Agent Provocateur will release Menage a Trois in January. I thought this would be a new fragrance, but it turns out to be a trio of travel sized Eau de Parfum bottles of their signature perfume. Lovely packaging though!
The New York Times has an article about perfumer Lyn Harris of Miller Harris. She loves fragrance, and she loves her Swiffer mop.
The next big sale at Floris starts Monday, January 3.
The next addition to the Acqua di Parma Blu Mediterraneo line will be Fico di Amalfi, a fragrance with "tangerine, bergamot, lemon, grapefruit and cedar; a heart of fig nectar, pink pepper and jasmine petals, and a drydown of fig wood, musk and cedar wood." (via Women's Wear Daily)
The Smell Culture Reader is due to be published in May 2006, and includes articles by Mandy Aftel, Oliver Sacks, Luca Turin, John Steele and Alan Hirsch. Thanks to Anya for the link!
The World of Perfume is the sort of book that covers walls in discount bookcenters: it shares the shelf with illustrated books about birds, guns, trains, and fishing equipment. I bought my copy almost a decade ago, and it's been a while since I last browsed through its pages. Time to revisit this forgotten gem, and to set aside some prejudices about affordable coffee-table books.
There is no definitive, universally accepted perfume classification. Various charts, tables, and diagrams have been circulating among fragrance manufacturers since the 1970s, and you’re probably familiar with Michael Edwards’ Fragrance Wheel, introduced back in 1992. The French, of course, have a classification of their own: it’s described at length in the bilingual booklet 
The French fin de siècle must have been an incredibly exciting era. Just think of the great technological progress of the 1880s: the decade that brought us synthetic perfumery, with fragrances like Houbigant’s Fougère Royale (1882) and Guerlain’s Jicky (1889). But they were also times of increasing pessimism: in French literature, a group of self-proclaimed Decadents turned their backs on the current known as Naturalism. With their harsh depictions of a civilization in decline, they reacted against the contemporary bourgeois ideal of eternal progress. Joris-Karl Huysmans, the most prominent member of the Decadent movement, uncovers the maladies of the late nineteenth century in his novel