As a bit of a unicorn chaser, some beauty: designer and book maker Irma Boom shows off the book — all embossed images and text, no ink — she made for Chanel No. 5 and the No. 5 Culture Chanel exhibition.
You can read more about the book at Wired. It will go on sale at Amazon next year.
Once or twice a year, someone will ask why I’m so fascinated with perfume — or, more bluntly, why I’m willing to pay more than $100 for a bottle. I have an answer ready: It’s a piece of art that you get to carry with you all day instead of leaving on/above the mantle.
It’s a half-truth. I also wear perfume when I can’t pile on enough cashmere, or black eyeliner, or gin flasks to keep up with my mood. That’s when I reach for Bottega Veneta, or Dior Poison, or Jean Patou Joy. Because, as Yesterday’s Perfume blogger Barbara Herman so aptly states in her book Scent & Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume, “Perfume’s power is that it has one foot in the elevated world of language, and one foot in the primal, emotional, visceral, and dreamlike.” They say what I really want to say, in a cut-to-the-chase, non-HR-involving language…
When I mentioned to a friend and colleague that I was reading Cult Perfumes: The World’s Most Exclusive Perfumeries, she thought it a pity that the book isn’t a scratch-and-sniff (or, more practicably, accompanied by a set of sample vials). If you’ve ever smelled a Lush store from a mile away, you can see the quirky appeal: the atmosphere within — or roiling out of — a fragrance shop is quite telling.
Even so, Cult Perfumes tells a lot for a book that is technically meant for the coffee table. Author Tessa Williams, a British journalist whose byline has appeared in Vogue, Marie Claire and Elle, catalogs the past and present of 26 “extraordinary niche perfumeries throughout the world,” with quick nods to 15 more in the back. Gorgeous art is peppered throughout, including historic advertisements, snapshots of the shops, and, of course, lots and lots of gorgeous bottles…
“Craftsman, artist: I have never managed to settle for one or the other of these definitions for myself,” perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena wrote in The Diary of a Nose: A Year in the Life of a Parfumeur, published in English last January. “I feel like a craftsman when I am completely wrapped up in making a perfume; I feel like an artist when I imagine the perfume I need to make. In fact, I constantly juggle with the two standpoints. If perfume is first and foremost a creation of the mind, it cannot actually be created without the mastery of true skill.”
Diary of a Nose follows Ellena’s first book, Perfume: The Alchemy of Scent, a short volume on the fragrance industry released in English in 2009. As Marcello noted in his review of Alchemy of Scent in its original French edition, Le Perfum: Que-sais je? (2007), Ellena uses “some of his well-known creations to explain what he regards as the essence of his profession.” For those who have read industry basics before, the chapters on history, materials, classification, and marketing will be familiar, but told with more depth…
Note: Alyssa Harad is the author of Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride, published in hardback last year. The new paperback edition comes out later this month. You can read our Q&A with Alyssa here, or read an excerpt from the book, The Tuberose of My Resistance. Also check out this video interview from Idaho Public Television, or just read through all her old posts on Now Smell This — she used to be a regular contributor here.
Well friends, it’s been quite a year. When Robin first suggested I someday write a guest post about the move “from blog to book,” I was living in the frenetic state of suspended animation common to new authors a month before publication. There were endless things to do, but none of them felt real. Every morning when I woke up, my palms tingled, a symptom I still haven’t deciphered. Life was so uncertain that I slipped into perfume monogamy, reaching for the cheerful elegance of L’Artisan’s Fleur d’Oranger over and over again.
My primary emotions were excitement, terror and gratitude. I was excited because the thing I had just spent nearly three years working on was about to make its way into the world. I was terrified for exactly the same reason.
Coming to My Senses is a true story, a portrait of people and communities I love. I wrote it hoping I could recreate for others the intensity of the pleasure I’d found, not just in perfume and its beauties, but the people and stories — a whole new way of life, really — that came along with it…