Notes on Notes

Posted by Robin on 31 July 2019 Leave a Comment

In a unique collaboration with London Philharmonic Orchestra as part of the Harrods Season, sound and scent come together this August for an immersive sensory experience. Join us as we explore olfactory notes to a musical soundtrack, hosted in Salon de Parfums from 7th to 31st August. Visit the space at any time to discover the experience or join us for a series of evening events, where the leading names in perfumery will showcase pieces of music alongside the exclusive fragrances that inspired them, delving deeper into the notes behind the scents. Evening events will take place from 5pm on Wednesday 7th, Thursday 8th and Friday 9th August.

— To book a spot for the evening Notes on Notes events at Harrods (you must rsvp by Friday), see the Harrods event page. Hat tip to David!

Somewhere between fresh flower petals and putrid, overripe vegetation

Posted by Robin on 9 July 2019 2 Comments

Visitors move through Fructaplex©, a fruity, plasticky smell reminiscent of artificial car air-fresheners, to Sylvoxime©, which has a comforting sylvan note of a walk through the forest, before hitting the intense and complex smell called Hyperflor©, which Raspet describes as somewhere between fresh flower petals and putrid, overripe vegetation.

— Conceptual artist Sean Raspet of Detroit has an exhibit at Empty Gallery in Hong Kong; read more at Conceptual art goes molecular with works you can smell but can’t see, and one that ‘sees’ you at South China Morning Post.

Reconstructing extinct flower smells

Posted by Robin on 24 May 2019 5 Comments

Christina Agapakis, the creative director at the genetics company Gingko Bioworks, started the process of reconstructing extinct flower smells in 2016 by looking through the archives of the Harvard Herbarium and cross-referencing preserved plant specimens with a list of extinct species. She stumbled upon the Scurfpea among about a dozen other plants and sent small pieces of leaves to a paleogenomics lab at UC Santa Cruz, where researchers were able to isolate sequences of DNA that are involved in producing a flower’s scent for three of the flowers. Then, Gingko Bioworks engineers stitched these fragments of DNA together into 2,000 variations, then synthesized them using yeast to see what kinds of molecules they would produce.

— Smell artist Sissel Tolaas used the Gingko Bioworks data to develop the scent of the extinct flower Falls-of-the-Ohio Scurfpea, which you can smell at the Cooper Hewitt exhibit Nature, which runs through next January. Read more at Millions of animals are going extinct–and the race to preserve their memory is already on at Fast Company.

Sage and Coriander

Posted by Robin on 10 April 2019 Leave a Comment

It is at this same spot that two new scents of antiquity, Sage and Coriander, revived by KORRES for the National Archaeological Museum, will be revealed this spring to mark the one-year anniversary of the exhibition. A milestone in the exhibition’s life cycle, as together with the new scents, a statue of Goddess Aphrodite of Roman times, will emerge from the storerooms of the Museum for the first time to light up the space and delight visitors with its charm.

– Korres adds two more scents to the collection they released last year for an exhibit at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Read the museum's press release at THE SCENT OF ANTIQUITY REBORN, or see the page for the new exhibit, which will run from May through December, The countless aspects of Beauty.

Thirteen perfumers

Posted by Robin on 6 March 2019 3 Comments

In the exhibition Nez à nez– Contemporary perfumers, we follow the trajectory and creative processes of those working in the complex and demanding world of perfumery. The aim is to give the public access to some of the insider secrets of a creative medium that touches us all. At mudac, the idea of an exhibition on perfumery was long in the works. [...]
To show just how complex and diverse the world of perfumery is, the exhibition spotlights the creations of thirteen perfumers from various countries and backgrounds: men and women, at different stages of their careers, working independently, as head of their own brand or for a perfume house. We teamed up with the perfumers themselves and the experts from the specialist magazine Nez to select three fragrances by each creator to feature in the exhibition.

— Nez à nez is open through 16 June at Mudac, Musée de design et d’arts appliqués contemporains in Lausanne, Switzerland; more here.

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Now Smell This

a blog about perfume

Notes on Notes

Somewhere between fresh flower petals and putrid, overripe vegetation

Reconstructing extinct flower smells

Sage and Coriander

Thirteen perfumers