Michael Edwards has released the latest version of his “fragrance bible”, Fragrances of the World 2013. The reference book lists over 8,500 fragrances grouped by fragrance family, and is used by numerous retailers to help customers find fragrances they might like based on the scent(s) they already know and enjoy…
I fully admit to judging books by their covers when selecting leisure reading. In the case of John Oehler’s Aphrodesia, “sexual frenzy” promises the kind of romance novel content I can really do without. Fortunately, looking at books for this blog is an objective undertaking, otherwise I would have missed this thoroughly engaging mystery novel set in a masterful rendering of the perfume industry.
The story’s protagonist is Eric Foster, the golden boy of the perfumery program at the Osmothèque’s sister school ISIPCA (Institut supérieur international du parfum, de la cosmétique et de l’aromatique alimentaire). To the envy — and alienation — of all but three of his peers, Foster is a gifted nose and a creative genius. But to the dismay of his mentor, a master perfumer who holds to the highest industry ideals, Foster’s ambition is to recreate the perfume worn by the Queen of Sheba to seduce King Solomon — an aphrodisiac, regarded as a fool’s errand. Except that Foster’s formula works. But just after his classmates prove the frightening degree of its efficacy, Foster’s key ingredient (spoiler: it’s oudh) is stolen from the school archives and he is expelled…
The The Museum of Arts and Design in New York City has introduced the limited edition catalogue for the The Art of Scent exhibit:
The Art of Scent 1889-2012, Chandler Burr
This first of its kind historical catalogue, for MAD exhibition is a beautiful limited edition coffret box featuring eleven of the works exhibited in the inaugural show…
During the reign of Marie Antoinette, more than 5,000 people lived and worked at Versailles. Given the resulting chamber pot situation, you can understand why she spent a few thousand livres a year on perfumed toiletries.
Like other royal purveyors, Marie Antoinette’s perfumer Jean-Louis Fargeon had an intimate view of the queen’s troubled tenure and the Revolution’s bloody reforms. But unlike the majority of the queen’s circle, which was prone to spending recklessly and engaging solely in frivolous pastimes, Fargeon was a competent businessman and an intellectual who would actively support the Revolution’s aims (if not its executions). Drawing on Fargeon’s papers, historian Elizabeth de Feydeau’s A Scented Palace: The Secret History of Marie Antoinette’s Perfumer is an illuminating biography of the reviled queen and a rich introduction to the era’s perfumed luxuries.
As a member of the merchant class, Fargeon’s education included the philosophy of the Enlightenment era, as well as the art and science of his skilled trade…
Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is. — Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Over the years, perfumers have had some wonderfully repugnant substances in their arsenal. Some, like jasmine and oakmoss, look picturesque in nature but can waltz into a perfume with manure or pond scum caked on their boots. Others have unseemly origins, like oudh produced by fungus-infected trees and various musks harvested from animals’ rear ends. Ambergris is a bit of both. It is produced in the bowels of just one percent of sperm whales from indigestible squid parts and feces, and expelled (sometimes fatally1) to the ocean’s surface, where it ideally ages for a few years before washing ashore. It almost always smells a bit like barnyard. Like oakmoss and animal musk, it seems to belong to a past age of perfumery. But ambergris has a mystery all its own, a treasure from the sea that can bring its finder a small fortune, an olfactory enigma that is difficult to describe and impossible to create in a lab.2
Molecular biologist Christopher Kemp first heard of ambergris in 2008 when a huge block of ambergris was thought to have washed up in New Zealand, where he was living at the time…