BPAL: Galvanic Goggle (8/11)

Another steampunk-themed scent today: Galvanic Goggles! Beth was wearing this one yesterday, but she found it not only too masculine for her, but also too potent for something which was masculine (in Womanspeak: "it had a lot of throw"). To make matters worse, the intensity kept amplifying, so she eventually had to kill it. It smelled, as she says, "like Chris [me] wearing Old Spice." Which is fascinating, because I don't even recall if I've ever worn Old Spice before. But nevermind that.

Before getting to the point, of course, I must waste time. It's what I do. So today I will look into the concept of Galvanic Goggles! First, the official description...

Golden goggles fitted with zinc and copper plates dangle heavily by their leather straps from a hook mounted to the wall. Its crystal lenses are effulgent with residual electric energy.
Metallic notes with Indian musk, tobacco flower, and African balsam.

Effulgent. What a great word. (it means "radiant")

So what ARE these goggles, anyway? A quick Google search implies no such eyewear existing independently of BPAL, so I try the natural second search, "galvanic," and I'm instantly revisiting nightmares of high school chemistry class. The Galvanic cell... two metals floating in sulfate solutions connected by a "salt bridge" (or a "porous membrane") cause a chemical reaction, creating electricity. This is exactly the sort of thing that I understand just enough to realize that there's way too much in the realms of the "why" and the "why not this instead" that I don't understand at all, which is how I feel about pretty much all chemistry.

My personal reservations aside concerning the subject matter... it's named after a man with the excellently Italian name of Luigi Galvani. There's also the apparently identical Voltaic cell, named after Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta, who invented the battery by piling a bunch of the cells on top of each other, but Galvani discovered it twenty years earlier, in 1780. And besides, when it comes to stereotypical Italian names, quality over quantity, right?

So Galvani made history when he discovered that when he connected two metals (copper and zinc seem to be the classic examples) it created a spark, and when he used that spark to electrocute the nerves of a dead frog's leg, the leg would twitch. He called this "animal electricity," which is just about as ridiculous as licking a power outlet and dubbing it "tongue electricity."

Why a frog leg? Well, it seems that Galvani was somehow trying to prove that a frog's testicles were located inside his legs. Why this mattered to him is anyone's guess, but it really calls into question his intentions behind this creation. You've thought of a brilliant new way to create electric sparks, and the first thing you test it on is what you perceive to be a leg-shaped scrotum?

You know another famous person who was around in 1780? De Sade.

Back on course, what exactly are these Galvanic Goggles envisioned to do? Besides being expensive and probably fragile things made of exotic materials that hang precariously off a hook on the wall. Well, for one, I think it is important that they are *Galvanic* rather than, say, Electric, Steam-Powered, Battery-Operated, or even Goggles-with-Zinc-and-Copper-Plates-Built-Into-Them. Also, notice the material of the lenses: crystal (nevermind how they managed it). And what are crystals used for? As any truly erudite scholar of spiritual wisdom can tell you, crystals focus and purify all energies... and electricity is an energy, yes?

Put it all together. If you're thinking laser beam eyes, you've forgotten about the first point. They're Galvanic. See, when Galvani discovered his metallicly derived electricity, he shot it directly into the nerve of a frog's leg. Same thing here, but improved! Not only do the goggles electrocute to your sensitive eyeballs, but they have crystal lenses to ensure that the electricity is focused into a perfect beam capable of penetrating the pupil at any level of dilation, hitting the optic nerve, and delivering a high-powered shock to every nerve ending of the eye!

Having confirmed its unquestionable identity as a vintage torture device, let's get down to business.

In the bottle, this one is hard to describe. It smells... energetic? And fresh? Not quite like "fresh" scented men's deodorant -- it's "sharper" than that -- but kind of along those lines. What I smell in it is probably some of whatever they use in those.

Wet on the skin, the energetic/fresh scent remains unchanged. However, a certain woody smell is there... looking back to the description, it is indeed balsam. I don't know about African balsam, but there is a certain smell that I do remember from a balsam shampoo I once discovered beneath my family's bathroom sink. The shampoo was called Flex, and I could have sworn the bottle was designed (and knowing my family, conceivably purchased) in the '70s.
There's also a hint of musk. Yes, I can actually smell that! Then again, after experiencing the terrors of Rat King 2010, how could I not know what musk is?

As it dries, more scents start to surface. Tobacco, for one. Gives it a nice smokey kind of feel. As with the Antikythera Mechanism, it's not the unpleasant creosote smell (like a burning cigar), just a light tobacco scent, as we can only wish that actual smoking smelled like.
Metallic scents also start developing. Can't honestly say if they're zinc and copper or not, but they are metallic.
The energetic/fresh scent keeps going strong, as do the musk and the balsam. And Beth was right when she said that it has a high "throw."

It all goes well, and I like it... all the way until it suddenly starts to die about an hour and a half in. The scents just stop developing and begin to weaken. Everything pretty much fades away within the next couple of hours. It stops being exciting. And that "fresh" scent stops being so piercingly energetic, turning to the more familiar fresh-scented deodorant kind of smell, lingering faintly for several hours afterward. I'm pretty sure this isn't supposed to happen... with Beth, it apparently kicked into turbo-mode after about three hours, getting even stronger. Many forum posts mention similar experiences. Oh well.

So the Galvanic Goggles didn't work for me. My eyes were just too resilient to be properly electrocuted by such antiquated technology. But for so much as it did work, I liked it. It struck me that it seemed conceptually similar to the Antikythera Mechanism, also a wood-and-metal object running in an atmosphere of tobacco (although the description doesn't say the goggles are actually "running" at the time, the scents indicated a charge), but aside from being metallic and tobacco, they were completely different. Antikythera was smooth, relaxed, orderly, sweet. The Galvanic Goggles, on the other hand, were potent, metallic, and brimming with a more chaotic energy. Were it not for the musk and the tobacco, you could almost name it "giant robot."

Good BPAL! Too bad it doesn't work very long on me.