Earlier this year, By Rosie Jane launched Remi, a new citrus fragrance…
Tuesday scent of the day 10/28
It’s Tuesday and International Animation Day. Birthdays: Erasmus, Levi Coffin, Auguste Escoffier, Edith Head, Evelyn Waugh, Jonas Salk. RIP Prunella Scales. What fragrance are you wearing?
I’m in Serge Lutens Chêne. Tea at the moment is an organic Ceylon from Idulgashinna Estate, via Upton.
Reminder: for Halloween on 10/31, wear your quirkiest or weirdest or spookiest fragrance…
Challenge a foundational theory of how smell works
The marine whiff of ambergris. The citrusy tang of grapefruit. The must of “corked” wine. The human nose can detect a virtually infinite palette of odors, some at vanishingly low concentrations. But puzzlingly, our bodies only use about 400 receptor proteins to interpret them. Now, fragrance researchers in Switzerland have landed on a new way to study the proteins in the laboratory—and their results, they say, challenge a foundational theory of how smell works.
— Read more in Perfume scientists tweak cells into having ‘sense of smell’ at Science.org.
Lazy 3-day weekend poll ~ open thread, late October 2025
Welcome to the weekend and our standard-issue open thread poll. PSA: our next splitmeet will start on Saturday 1 November.
Meanwhile, talk about anything you like — the fragrance you’re wearing today, the last perfume you tried and loved but probably won’t buy, whatever.
Or, ask a question about fragrance, then see if anyone else has asked a question that you can answer…
The brick-and-mortar fragrance business is booming
While sniffing via a screen is a technology yet to be cracked, the brick-and-mortar fragrance business is booming: 75 percent of fragrance sales in the U.S. happen in stores. And over the past year, it’s seemed as if every other boutique opening in the city is a perfumer or a home-fragrance shop. [...] Naked Ghosts (66 Greenwich Ave.), which opened in the summer, offers a tight selection of niche eaux (such as Annindriya and Chester Gibs’s Walk With Me) chosen by store co-founder Christophe Laudamiel, a perfumer whose own fragrances are for sale.
— Read more in What’s That Smell? 11 New Fragrance Stores Open in New York magazine.