Ganymede: a reliable "synthetic mood" that no longer works

A story of bottled qualia

Ganymede used to be my first and favorite perfume. It still is my first one, but it no longer is my favorite.

I got the recommendation to buy it from Sasha Chapin's tweet that no longer seems to exist or perhaps it got sucked into the blackest darkest hole of twitter out of which twitter search is unable to pull it from.

The tweet was something like this: "The fourth taxi driver asked me what perfume I'm wearing. Ganymede is powerful stuff".

Taxi drivers as a group are internationally recognized for their exquisite taste, so naturally I ordered a 30ml bottle. And when I arrived, I immediately fell in love with it.

Ganymede was unlike any other perfume I ever smelled before… This is a moment in my post where genre conventions compel me to start piling up poetic descriptions. "The perfume smelled like a Unicorn's horn harvested during a fool moon night". "The perfume is reminiscent of waking up and smelling rhubarb on a bright Sunday morning after a hearty breakfast".

People writing about scents always have a PhD in smelling rhubarbs.

Ganymede smelled fantastic. There is something simultaneously cinematic, natural, and artificially engineered in the way its initial rainy freshness smells. It’s what I now imagine the rain in the final Blade Runner scene smells like.

A synthetic mood and lo-fi qualia engineering

If you pay attention to how your mind constructs your experience of a mood, you can notice that a mood colors the entire experience of the world and not just your 'self'. When you are depressed, the whole world in your perception seems bleak. When you are energetic the world seems exciting and enticing. A good party or concert may make the world seem like outright magic.

A good scent or perfume produces the same sort of 'coloring' effect a mood does, except a lot more subtler. Spray it on yourself and within moments your subjective experience shifts to slightly out of ordinary. Ganymede is a readily available pinch of artificial mysticism, a hedonic spark in a bottle.

In the future that could arrive sooner than people expect we'll be able to create and curate much fancier blissful synthetic moods streamed directly into people's minds via neuralink-like interfaces. But for now we have to content ourselves with perfume designers maxxxing out the possibilities of lo-fi qualia engineering in the olfactory modality.

Influencing people's perception of you

I suspect the same kind of 'subtle coloring' effect you could have on your own 'felt presence' in other people perception.

Or perhaps not even subtly. I went to a party once. When I arrived, one girl was like: "WHAT IS THIS SMELL?!". I told her the name, and she thanked me and replied that she considers it faux pas to ask the name of the perfume, but the smell was so good she just couldn't resist.

Running out of my first bottle

I went through a 30 ml bottle over a few weeks. And it felt like I didn't get enough of Ganymede. My budget was a bit tight, so I didn't order a replacement bottle until a few weeks later.

And when my replacement bottle arrived, it just wasn't the same. Perhaps I developed a sort of Capgras Syndrome for my favorite scent. Sure, it smelled… similar? but way more two-dimensional.

I even started to suspect I had a defective bottle and even emailed the support of the company where I purchased it. People in the replies to the linked tweet reassured me companies changing product compositions is commonplace.

Maybe Capgras Syndrome is too dramatic for a scent. In Russian language we have a joke saying for these types of situations: «Фальшивые елочные игрушки. Как настоящие, только не радуют». “Fake Christmas tree ornaments. Just like the real ones, only they don't bring you joy.”

Getting a new bottle was like reconnecting with a friend from 10 years ago: there is old familiarity but you kind of moved on from the place where your friendship was. Or maybe it is like falling out of love: the person is still the same but the house of cards of their image in your head — all the narratives and perceptions you’ve built over time — has collapsed.

Solving the mystery

Or maybe it's my bottle that's defective. Two weeks ago I decided to settle the matter once and for all and figure out whether it's defective or not. The company had a brick-and-mortar shop on the other side of London. So I embarked on a quest to get there on a Saturday evening.

I left my apartment building, hopped on my electric bicycle. The store was closing at 18:00 and Google Maps was predicting that I'd arrive there at 17:58 after a 40 minute ride. I hesitated, but it was now or never. I had to get there. 

I was running every red light possible, I was slightly dangerously overtaking other cyclists. I lightly bumped into a guy on an electric scooter who was riding right in the center of a cycle lane like an annoying little bitch instead of riding on one side like an upstanding citizen would. Ultimately I watched the estimate go down 17:57, 17:56, 17:55… like a weird sort of backwards countdown.

I arrived at the store at 17:50, 10 minutes before the closing time. I asked them if they had "Ganymede" in stock and heard "Of course". 

And, of course, of course, their bottle smelled the same. I pretty much immediately figured that I won't be able to tell the difference blindfolded, but it took several more sniffs and talking to consultants to fully convince myself.

Disappointing. Nothing could bring the joy of Ganymede back.

Then my eyes fell onto a fancy bottle of "Ganymede Extrait". A scent released in 2023, sort of "Ganymede revisited", much heavier, spicier and metallic. This scent is how I'd make enriched Uranium smell if I was a god creating the next iteration of this universe.

Somehow Ganymede Extrait feels sufficiently familiar to trip the pattern recognition machinery in my mind in a sufficiently similar way. Oddly familiar yet so different. I am fascinated by this scent and I ended up buying it.

Perfume design is art. In a different sensory modality musical artists sometimes drop sick remixes of their own stuff. This allows you to rediscover the joy of the original and rekindle the sparks of magic. "Ganymede Extrait" is like taking the original "Ganymede'' and adding a much fatter baseline, speedier drums and catchier tune while keeping the essence of the original. It's intense, but every now and then you just want to turn the volume to 11.

Is there a deeper point to my piece? Let’s find a point. I would say it’s this: sometimes you have to let go of the thing you love the most, get on a hero's journey towards the unknown and come back with your stance on reality transformed.