Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend The Perfume Society’s talk with Luca Turin at Les Senteurs in Marylebone. Mr Turin spoke about his early days of perfume writing and recounted some of his hilarious misadventures in perfume land.
Plus, he seems like a pretty cool guy.
On my last few visits to the perfumery at Fenwick on Bond Street, I noticed that they carried quite a few brands that I hadn’t seen at other Central London boutiques. So I decided to pop in for a proper sniff around…
Angelique and Company, Inc. very well may have been America’s first independent microperfumery. The below article entitled “How to Sell a Smell” from Life magazine’s 4th December 1950 issue written by Percy Knauth tells the story of how N. Lee Swartout and Charles Granville began their business on Skunk Lane in Wilton, Connecticut. Affectionately deeming it “The Skunk Works.”
The article also details the ups and downs of the brand’s early years and the various publicity stunts they attempted in order to shift their fragrances. They took perfume marketing to the next level. Swartout and Granville tried to make perfumed snow in the middle of winter and hired a team of starlets to bomb Los Angeles with perfume. Kinda love these guys.
If someone had told me last year when I began this blog that I would one day see an article published I probably would have cracked up laughing. So you can only imagine how absolutely thrilled I am to have been able to contribute to ODOU Issue Four. Continue reading
Sophia Fannon-Howell’s Deco London launches next month. She has translated her appreciation for history and fragrance into a well-rounded collection of perfumes, three feminine and three masculine eau de parfums developed in collaboration with Robertet. I’ve spent the past few weeks getting to know the scents a bit better.
Watercolour sketch by Alastair
Now that I have completed the series of scents referenced in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, I thought it would be fun to track down perfumes that best match the references. It’s quite a list, and any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Let’s take a look at what I need to hunt for…
“You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play – I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. Browning writes about that somewhere, but our own senses will imagine them for us. These are moments, when the odour of lilas blanc passes suddenly across me, and I have to live the strangest month of my life over again.”
“There was something in the clear pine-scented air of that winter morning that seemed to bring him back his joyousness and his ardour for life.”
“The smell of the singeing clothes and burning leather was horrible.”
Rose oxide was discovered in 1959 by Casimir F. Seidel and Max Stoll at Firmenich. It is a significant ingredient of Bulgarian rose oil. It is also a contributing factor to the flavour of lychees.
Its discovery was considered so important it warranted a postage stamp in Russia.
Further reading: Rose oxide – the scent of shiny metal roses via 4160 Tuesdays.
sources: From Classical to Modern Chemistry: The Instrumental Revolution by Peter T.J. Morris
bgirl rhapsody 