A team at the Tokyo Institute of Technology is working on a new device that would allow users to "record" a fragrance:
Inventors are on the verge of creating the first mobile 'smellophone', a gadget which can capture an odour and then replay it back later, just as camcorders do with images.
Read more in the Daily Mail. Many thanks to Ruth for the link!
Courtesan is the latest fragrance from Scent By Alexis, the collection of hand-made perfume oils created by New York-based artist Alexis Karl. Courtesan was "inspired by the temptress's of the Renaissance era", and features "violet notes flirt[ing] seductively with green tea and orchid".
Courtesan is $100 for 30 ml of perfume oil in a hand-made, one-of-a-kind gilded bottle, and is available online at lacremebeauty.
Barneys will open flagship stores in San Francisco and Dallas this fall; look for another flagship in Las Vegas in 2007. (via cosmeticnews)
New at mybeautifulplace: the Pilar & Lucy Line and becker.eshaya Be.
New at strawberrynet: Lancome Tropiques, Nicole Farhi.
New at theperfumeshoppe (Canada): Carthusia Numero Uno.
There's only a handful of comprehensive books on the psychology of smell; one of them is Smell: The Secret Seducer by Piet Vroon. It was originally published in Dutch in 1994, and the English translation is now almost ten years old. I included it in my list of five “must-have” books for beginners (December 2005), because it's properly researched, well-referenced, and easily accessible to a large public. It was a long time since I last browsed through it, so I dusted off my old copy of the Dutch original, hoping that I wouldn't be disappointed in retrospect. Here's what I found…
L’Artisan launched Fou d’Absinthe earlier this year. It is said to be the first fragrance from L’Artisan to be marketed specifically to men, although there are certainly other “masculine” fragrances in the line; it also introduces a new bottle design that will eventually be used for all of the L’Artisan fragrances. Fou d’Absinthe was created by perfumer Olivia Giacobetti and features notes of frozen alcohol, absinthe, blackcurrant buds, angelica, star anise, four spices cocktail (pepper, clove, nutmeg, and ginger), patchouli, pine needles, cistus and fir balsam.
L’Artisan describes the opening of Fou d’Absinthe as…