Alyssa Harad’s (yes, our Alyssa!) Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride will be published by Viking this June…
The Perfume Lover by Denyse Beaulieu ~ Q & A
An often-cited quote asserts that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Substitute “perfume” for “music,” and you get an idea of the challenge perfume writing presents. To communicate how a fragrance smells, a writer often draws from stories, memories, and senses other than smell to evoke perfume’s deep and broad impact. Denyse Beaulieu does all that and more as she tracks the development of Séville à l’aube, an upcoming perfume release by L’Artisan Parfumeur. The result, The Perfume Lover, is a passionate and insightful story not just about the development of a single fragrance, but about how perfume has infused Denyse’s own life. If you enjoy Denyse’s perfume blog, Grain de Musc, you’ll want to read The Perfume Lover.
I consider Denyse a friend, so to avoid a conflict of interest, rather than write a traditional review of The Perfume Lover, I present a handful of questions about the book and Denyse’s responses. Denyse will be checking in, so if you’d like to add your own questions you can leave them in comments.
The Perfume Lover is an unusual combination of memoir, perfume history, and the story of the development of a single fragrance. What led you to choose this format?
I’d say the format chose me…
The Oregon Experiment ~ book review
The Oregon Experiment by Keith Scribner features a professor of anarchy newly arrived in a small town in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, his wife the perfumer, a “sensuous free spirit called Sequoia” and a complicated anarchist. The review copy came with a sample of perfume called “The Oregon Experiment” by Yosh Han.
Could there be a better book for me to review? I like to read and I like perfume. Also, I’m a Portlander and live in a neighborhood so liberal that my Gore-Lieberman lawn sign was vandalized for not touting Nader. Sequoia is one of the more subtle hippie-girl names within a five-block radius of my house, which includes the fabled Peoples Co-op. Scribner, I’ll see your anarchist and raise you a freegan.
So, I opened The Oregon Experiment with relish. The novel is beautifully written — polished to a high shine, and full of lush turns of phrase. But in the end, it’s like an intricately carved chair of satiny wood that is too high to sit in, or only has three legs…
Of Gifts and Gratitude ~ out of the bottle
When I think about perfume, I think of gifts and gratitude. It’s difficult to make outsiders understand just how deeply giving things away is woven into the perfume world. It’s built into the industry — all those testers and samples floating around. It’s even part of perfume itself — to wear it is to share it. And when I try to explain how generous perfume people are, all my fellow decanters and swappers, I find myself talking about gardeners in zucchini season.
It’s not quite the right metaphor though, because perfume generosity isn’t just about having too much of the stuff. I’ve received packages so full they made me dizzy — a bottle where there should have been a decant, a dozen samples when I expected one. But I’ve also been bowled over by a single milliliter vial with a tiny dab of some rarity carefully transferred from a bottle no bigger than a nickel because the sender thought I might love it, or because we were talking about it, or because someone just couldn’t bear for its beauty to go unknown. We give our perfume away to share the astonishment and delight and pleasure we felt the first time we smelled it. Oh, you just have to try it. Please let me send you some.
In the days when my entire collection fit easily inside a small wooden cigar box, those gifts made me both very happy and very uncomfortable…
Fragrances of the World 2012 by Michael Edwards ~ new perfume book
Michael Edwards will release the latest version of his “fragrance bible”, Fragrances of the World 2012, in January. The reference book lists over 8000 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…