Dariush Alavi, better known to perfumistas as Persolaise, has released Le Snob: Perfume, a new book in the Le Snob series of guide books from Hardie Grant Books…
Glamour Icons by Marc Rosen ~ perfume books
In the foreword to Glamour Icons: Perfume Bottle Design, Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Harold Koda discusses working with the author, Fifi-winning bottle designer Marc Rosen, on a perfume packaging exhibition (“Scents of Time”, for anyone lucky enough to have seen it in the mid-1980s). He credits Rosen with “a presentation that was at once scholarly and visually arresting.” That just about sums up Glamour Icons as well.
I didn’t know Rosen’s name before I read this book, but I’ve been a fan of his work since I can remember. Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door fragrance was a fixture on my childhood Christmas and birthday lists because of the little gold key charm that often graces the bottle. For grown-ups, of course, the design evokes the signature entryways to Arden salons. I took it as a reference to The Secret Garden, but that just goes to show how perfectly Rosen executed his message: “Here is your key to a private world meant just for you.” The Fifi judges must have agreed, since Red Door took home the award for best perfume bottle of the year in 1990. (My mother saw Vanilla Fields as a more appropriate message for a six-year-old; I never did get a bottle of Red Door…)
Coming to My Senses ~ Q & A with Alyssa Harad
As we’ve announced, and as you very well may have heard elsewhere, Alyssa Harad has just published a memoir titled Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride (and if you missed it, see the excerpt we posted yesterday). It’s a highly readable and moving account of the year in which Alyssa married her longtime beau and developed an obsessive interest in perfume, and a meditation on the ways that those two turning points brought her to think differently about her own identity as a woman and a writer.
Since I consider Alyssa a friend and we all know her as a Now Smell This contributor, I’ll be having an e-mail “question and answer” conversation with her rather than writing a traditional book review.
Alyssa will be checking in throughout the day, so if you have a question or comment of your own, please do share it.
Jessica: On a personal note, I completely empathized with the early chapters of your book, in which you recall your graduate education and the reasons that perfume would have been viewed with distrust as a “romantic distraction” in that world. I understand that experience all too well, having tried to suppress my love for fashion and perfume and cosmetics during my own long grad-school career! Do you think there’s some shared sensibility that accounts for all the academics-turned-scent-obsessives in the online fragrance-world, or is it just coincidence or the law of averages?
Alyssa: I’ve noticed there are not only a lot of former (and current) academics in the perfume blogosphere, but plenty of writers, librarians, curators, and scientists, too. The book polls on Now Smell This also suggest that perfumistas in general are big readers…
The Tuberose of My Resistance
Note: the following is an excerpt from Alyssa Harad’s (yes, our Alyssa!) just-published Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride. Tomorrow, join us again for a Q&A with Alyssa about her new book.
Andy Warhol, who knew a thing or two about perfume and cool (a serious devotee, he was buried clutching a bottle of Estee Lauder’s Beautiful), wrote that perfume is another great way to take up space. Nobody knows this better than adolescents, even if they generally all want to take up exactly the same kind of space.
Perhaps you remember clouds of Alyssa Ashley and Drakkar Noir, or Anais Anais and CK One. In my junior high, Ralph Lauren reigned supreme. The boys–the right boys–wore Polo, splashing it on with abandon from the handsome hunter-green bottles they kept in their lockers. Their female counterparts patrolled the halls in clouds of the original Lauren, passing that deep-red square bottle from girl to girl until all were fully anointed.
Polo was a swoon-worthy scent of deep, smoky-sweet woods and gentlemanly confidence, good even when broadcast at very high volume…
Aroma: The Magic of Essential Oils in Food & Fragrance ~ perfume books
As far as collaborative projects go, perfumer Mandy Aftel and chef Daniel Patterson totally nailed it with Aroma: The Magic of Essential Oils in Food & Fragrance. More of an inspiring manual than a cookbook, the down-to-earth text provides comprehensive information on making fragrance and enhancing food with 27 aromas—from classics like green tea to the intriguing litsea cubeba, distilled from a Chinese fruit.
The brilliance of Aroma is that it provides a good handful of things to do with each featured ingredient, a number of which are readily available at the grocery store. And they’re not all elaborate, hours-in-the-kitchen concoctions, either. In addition to basic dressings and sauces that can be kept for weeks or months, each section begins with simple suggestions for using a fragrance “in the everyday kitchen.” Adding a few dashes of rosewater to frozen strawberries, vodka and seltzer is a particular favorite…