Back tomorrow. Feel free to share your scent of the day in the comments.
Note: image is Voxtrot:the start of something by visualpanic at flickr; some rights reserved.
A ripped cotton tee-shirt for more than 1,000 euros
If, like French fashion house Balmain, you can sell a ripped cotton tee-shirt for more than 1,000 euros, you might wonder if there's any price your well-heeled customers won't pay.
It's a question the luxury industry has been posing for years as it skipped through the financial crisis in diamond slingbacks...
— From Faster, Higher, Stronger: Luxury Pricing Goes for Gold at The New York Times.
New contributor, guest authors & other business
We're very pleased to announce that Aleta B will be joining us as a contributor on perfume books. Her first post, a review of MJ Rose's The Book of Lost Fragrances, will appear tomorrow — do come by and welcome her to Now Smell This! You can read more about Aleta and her background on our About page.
If you have your own perfume blog and would be interested in writing a guest post (or if you've already written a guest post for us and would like to write another), just send me (robin at nstperfume dot com) a quick note with a link to your site. If you already know what you’d like to write about, mention that too, but it isn’t necessary.
And as always, we are open to general complaints & suggestions — this is as good a place to put them as any, so do comment!
Oops: and meant to add that voting for the Prix Eau Faux will be coming up on Thursday!
L’Odyssee de Cartier
L'Odyssée de Cartier is a short film for the Cartier brand — not for any particular product — directed by Bruno Aveillan. If you watch it, do expand to full screen. Hat tip to Kevin!
See also: three perfume commercials by Bruno Aveillan.
5 things to think about before you start a perfume blog
About the author: By profession Vanessa Musson is a freelance market researcher, specializing in industrial products. Her work involves a lot of overseas travel, to places as varied as chemical plants and wind farms, oil fields and cotton fields, stately homes and sewers. In her free time Vanessa writes the blog Bonkers about Perfume, which combines lighthearted perfume reviews with zany travelogues and the occasional post on beauty products for that unfortunate crossover condition of “problem mature skin”.
I am a relative newcomer to perfume: for most of my life I was largely indifferent to scent, occasionally succumbing to the heavy sell tactics of sales assistants at airport duty frees, and politely wearing whatever anyone might think to give me as a gift. Not very often, mind, for when I was struck down out of the blue by “sudden onset perfume mania” in 2008, I had just one rancid bottle of Estée Lauder Intuition to my name, barely touched in the seven years I had owned it.
But all that changed, and within weeks I went from zero to raging “fumehead”, and I’ve never looked back. 18 months on, I decided to start a blog. For the previous eight years I had written a humorous column for a business magazine, based on my misadventures on overseas work trips. Its sudden closure prompted me to seek out another creative writing outlet, and my newfound interest in fragrance provided the perfect vehicle. Bonkers about Perfume was born. And now another two years or more have passed, and here you have it: 5 things you might wish to consider if you are thinking of starting a perfume blog of your own…
Do you have anything new to add to the conversation?
A while back, there was a post on Grain de Musc about the recent proliferation of perfume blogs. Denyse used the colourful phrase: “metastasising like crazy”, which troubled me at the time, though I don’t think the analogy between newbie bloggers and rampant tumours was meant to be taken too literally…