Before wearing Paper Passion¹ I sniffed a lot of books and paper. I sat in front of my bookshelves and wedged my nostrils between many pages. I don’t think contemporary paper has much scent; what I did smell on occasion (especially in art books) was a mild chemical odor (inks?) I did get a definite aroma from watercolor papers — the scent of wet animal fur. Finally, I sniffed a falling-apart edition of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time that was printed in the 1980s (I’m saving the wreck because the pages might make a neat lampshade or “collage” screen); the rough pages were not printed on archival paper (they’ve yellowed and become brittle). Sniffing the Proust and other “old” books I realized that cheap, wood pulp paper smelled the best — vanillic, woody-acidic.

Paper Passion opens with a quick touch of osmanthus “bud” (neither too fruity nor floral) and balsam of copaiba (woody but with a cool “bite”). The musk in Paper Passion’s base is super-light and almost undetectable but complements the overall vanilla-wood character of the perfume. I do smell “old books” as I sniff Paper Passion — there’s a definite musty vibe. The longer you wear the fragrance, the more you’ll smell like your granny’s huge, disintegrating 100-year-old family Bible, or bungalow-sized (silverfish-infested) volume of The Complete Shakespeare…

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