Thank you to Christine for pointing out this article by Chandler Burr about strange fragrances from yesterday's New York Times.
And thank you to Laura for the link to this article about iris perfumes in the London Times.
The ad campaign for Sarah Jessica Parker's Lovely fragrance has kicked off online, in advance of televison advertising. You can watch the ad via this link from adjab.
Thank you to Ruth and Liz for pointing out that Chandler Burr has an interesting article titled "The Unbearable Lightness of Scent" in yesterday's London Times.
U.S. based real estate firm Starwood Capital has acquired a 65% controlling interest in Société du Louvre, the holding company which currently owns perfume house Annick Goutal. (via Guardian Unlimited)
Inter Parfums has signed a deal with Gap, Inc. to expand their line of fragrances and body care products. Look for new Banana Republic products next fall, and new Gap products in early 2007. (via Northwest Herald, link no longer working, sorry!)
Chandler Burr is the author of Emperor of Scent, the fascinating book about Luca Turin and his theory of smell. He is also the New York Times writer on scent. You can read his articles about perfume on his website, and you can also take a look at his 10 favorite fragrances.
If you have not read Emperor of Scent, you might also want to look at this interview with Chandler Burr for the website parfumessence.
You came to appreciate fragrance while working on the Emperor of Scent. Can you recall a few of the perfumes that initially captivated you?
I was fascinated and a bit disturbed at first by the degree to which I *didn’t like—couldn’t access, didn’t understand— some of the perfumes that Luca loves, specifically the classic Guerlains and Carons: l’Heure Bleue, Shalimar, Après l’Ondée, Vol de Nuit. These are the olfactory equivalents of 19th century French literature—smelling Chamade today is in almost every aesthetic sense identical to reading Stendhal today: the sentiments, reference points, emphases, and values all differ from those (or those most common) of our time, and you can find yourself lost. They require work. I’ve spent years with them, and I’ll never have an instinctive love of them. I don’t like Hugo either. Too much *stuff. But I can, now, appreciate their construction and their importance…
There were two perfume-related articles in the Sunday New York Times Magazine yesterday. The first, by Chandler Burr, explores attitudes towards perfume in Japan, "a culture whose relationship to fragrance is more ambivalent than perhaps any other on the planet."
The second article is about the cookbook Aroma: The Magic of Essential Oils in Food & Fragrance, released last year by perfumer Mandy Aftel of Aftelier and chef Daniel Patterson:
...the two connect in their longing to marry scent and taste. ''There was no template for cooking with essential oils,'' Patterson says. So they decided to create one. First came chilled carrot soup, with fresh ginger and a drop of ginger essential oil. That led to blood orange sorbet; mojitos with spearmint oil; crab salad with coriander oil; and white chocolate with sweet fennel and the essence of tarragon, which pushed the boundaries of chocolate as a comfort food. ''I remember being knocked out by how they just transformed things,'' he says.
The article includes three recipes.
Thank you to steelyglint from the Basenotes forum for finding this link to a 30 minute documentary on the perfume school in Versailles. You will need to click on the link (link expired, sorry!) under "Nose School". I haven't had time to listen to it yet, let me know if you enjoy it!
And while searching around the web last weekend for information on Demeter, I came across a link to this radio show on fragrance which was aired last year on Studio 360. Chandler Burr joins the regular show and among other things, they discuss the Demeter line and the use of smell in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. I listened to it shortly after it aired, but it was worth a repeat.
An older, shorter, but still interesting radio interview: this 2002 piece from National Public Radio in which Susan Stamberg talks to Jean-Paul Guerlain about his retirement from the company that had been run by his family for five generations.