As you may have gathered from some of my past posts, I get touchy when arbitrary (or inaccurate) analogies are drawn between perfume and the visual arts. However, Olfactive Studio’s collaboration between photographers and perfumers is specific and yet open-ended enough to leave breathing room for everyone involved. Each fragrance is inspired by a photograph and is given a term from the photographic arts. Lately I’ve been sampling Still Life, which was prompted by a photograph by Frédéric Lebain (above, cropped).
Lebain’s still-life photograph shows an arrangement of three photographic prints of mirrored disco balls surrounded by a dusting of confetti. It contains images-within-an-image, and it could be a self-referential meditation on photography’s two-dimensional representations of a three-dimensional world; it’s playful and cerebral at the same time. Still Life, the fragrance, was developed by perfumer Dora Arnaud. It’s a woody citrus with notes of yuzu, elemi, pink pepper, black pepper, Sichuan pepper, star anise, galbanum, dark rum, cedarwood and ambrox…
