I’ll be giving a talk at FutureFest in London 17-18 September. Who knows, I may even get to meet Brian Eno. I am reliably informed he has our perfume guide in his loo for casual reading. Nice opening gambit: “Hi, I’m the guy whose book you apparently have in your… ah, never mind.“
Today I found out that my composer genius friend Howard Skempton, author of the heartbreakingly beautiful Lento, has written a Piano Concerto which can be heard here starting at approx 59:00. You have six days to do so, then this will disappear in the BBC’s vast archives.
Rouge Bunny Rouge is a beauty products and fragrance outfit started in 2005 by Yugoslav-born Alexandra de Montfort. It is based in the UK but launches its products in Russia. This is an odd bird among niche companies: it clearly has an intense and focused visual art direction in a mock-baroque style, but the fragrance art direction seems a bit more random, not least because RBR went to the big oil houses for […]
There is a tendency among arty niche houses to insist on simultaneously being about less and more than mere perfume. The less part has to do with minimalism, that sterile hybrid of classic modern and germophobia. The more part has to do with adding a fragrance angle to the great adventure of navel-gazing. Two examples among many: “scent as an open-ended adventure in self-expression […] opens a window on a new horizon of human […]
I was delighted to see that Miyako and Incendo, two of my favorites from the AOA finalists, had won the top prize for artisan fragrances. Congratulations to Auphorie and La Curie. It shows that 1] The judging system devised by Saskia Wilson-Brown works 2] The judges all have impeccable taste and 3] Niche perfumery is producing masterpieces. I hope those two small outfits get snowed under with orders. They deserve it.
On October 20-24 I will be taking part in an exciting 3-day science/art event in France’s beautiful Lubéron region. Victoria Frolova of Boisdejasmin and I will cover the chemistry, art, and neuroscience of smell in its different contexts from fragrance to food. There will be plenty of time set aside for discussion, smelling and general enjoyment. Reservations can be made here.
Respectable number of page views, let’s see what happens. Very curious to see what the ads will be (I don’t have any say). Air filters? Pheromones boost your attraction? No more unsightly something? Expensive HiFi? Visit Greece? Update: and the answer is, of course, that the ads will be different for every viewer….
One of the many wonderful things about the Web is the fact that you can set up a perfumery in a heavenly small hill village in Italy’s Teramo province and expect, all being well, to become known all over the world and thrive. Angela Ciampagna’s collection is beautifully presented and comprises nine fragrances. My two favorites are Liquo and Nox: Liquo: I always think of liquorice as vetiver’s friendly sibling, and it is an […]
I had not heard of Coolife, and probably a good thing too, because the naff name and the glib patter on their first fragrance “It harnesses the power of scent […] to unite lovers in an irrational and convulsive attraction” would have put me in a grim mood. As it was, I smelled them first and read them later, which turns out to be generally a good idea. The Parfums are straightforwardly numbered from Premier to Quatrième. The first […]
My Latin is sparse and rusty, but still good enough to know that stringing two nominatives together, as in Aqua Sextius*, will not get you into Oxford. But Guerlain (Aqua Allegoria) gets away with it, so why not? The fragrance, composed by Cécile Zarokian, is a technical marvel. I’ll wager that every oil house has analysed this one to death and told its perfumers to copy it. It belongs to that very small […]
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