Perfumer Mark Buxton has launched his own line of fragrances:
One of the sharpest “noses” ever. Author of fragrances for Givenchy, Versace, Paco Rabanne, Burberry, Salvador Dali, Cartier, Chopard, Ferre. One of the brilliant pages of his perfumer career concerns his companionship of many years with Comme des Garcons. Mark's personal testament has always been “Simplicity is the ultimate degree of luxury”. This credo is incarnated in his works as well as in his life…
What does communism smell like? How about the Sun, or Cleopatra’s perfume, or the atomic blast that destroyed the city of Hiroshima? This booklet, published on the occasion of the exhibition If There Ever Was, attempts to bring distant, elusive, and sometimes impossible olfactory experiences to life. Curator Robert Blackson commissioned thirteen fragrances from eleven perfumers and smell artists, including Bertrand Duchaufour, Christophe Laudamiel, Christoph Hornetz, Mark Buxton, Sissel Tolaas, and Geza Schön. If, like me, you missed the show at the Reg Vardy Gallery, this booklet gives you a chance to smell them all in the comfort of your own home.
Each scent of the exhibition is encapsulated in a scratch-n-sniff card, and comes with a short explanatory text. What these fragrances have in common is that they all refer to objects that are absent from our experience: they represent things that are temporally and/or spatially remote. There are no traces, for instance, of the original recipe to Cleopatra’s perfume; we can only guess what it really smelled like…
The Six Scents Fragrance Initiative is a new, ongoing collaboration between Symrise, Metaproject and Seven New York. The group plans to launch six new fragrances every year with a percentage of the proceeds going to charity. Six Scents: Series One will launch next month, and will benefit Designers Against AIDS' International AIDS Awareness Education Center in Antwerp, Belgium.
Each of the six fragrances was developed by a celebrated designer working in conjunction with a Symrise perfumer. The fragrances for Series One, curated by Joseph Quartana of Seven New York, are:
Fragrance 1: Urban Tropicalia ~ by Alexandre Herchcovitch. According to perfumer Joachim Correll, “The inspiration for this fragrance was driven by the way that Alexandre creates fashion: The creative liberty he uses to design fashion which can be used equally by men or women…”
Linari, best known for their home fragrances, has launched a range of four personal scents:
Notte Bianca (shown) ~ “As exciting and beguiling as a sleepless night with fruity, delicate accents of pink grapefruit, fresh bergamot and Italian orange in a delightful interplay with aromatically lively notes of star anise, absinthe elixir, cloves, sage and fine cashmere wood. Haitian chords of Vetiver and Tonka, underlined by white musk and amber give the base a seductively sensual character.” By perfumer Mark Buxton…
Karl Lagerfeld will launch Kapsule, a trio of mix 'n match unisex fragrances, this coming November. It is his first fragrance project under new licensing arrangements with Coty; a company representative noted that…
Lots of people are doing three fragrances, but only at an expensive price, as a limited edition. Here, the idea was to say we will propose a capsule wardrobe of fragrances…at a price that is in line with the market…