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.”
A perfume friend of mine recently shared with me a wonderful article she wrote on fragrance in Decadence literature. It inspired me to start exploring this further, and I’ve begun reading Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. I’ll be sharing the references to scent I discover…
bgirl rhapsody 