Hunter Schafer for Angel Fantasm.
If I were to manufacture a perfume
If I were to manufacture a perfume, it would smell the way that grass being ripped from the ground by elephants sounds—simultaneously soothing and astonishing—and simply everyone would have to have it. The problem is that it wouldn’t go with any of the perfume names I’ve come up with over the years, the best being Obsequious.
— David Sedaris on safari in Kenya. Read more in Notes on a Last-Minute Safari at The New Yorker.
The store is bustling with people on a mission to design their own fragrances
The store is bustling with people on a mission to design their own fragrances. I’m here on perhaps the weirdest, and definitely most pungent, assignment I’ve ever gotten at NPR: to make a signature scent for Morning Edition and Up First.
The process at Olfactory NYC requires a lot of sniffing, and with the help of a personal scent-ologist, customers leave the store with a personalized bottle of perfume for $85.
— Read more in We designed a 'Morning Edition' fragrance – and learned why perfume sales are up at NPR.
Joyful couture fragrances
A spot for the Carolina Herrera Lucky Charms collection.
Floral Bouquet
Part of how we experience the way something smells has nothing to do with our nose. Meg Michelsen, a professor of marketing at Longwood University, studies how scent affects consumer behavior. For one experiment, she provided the same scent to people, packaged either as “Lavender Bouquet” or “Floral Bouquet,” and asked how likely they were to buy it. The experiment determined that more people wanted to buy the less specific “Floral Bouquet.”
— Read more in How candles got so expensive: Here’s what you’re really paying for when you spend $50 on a jar of scented wax at The Washington Post.