February 2012: 25 posts

Last year the weekly French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur published an interesting article about perfume creation called La Guerre des Nez (The War of the Nose). It featured a candid interview with perfumers Dominique Ropion and Anne Flipo and provided a table outlining the price breakdown for an average prestige brand perfume. The revelation is that in a bottle of perfume that costs 100 euros, the value of the fragrance concentrate is only 1-1.50 euros, or about 2-3 dollars. The rest is for marketing and distribution: 19.6 euros for value added taxes, 36 euros for distribution, 25 euros for ads and so on. I know all too well the economics of making a perfume, but seeing this table was still a shock.

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Every couple of weeks, I devote an evening to beauty rituals. They are not fancy, nor do they require an appointment at a spa for an expensive treatment, but my evenings of beauty, as I’ve taken to calling them, are just as satisfying. I make a sugar and lemon juice scrub, a yogurt and rosewater mask and a colorless henna treatment that leaves a sweet leathery scent on my hair and everything else it touches. Sometimes I listen to music as I wait for my treatments to work their magic, sometimes I read, but most often, I simply lie down and fall into a daydream.

As I carefully apply the sticky brown paste to each lock, I remember my mother and aunts sharing their beauty secrets and relationship advice as they painted their nails, mashed strawberries for a gentle facial scrub or applied a chamomile and egg yolk mask to enhance blonde highlights in their hair. The taste of strawberry as it dripped from my cheeks and the stickiness of honey on my fingertips is how I remember those long summer evenings. I hope that when I have a daughter, she will instinctively know, just as I now know, how long one needs to rub honey into the skin to make it glowing and how to listen to a story of heartbreak before offering words of support.

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Star rating: 5 stars–outstanding/potential classic, 4 stars–very good, 3 stars–adequate, 2 stars–disappointing, 1 star–poor.

Some perfumes appeal to me for their complexity, others for their unusual character. Whenever I explore the collection of Sonoma Scent Studio, I realize that what draws me to Laurie Erickson’s work are the personal stories that she paints with her scents. Erickson’s fragrances are like glimpses into her own universe, reminiscent more of Annick Goutal’s spontaneous etudes than Guerlain’s studied epics. Fireside Intense and Winter Woods illustrate this idea well. They are the scents of a bonfire, of smoldering cinders and of tobacco crumbs in the pages of old books.

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Robert Piguet Parfums, the maker of infamous Fracas, introduces Nouvelle Collection of five new perfumes: Casbah, Bois Noir, Notes, Mademoiselle Piguet and Oud. All five fragrances were created by perfumer Aurelien Guichard.

“From the corners of the souks of Marrakech with Casbah, to the heart of a balsam forest with Bois Noir, each of the five Nouvelle Collection conjures vivid images and visceral reactions in their wearers. Like the moving sounds of a symphonic masterpiece, Notes romances and inspires. The seductive Mademoiselle Piguet is a glamorous jaunt on the most coveted red carpet. Oud, the scent that completes the new family, is a jewel from the sands of the middle East.”

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When Denyse of Grain de Musc shared that she would be coming out with a perfume memoir, it was intriguing enough. However, to learn that The Perfume Lover will also be accompanied by a fragrance makes the news even more exciting. Séville à l’aube, created by perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour, will be launched by L’Artisan Parfumeur. As Denyse shared in her recent post, it was “inspired by one of the most beautiful nights in my life, in Seville during the Holy Week under an orange tree in full blossom, wrapped in incense smoke and the arms of a Spanish boy…”

Séville à l’aube is “is an orange blossom oriental with zesty, green and balsamic effects, with notes of petitgrain, petitgrain citronnier, orange blossom absolute, beeswax absolute, incense resinoid, Luisieri lavender absolute and Siam benzoin resinoid.” It will be launched in July. Meanwhile, The Perfume Lover is about to land on the bookshelves in the UK next month and can be pre-ordered on Amazon.co.uk. You can read an excerpt on Denyse’s blog.