The State of the Industry: A Conversation with Perfumer Raymond Chaillan ~ out of the bottle

Posted by Alyssa on 21 April 2011 58 Comments

Perfumer Raymond Chaillan

Until quite recently, if you had asked me how I felt about the rise of the perfumer-as-star I would have told you enthusiastically that I thought it could only be a good thing. Though some have complained about his omnipresence in the press, I think Jean-Claude Ellena’s ability to articulate his vision and his process have done more to raise the general public’s Perfume IQ than any ad campaign, as have the varied projects of perfume adventurers like Christophe Laudamiel, Mandy Aftel, Bertrand Duchaufour, and Francis Kurkdjian, just to name a few. I was moved by the passage in Chandler Burr’s The Perfect Scent where a perfumer recalls drifting anonymously around a launch party, forbidden to claim any part of the spotlight. I assumed Frederic Malle’s auteur model would give perfumers a greater share of power along with credit and name recognition.

The recent launch of Belle d’Opium made me re-think my views. The PR campaign featured videos of the talented perfumers Honorine Blanc and Alberto Morillas, but their mark seemed absent from the perfume itself which, at best, hews carefully to market-tested preferences. In the middle of it all, I found myself thinking about the far more anonymous creators of the original Opium. I wondered how they might feel watching the relatively high amount of attention paid to perfumers, while knowing that the launch depended on their original, now reformulated, work. Would it seem like the industry had changed for better or worse?

Recently one of Opium’s creators, Raymond Chaillan, was gracious enough to answer a few of my questions by email…

Read the rest of this article »

Poached Pears with Whole Long Pepper ~ out of the bottle

Posted by Alyssa on 15 March 2011 63 Comments

Poached Pears with Long Pepper

A new spice shop opened here recently and I went down to see if there was anything delicious and fragrant I could bring to you people. I found several things I’d been looking for — sichuan peppers, nigella seeds, aleppo pepper — all of which we’ll discuss at a later date, and one I didn’t even know existed that I am very excited to tell you about right now.

Long pepper is only one of its names. It also goes by Balinese pepper, Bengal pepper, Jaborandi pepper, Indian long pepper, and various combinations thereof, none of which appear in the indices of any of my many cookbooks and ingredient guides. The internets seem to agree that it is widely employed in Asia for stir fries and pickling, and is featured in North African spice blends such as Ras el Hanout and Berbere.¹ The same sources repeat the story that it was the pepper preferred by the Romans, and some add that it was the spice the world thought of as “pepper,” until cultivation methods made the black pepper we are accustomed to today far more widely available. I have a feeling limited availability might explain long pepper’s absence from my cookbooks. (If you are familiar with it, or come from a part of the world where it is commonly employed, do comment.)

At any rate, there it was, on the wall of glass jars devoted to peppercorns…

Read the rest of this article »

Sissel Tolaas, scent artist ~ out of the bottle

Posted by Alyssa on 15 February 2011 35 Comments

I was breathing in the air and then I started thinking: Air cannot just be something abstract. It is out there so it must contain molecules and information. So what happens if I start to analyze the invisible?

— Sissel Tolaas, Mono.Kultur #23

Mono.Kultur is a German art journal that devotes each issue to a single interview with a notable figure. I’ve been meaning to tell you about their special edition on scent artist Sissel Tolaas for some time now, but when I pulled it out of the envelope this summer, the scent that rose up from its pages and rubbed off onto my hands was so subtly disturbing that after ten minutes I put it away again. A month later I tried again with similar results. And so it went, until last week, when I finally read it thoroughly, albeit never for more than fifteen minutes at a time, and never while eating.

By the time I ordered my copy, I’d been following Tolaas’ work for some time. In many of her interviews, she introduces herself as a “professional in-betweener,” and a “provocateur” and I can think of no better way to summarize her. She is a chemist who participates regularly in major art exhibitions, and a globe-trotting Norwegian fluent in nine languages who now resides in Germany, when she is not in New York, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo, or Mexico City. Her Berlin lab is funded by International Flavors & Fragrances, and she has created scent logos (who knew there was such a thing?) for Adidas, Ikea, a credit card company — they wanted their cards to smell of money — and the couture line Maison Martin Margiela, but she has also used head-space technology to capture and bottle the scents of male fear, air pollution in Mexico City, the Cold War, and her own body.

She sometimes wears the latter (the ultimate bespoke signature scent if there ever was one) and describes smelling it for the first time as a shocking, fascinating, and ultimately revelatory experience that allowed her to discover herself as a human being. Then again, Tolaas is the sort of person who enjoys dressing up for a party — she’s a striking woman, tall and leggy with a chic platinum bob and bright red lipstick on her full mouth — and then spritzing on the scent of male sweat for the sheer nervy disjuncture of it…

Read the rest of this article »

The Scent of Home, the Scent of Celebration ~ out of the bottle

Posted by Alyssa on 21 December 2010 86 Comments

I won’t be going home for the holidays this year. Work, distance, and the difficulties of holiday travel in a time of war and other strange weathers mean I’ll be in Texas while the rest of my family is up in Idaho. So I’ve been thinking about the smells of Christmas, and of home, of the North and the South, and the places where they come together, and the places where they don’t.

The most expected smells of Christmas — the ones most likely to appear in limited edition perfumes, soaps and candles — are the smells of a Northern winter festival. The cool scents of pine and peppermint (all those candy canes), hints of snow, crystalline air, tree-covered mountains and those Northern night skies that seem so much blacker, and whose stars seem so much sharper and brighter than any I see in the South. To combat the cold, there’s the scent of woodsmoke from the hearth, and the smells of all those precious things imported from Southern climes: spices — especially the woody warmth of cinnamon and nutmeg, the heat of dried ginger and the cool-hot prickle of clove; oranges, which smell and look so much like the sun should that they hardly need explaining; and cacao, in the form of chocolate eaten in the hand, or melted into rich hot milk.

It’s an appealing combination — so appealing that all sorts of people who don’t celebrate, or even understand Christmas enjoy it (in Japan, for example, Christmas has been translated into a kind of Alpine-fantasy Valentine’s day). But it may or may not be the smell of your winter holiday, or your home…

Read the rest of this article »

The Antique Rose Emporium ~ out of the bottle

Posted by Alyssa on 16 November 2010 57 Comments

purse full of roses Mike Shoup of Antique Rose Emporium

Twenty-seven roses. That’s how many blooms tumbled out of my purse when I got home, each a different variety, all richly fragrant. My car smelled of roses. My office smelled of roses. I’d just gotten back from Independence, Texas, home of the Antique Rose Emporium.

A busy fall delayed my visit to the eight acres of display gardens — the roses peak in April and October — but it’s been a warm November and when I arrived the beds were still alive with migrating butterflies and fat bees storing up the last of the season’s pollen. Mike Shoup, the Emporium’s cheerful, bearded owner (shown above right), toured me around the different gardens, including one expressly for the many weddings the Emporium hosts. The goal, he explained, was to show people how they could integrate old roses (a loose term for varieties at least fifty years old, sometimes much older) into their gardens. It was all very pretty. But I wasn’t there for gardening inspiration. I was there to smell the roses.

I explained my purpose — and Now Smell This — to Mike as best I could. “Oh that’s great!” he said. “I think fragrance is one of the most important things about the roses, but it’s so hard to talk about.” Then he recommended The Emperor of Scent, Chandler Burr’s book on biophysicist and perfume critic Luca Turin, and I knew I’d found a fellow scent fanatic…

Read the rest of this article »

« Newer articles

Older articles »