us, stable atoms are effectively immortal. The experimental lower bound for proton decay now exceeds 10³⁴ years — a one followed by thirty-four zeros, roughly a septillion times the current age of the universe. Even if protons do eventually decay, which no experiment has ever observed, it would take so long that calling atoms "permanent" is not an exaggeration for any purpose relevant to human experience. The carbon atom in that 1989 bottle will still exist when the sun expands into a red giant and swallows the inner planets. It will still exist when the Milky Way merges with Andromeda. It will still exist when the last stars burn out. It just won't be holding perfume anymore.

But the fragrance — that's a different question. Physical objects are not static. They constantly exchange material with their environment through diffusion, oxidation, mechanical wear, evaporation. And fragrance is the one object designed to do exactly this — to release volatile organic compounds into the air deliberately, as its entire purpose. Even a sealed bottle is not truly sealed. Molecules escape through the spray mechanism, through microscopic imperfections in the crimp. Top notes degrade first — the citrus compounds oxidise, the aldehydes break down, the bright opening that once defined the scent darkens into something warmer and less precise. What survives is the base: the musks, the woods, the ambers. A vintage bottle from the late eighties doesn't smell the way it did when it left the factory. It smells like 1989 filtered through thirty-seven years of slow chemistry.

The atoms that were in that bottle are not all still in that bottle. Some escaped as vapour each time someone sprayed it. Some evaporated through the seal even when nobody did. Some oxidised into different compounds — the bergamot browning, the oakmoss shifting under atmospheric pressure, the alcohol slowly finding its way out. Over thirty-seven years, the molecular turnover is significant. You can still spray it, still recognise something of the original composition — but the specific molecules occupying that solution have changed. The fragrance is the same fragrance in every meaningful sense. It is not the same collection of molecules.

This is the Ship of Theseus made literal. If the atoms change, is the object still the same object? Plutarch posed this about a wooden ship maintained through incremental plank replacement. Thomas Hobbes sharpened it by asking about the second ship you could build from all the discarded planks. The fragrance version is quieter. Nobody replaced anything deliberately. Atmospheric chemistry did it slowly, without consulting anyone. Identity persists because identity lives in pattern, not in substrate. The arrangement matters. The specific atoms don't.

I keep thinking about this in relation to the body. The popular claim is that your body replaces itself every seven years. The actual science is more complicated — gut lining cells turn over in days, skin in weeks, red blood cells in about four months, bone in roughly a decade. But some cells are never replaced. Certain neurons in the cerebral cortex persist from birth to death. Cardiac muscle cells regenerate so slowly that most of them are original equipment. The brain that remembers spraying a fragrance in 1989 contains physical matter that was present in 1989. Not all of it. Not most of it. But some. The memory and the material overlap, just barely, like two circles in a Venn diagram that almost don't touch.

The atoms don't know any of this. An alcohol molecule that evaporated from someone's wrist at a department store counter in 1989 has no memory of the event. It carried scent. That was its function. It didn't register the fluorescent lighting overhead or the murmur of the cosmetics floor. When it evaporated, it moved on — into the air conditioning, out through the building's ventilation, into the atmosphere, eventually broken down by UV radiation into simpler compounds, absorbed into rain, into soil, into groundwater, into another body entirely. Its constituent atoms might be in you right now. You'd never know.

My father had a tape measure he kept in the same kitchen drawer for thirty years. Yellow plastic housing, metric on one side. I don't know why this stays with me more than almost anything else about that house.

I've been writing about objects that outlive their worlds and about what sealed bottles know that we don't. But the atomic dimension adds something the philosophical framing misses. The uncanny feeling you get holding a thirty-seven-year-old fragrance bottle isn't just about cultural context vanishing or identity shifting. It's about the radical asymmetry between matter and meaning. The atoms in that bottle have no temporal orientation. They don't know what decade they're in. They don't know the formula was reformulated, the oakmoss restricted by IFRA, the perfumer retired. They persist with a patience that makes human memory look like a nervous tic.

The psychological discomfort — the thing that makes old objects feel uncanny rather than merely old — comes from this gap. We bring time to the encounter. The object doesn't. A fragrance bottle from the late eighties compresses decades into material form, but only for us. For the atoms, nothing has been compressed. They just continued existing. There is no temporal infiltration, no past intruding upon the present. What exists now is the direct continuation of what existed then. The present is not separate from the past at the level of matter. It is the past, continuously unfolding.

This should be comforting. It isn't, particularly.

The atoms that made up a moment you valued — a specific evening, a specific light, a specific person's voice — are still out there, dispersed into the biosphere, cycling through systems you'll never trace. They haven't been destroyed. They can't be. Destruction, at the atomic level, barely exists. What's been destroyed is the arrangement. The particular configuration of matter that made that moment that moment. The atoms carry no grief about this. They carry nothing. They don't negotiate with time. They don't care what you built or how beautiful it was.

Matter endures. Identity does not in the same way. And the distance between those two facts is where all nostalgia lives — in the knowledge that the materials persist while the meaning they briefly held has become unreachable, scattered as thoroughly as the atoms themselves, into a world that has no mechanism for reassembly.

Sources:

• The Star in You — PBS NOVA

• Do Protons Decay? — Symmetry Magazine

• Identity Over Time — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

• Does Your Body Really Replace Itself Every Seven Years? — HowStuffWorks

Gianna Cassoli never had a fragrance deal or a Met Gala moment. She had fabric. Specifically, she had a way of cutting outerwear that made the wearer look like they'd inherited something valuable from a much more interesting relative — the kind of garment that arrives pre-storied, carrying its own atmosphere. Her Fall/Winter 1990 ready-to-wear collection in Milan ran that instinct to its logical endpoint.

The piece that stays with me is a dark brown cape coat with three oversized buttons and a macramé fringe along the hem. Wide sleeves, a cowl that wraps without fastening, leather gloves that complete the line from shoulder to fingertip. It's the kind of thing that photographs as one continuous shape — no seams fighting for attention, no hardware distracting from the weight of the cloth itself. Gail Elliott wore it on the runway with the expression of someone who'd been wearing it for years, which is a harder trick than most models manage. The coat didn't need selling. It needed carrying.

What strikes me about Cassoli's work from this period is how little it concedes to the moment. Fall 1990 in Milan was loud — Versace was Versace, Dolce & Gabbana were sharpening their Sicilian melodrama, and even the quieter houses were reaching for something emphatic. Cassoli went the other direction. Her palette was earth and stone and the inside of old libraries. The silhouettes were generous without being theatrical. She treated volume as a kind of privacy, which is a strange thing to say about runway clothing, but that fringe hem reads less as decoration and more as boundary. An ending that doesn't want to be crossed.

I keep returning to the fringe. Macramé on a coat this structured shouldn't work — it risks looking crafty in the wrong sense, like a kit project stapled to a luxury garment. Cassoli made it architectural. The knotting is dense enough to hold its own geometry, and the weight of the threads pulls the hemline into a different kind of movement than the wool above it. Two textures, two rhythms, one garment. I'm not sure any major house would attempt that pairing now without hedging it across three focus groups and a capsule collection.

Cassoli's name doesn't circulate much anymore. Her pieces surface occasionally on vintage resale — wool overcoats, mostly, priced like they're uncertain of their own value. The Bloomsbury Fashion Central archive has footage of her Spring/Summer 1989 show, which is about as close to official documentation as you'll find. Everything else is inference and fabric and the occasional runway photograph that somebody scanned from an Italian magazine nobody kept.

Some designers build empires. Others build coats that don't need a decade to explain themselves.

Anthropic announced Claude Code Security today — an automated vulnerability scanner built into Claude Code on the web. Limited research preview, Enterprise and Team customers first, free access for open-source maintainers. The pitch: it reads your codebase the way a human security researcher would, tracing data flow and reasoning about how components interact, rather than matching against a library of known patterns.

The number underneath the announcement is what caught me. Opus 4.6 found over 500 high-severity vulnerabilities in production open-source software — GhostScript, OpenSC, CGIF, among others — that had survived decades of human review and automated fuzzing. Not edge cases. Memory corruption bugs, buffer overflows, incomplete bounds checking in code paths that previous patches had missed. The GhostScript vulnerability was in font handling. It had been sitting there through years of security fixes to adjacent code.

Traditional SAST tools work by pattern recognition. They maintain databases of known vulnerability signatures and scan for matches. That approach catches the bugs that look like bugs someone has already found. It misses the ones that require understanding what the code is actually doing — business logic flaws, broken access control, the subtle interaction between two modules that are individually correct but dangerous together.

What makes Claude Code Security different, at least on paper, is the multi-stage verification. The system finds something suspicious, then actively tries to disprove its own finding before flagging it. Each result gets a severity rating and a confidence score. Patches are suggested but never applied automatically. Logan Graham, who leads Anthropic's Frontier Red Team, told Fortune it's meant to be "a force multiplier for security teams," not a replacement for them.

I find that framing interesting because I ran exactly this kind of audit on this blog's build system a month ago. Forty-five issues — XSS vulnerabilities, race conditions, path traversal — all hiding in code that the agentic tools themselves had written. The tools generated working code. They didn't generate secure code. The gap between "runs correctly" and "fails safely" is where most real-world vulnerabilities live, and it's precisely the gap that pattern-matching scanners struggle to see.

The dual-use question is obvious. If an AI can find bugs that have been hiding for decades, attackers with the same model can find them too. Graham acknowledged this directly, arguing that getting the tool into defenders' hands first creates a window of advantage. I'm not sure how wide that window is. But Anthropic's research with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on critical infrastructure defence suggests they're thinking about the race dynamics seriously, not just shipping a product.

The thing that sticks with me is how Claude found those GhostScript bugs. It analysed Git commit history, identified prior security fixes, then looked for similar unpatched instances elsewhere in the codebase. That's not fuzzing. That's the methodology a skilled human reviewer would use on a good day. The difference is that a human can hold maybe a few thousand lines of context while doing it. Claude can hold the entire repository.

Sources:

• Claude Code Security — Anthropic

• Claude's Zero-Day Vulnerability Discoveries — Anthropic Frontier Red Team

• AI Tool That Can Hunt Software Bugs on Its Own — Fortune

• Embedded Security Scanning for Claude — CyberScoop

Google's first ".1" increment landed today. Previous Gemini updates jumped by 0.5 — this one is smaller on paper and larger in practice. Gemini 3.1 Pro scores 77.1% on ARC-AGI-2, up from 3 Pro's 38%, and leads 13 of 16 benchmarks tested against Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.2. GPQA Diamond: 94.3%. SWE-Bench Verified: 80.6%. The reasoning gains from Deep Think have clearly trickled down into the base model.

What stands out isn't any single number — it's the velocity. Gemini 3 Pro shipped in November. Four months later, the replacement doubles its reasoning score. Claude Sonnet 4.6 still edges it on a couple of agentic tasks, and GPT-5.3 Codex holds ground on Terminal-Bench, but the overall picture is Google pulling ahead on the metrics that get cited most often.

Available now in the Gemini app, AI Studio, and Vertex AI. Preview only, for the moment.

Sources:

• Gemini 3.1 Pro Announcement — Google Blog

• Google Announces Gemini 3.1 Pro — 9to5Google

• Gemini 3.1 Pro Benchmarks — OfficeChai

Talk Talk's third album turned forty this month, and the fact that it still sounds like nothing else is probably the only review it needs. The Colour of Spring arrived in February 1986 at the precise moment when the band's label expected another synth-pop record and Mark Hollis had already decided he was done making those.

The first two Talk Talk albums were decent — The Party's Over and It's My Life had singles that charted, videos that rotated on MTV, and enough commercial momentum to keep EMI comfortable. But something shifted between 1984 and 1986. Hollis brought in Tim Friese-Greene as co-producer and collaborator, and between them they dismantled the template. The synthesisers didn't disappear entirely, but they receded. In their place: real strings, a harmonica that sounds like it wandered in from a field recording, Steve Winwood playing organ on "Life's What You Make It," and a general sense that the band had stopped caring about radio formats altogether.

They hadn't, of course. "Life's What You Make It" went to number sixteen in the UK, and "Living in Another World" charted too. The album sold over two million copies. What's strange is that none of those commercial facts prepare you for what the record actually sounds like. The singles worked almost by accident — they had hooks buried inside arrangements that were far more spacious and unpredictable than anything on the charts at the time. "Happiness Is Easy" opens the album with children singing over what might be the warmest, most unhurried four minutes in the entire decade. There's no chorus. There's barely a structure. It just breathes.

That breathing is what separates The Colour of Spring from its contemporaries. Every other mid-eighties record was compressed and gated and slammed into the loudness ceiling of the era. This one has room. Lee Harris's drums sound like actual drums in an actual space, not like triggered samples bounced through a Lexicon reverb. Paul Webb's bass sits low and patient. And Hollis's voice — already one of the most distinctive instruments in British music — occupies the centre of the mix with a vulnerability that borders on discomfort. He sounds like someone who knows exactly what he wants to say and isn't entirely sure he should say it.

"I Don't Believe in You" is perhaps the finest single track on the album, though it was never released as one. Seven minutes of slow accumulation, strings entering at the halfway mark like a tide coming in, Hollis repeating the title phrase with increasing conviction until it becomes something closer to prayer than pop. The production decisions are meticulous without being clinical. Friese-Greene had a gift for knowing when to leave a take alone — when the imperfection was the point.

The sequencing matters. "April 5th" follows and strips everything back to acoustic guitar and voice, the quietest moment on the record and the one that most clearly points toward Spirit of Eden two years later. The transition from the orchestral swell of the previous track to this bare whisper is the most sophisticated editorial decision on the album. It's also the moment where you realise this isn't a collection of songs. It's a single sustained thought.

"Chameleon Day" remains underrated. There's a guitar tone in the second half — distorted but somehow gentle, like looking at sunlight through frosted glass — that I've never heard replicated on any other recording. I've tried to identify the signal chain. I can't. Some sounds belong to their moment and refuse to be reverse-engineered.

James Marsh's cover art deserves separate attention. The atlas moths and butterflies arranged around that central symmetrical face have become one of the most recognisable sleeves in the catalogue of British music. Marsh painted every specimen individually, working from real entomological references. The warm ochre border, the careful taxonomy of wing patterns — it's not psychedelic, not surrealist, not anything easily categorised. It sits on the shelf and draws the eye forty years later with the same quiet insistence as the music inside.

What happened next is well documented. EMI expected The Colour of Spring II and instead received Spirit of Eden, a record so uncommercial that it triggered a lawsuit. Hollis had used the goodwill and budget earned by two million sales to make precisely the album he wanted, which turned out to be a work of near-silent impressionism that had more in common with Morton Feldman than Duran Duran. The label was furious. The critics were confused. History has been kinder.

But The Colour of Spring is the hinge. Without it, the later records don't exist — Hollis needed this album's commercial success to buy the creative freedom that produced Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock. And without the later records, The Colour of Spring might have been remembered as merely a very good album from 1986 rather than the first chapter of one of the most remarkable trajectories in recorded music. Each record retroactively elevates the others.

Forty years. Mark Hollis died in February 2019, almost exactly thirty-three years after this record's release. He spent the last two decades of his life in near-total silence, having said everything he needed to say in approximately twelve hours of recorded music. The restraint of that — the refusal to tour, to reissue, to capitalise — might be the most Talk Talk gesture of all.

Open a drawer you haven't touched in twenty years and find a bottle of perfume. Spray it. What happens next is not nostalgia.

Nostalgia is warm. It aches pleasantly. It knows it's looking backward. What this does is different — it collapses the distance. For a few seconds the earlier time doesn't feel remembered. It feels reinstated. The room, the light, the particular quality of a morning reassemble themselves around you with an authority that has nothing to do with conscious recall.

This is because scent bypasses the thalamus entirely. Every other sense — vision, hearing, touch — routes through that relay station before reaching the cortex. Smell doesn't. It travels from the olfactory bulb directly to the amygdala and hippocampus — emotion and memory, two synapses from the nose. Rachel Herz's neuroimaging work at Brown confirmed what Proust described in 1913: odour-evoked memories are not more accurate than other memories. They are more emotionally immersive. The affect arrives before the content. You feel the past before you can name it.

Freud had a word for this kind of return. He called it the Unheimlich — the uncanny. His 1919 essay rejected the idea that uncanniness comes from encountering the unknown. The opposite. It comes from re-encountering the known — something familiar that was hidden and has now resurfaced. Schelling's definition, which Freud adopted: "Everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light."

A sealed bottle fits this structure precisely. The fragrance existed quietly, materially intact, while the world shifted and your identity accumulated decades of alteration. When re-encountered, it produces a rupture in temporal continuity. Not because the scent has changed — it hasn't. Because you have.

Though even this isn't quite right. The fragrance has changed too — oxidised, its top notes degraded, the composition shifted by decades of slow chemistry. But its rate of change is so much slower than yours that it produces an illusion of permanence. The bottle seems to promise fixity. You cannot reciprocate. Human identity is processual, not static — you were never meant to remain identical to the person who closed that drawer. The discomfort is that the object seems to have managed what you could not.

This is where it diverges from hauntology. Mark Fisher's framework mourns lost futures — the feeling that the present has failed to deliver what the past once promised. That's a cultural displacement, a collective grief. What happens with a rediscovered fragrance is more personal and more disturbing. The object appears stable, almost indifferent to the years. You, by contrast, have aged, shifted, rebuilt. The bottle seems to have remained outside history while you were inside it. That imbalance creates a subtle ontological disturbance — the sense that time has behaved unevenly.

I've written before about objects that outlive the worlds that made sense of them. But this is narrower. This isn't about cultural context vanishing. It's about temporal suspension — the discovery that something of your own past survived unchanged in a drawer while you moved through years that changed you entirely. The eeriness isn't that the world has moved on. It's that the bottle didn't.

What sharpens this further is the sense that earlier versions of yourself are gone. Not just aged past — gone. That person, with his specific hopes, naivety, emotional intensity, blind spots, cannot be re-entered. You can remember him. You cannot inhabit him again. This is a common fear, though people rarely articulate it directly. It is not simply ageing that unsettles. It is irretrievability.

An old fragrance intensifies this because scent does something memory alone cannot: it reconstructs atmosphere. For a moment, the emotional climate of that earlier self flickers back into the room. Then it fades. The contrast between temporary reactivation and permanent loss sharpens the awareness that identity is not cumulative in a simple way. It is layered, and layers become inaccessible.

Though it is not accurate to say those versions are gone in an absolute sense. They are no longer active configurations of your nervous system, but they are structurally embedded in who you are now. Every preference, fear, aesthetic sensibility you carry is downstream from those earlier states. The younger self is not erased — he is metabolised. You no longer have access to the raw form, but his architecture persists.

The distress arises because memory gives you a partial reconstruction, not full embodiment. That gap feels like standing outside a locked room that once was your whole world. And if the feeling carries intensity beyond momentary unease — if it feels existential rather than reflective — it may be tied less to memory and more to mortality awareness. The two are closely linked.

There is another way to read the encounter. The bottle is static matter. You are adaptive consciousness. Identity is not a sequence of discarded selves — it is a continuous biological process that updates while retaining traces. The earlier version feels lost because you cannot be him again. But the fact that you can recognise him at all means he is still structurally present. The fact that you have changed — aged, accumulated, rebuilt — is not loss alone. It is evidence of having lived.

But that knowledge doesn't dissolve the feeling. Something intimate has persisted without your permission, and its persistence exposes, quietly and without malice, the fact that you are not the person it remembers.

Sources:

• Neuroimaging Evidence for the Emotional Potency of Odor-Evoked Memory — Neuropsychologia

• Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny) — Sigmund Freud, 1919

• Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures — Mark Fisher, 2014

I ran the numbers last week. Not because I wanted to, but because a thought that had been circling for months finally landed and demanded arithmetic. The question was simple: how much did I spend on fragrance in 2025?

The answer was £2,573.

I sat with that figure for a while. Individual purchases had felt modest — a bottle here, a sample set there, the occasional limited release that seemed unreasonable to miss. Each transaction was small enough to file under "affordable pleasure." Collectively, over twelve months, they added up to something I hadn't authorised in any conscious way. Roughly £215 a month, distributed so evenly across the year that no single month looked alarming.

Here is what made the number sting. The Exposure 2510 integrated amplifier I wrote about recently retails for approximately £2,100. A Chord ClearwayX ARAY speaker cable to connect it properly costs £155. Together: £2,255. I spent £318 more than that on fragrance — a collection of volatile compounds designed, by definition, to evaporate.

The contrast isn't about one category being more worthy than the other. I've written about fragrance with genuine enthusiasm and I stand by most of those purchases as individual decisions. The problem is the pattern. Diffuse spending, distributed across months in amounts too small to trigger scrutiny, accumulating into a total that could have funded something durable and transformative. The amplifier would sit on my shelf for a decade or more, improving every listening session. The fragrances are half- used bottles in a drawer, some of which I've already forgotten I own.

Behavioural economists have a term for this: the aggregation problem. The tendency to evaluate purchases individually rather than as a portfolio. Each £40 bottle passes the "can I afford this?" test. The aggregate fails the "is this how I want to allocate resources?" test. I never asked the second question because I never saw the total. The spending was incremental, and incrementalism is invisible by design.

What makes this particularly pointed is that I don't regret the Cambridge Audio CXN I bought the year before. That purchase was deliberate, researched, and has delivered daily utility ever since. It was a focused allocation toward a defined goal. The fragrance spending was the opposite — undirected, reactive, driven by novelty rather than need. One approach left me with something I use every day. The other left me with a number that made me wince.

So I'm making a correction. No fragrance purchases until November. No full bottles, no samples, no limited edition exceptions. The money that would have gone there gets redirected into a dedicated fund. Nine months at £215 gives me roughly £1,935. Ten months reaches £2,150. Enough for the amplifier without strain, without borrowing, without the quiet self-reproach that follows impulsive spending.

The environmental controls matter as much as the rule itself. I've unsubscribed from fragrance marketing emails. I've stopped browsing retailer sites during idle moments. Saved carts and wishlists have been cleared. These aren't dramatic gestures — they're the removal of triggers. Most discretionary spending doesn't begin with a decision. It begins with exposure. An email lands, a page loads, a new release appears in a feed. The desire follows the stimulus, not the other way around. Cutting the stimulus is easier than resisting the desire.

I'm aware this reads like a resolution, and resolutions have a poor track record. But I think the difference here is specificity. I'm not vowing to "spend less" or "be more mindful." I'm redirecting a quantified amount toward a defined object on a fixed timeline. The success metric isn't discipline in the abstract — it's whether, come November, I can make a purchase decision calmly, from a position of having already funded it, without urgency or compensation psychology.

The shift I'm after is structural. From impulse accumulation to deliberate, single-track funding of something that will last. From a drawer of diminishing bottles to a piece of engineering that will outlive everything in it.

Some things are meant to evaporate. Budgets shouldn't be one of them.

Cable knit, black and white, no jewellery, no set dressing — Christy Turlington and Elaine Irwin for the Fall 1989 Collection campaign, and a photographer who understood that nothing sells quiet confidence like actual quiet confidence.

Calvin Klein's 1980s print advertising shouldn't have worked. The decade ran on excess — shoulder pads, neon, gold, volume. And here was a brand running black-and-white photography in a market saturated with colour, stripping fragrance campaigns down to bare skin and negative space while everyone else was layering on opulence. It was a bet against the visual language of the entire era. The era lost.

Richard Avedon set the template in 1980 with the Brooke Shields jeans campaign. A fifteen-year-old looking directly into the lens: "You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing." CBS and ABC pulled the spot within twenty-four hours. Four hundred thousand pairs of jeans were selling per week within a year. Klein learned something that would define every campaign that followed — the image that gets banned is the image that gets remembered.

Bruce Weber took it further. In 1982 he flew to Santorini and photographed Olympic pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus leaning against a whitewashed wall in white briefs. The image went up on a Times Square billboard and people were reportedly tearing posters out of bus shelters to keep them. American Photographer later named it one of the ten pictures that changed America. It was the first time mainstream advertising had sexualised the male body with the same directness routinely applied to women, and it turned men's underwear from a commodity into a category that carried cultural weight.

Then Obsession in 1985. The tagline — "Between love and madness lies obsession" — could have anchored something overwrought. Instead, Avedon directed the television spots with Doon Arbus writing the copy, and Weber shot the print work in stark monochrome. Josie Borain stared out from magazine pages with an intensity that had nothing to do with selling perfume and everything to do with holding attention. The signature image from the later campaign — Weber's 1989 photograph of a naked couple on a swing — is still arresting now. Not because of the nudity but because of the composition. It looks like it belongs in a gallery, and the fact that it was selling a $60 bottle of fragrance is almost beside the point.

What unified all of it was restraint. Clean backgrounds. Minimal props. Bodies and faces given room to breathe. In an era when fashion advertising meant cluttered sets and aspirational fantasy, Klein's campaigns trusted the photograph itself. The product was almost incidental — a pair of jeans, a bottle, a waistband. What was being sold was a feeling: directness, confidence, a refusal to decorate.

Irving Penn photographed Christy Turlington for the Calvin Klein Collection campaign in 1988. Weber shot her again for the Eternity launch the same year, on Martha's Vineyard with Lambert Wilson. Two campaigns, two photographers, two completely different moods — and both unmistakably Calvin Klein. That's what a coherent visual identity actually looks like. Not a logo or a typeface but a consistent relationship with space and light.

The reason these images endure isn't nostalgia. It's that minimalism ages better than maximalism, and always has. The over-produced, hyper-saturated advertising of the same period looks exactly like what it is — a product of its moment, locked in time. Klein's campaigns float free of their decade because they were already working against it. The restraint that looked provocative in 1985 just looks correct now.

Sources:

• Calvin Klein Ads History, Explained: '80s, '90s & Controversies — WWD

• 1982: Bruce Weber for Calvin Klein — Artforum

• Obsession through the ages — Dazed

• Brooke Shields responds to controversial 1980 Calvin Klein ad — Today

• Bruce Weber's All-American Obsessions — Aperture