Nest Fragrances, the candle company founded by Laura Slatkin, will launch three personal fragrances this month: Amazon Lily, Passiflora & Midnight Fleur. The “botanically based” perfumes were inspired by the paper mosaics of British artist Mary Delany; Delany’s works were interpreted by Alexander Solodukho for the bottle designs…
The perfumista chorus constantly chants “Enough Oud!” “Stop Oud!”** and all of a sudden I’m beginning to feel protective of oud perfumes. True, the market is flooded with oud fragrances but it’s also flooded with sport and gourmand and jasmine colognes. The perennial pet of the perfume world, orange blossom, gets to star in fragrance after fragrance without complaints from the “perfume gallery.” Oud is like any other ingredient; it can be placed in an unimaginative setting, or showcased with ingenuity.
Recently I’ve come across several oud fragrances that deserve respect; Humiecki & Graef Blask is one of them. You can read the convoluted “backstory” of Blask here. I’ll just say it was created by the perfume team of Christoph Hornetz and Christophe Laudamiel and has fragrance notes of bay laurel, “red wine,” walnut wood, floral notes and agarwood/oud.
Blask opens with a warm, rich bay leaf aroma…
Art lovers who wander into Dillon Gallery in Chelsea this week will have virtually nothing to look at, but plenty to smell—from a freshly grated lemon peel, to a musty cave, to a ripe banana layered with the feral odor of a ... monkey.
— From What's That Smell? A Fragrant Downtown Exhibit Makes the Case for Scent Art at the Wall Street Journal. The exhibit features "scent sculptures" by perfumer Christophe Laudamiel; you can find more details at the Dillon Gallery website.
This fall, niche line Humiecki & Graef will launch Blask, their eighth fragrance…
So it is like a Dalmatian dog, you don’t look at it as being a listing of 100 dots; you see it at the end just as a dog. And you can see how if you have this dog, on the black and white picture, you can remove a few dots from the dog, you will still see the dog and then at one point when you remove two or three dots, the dog is going to disappear in the whole picture. So that’s what we do in perfumery. We put enough of those dots to recognize a certain facet, a floral facet, a woody facet...
— Perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, from Creating the Scent of a Virgin: A Lesson on Fine Fragrance Perfumery at Big Think.
Update: Joe points out that to see the actual quote I clipped above, you have to click on the links in the Big Think article — those links will take you to the interview.