Alexandra Kosinski: 1 post

Today’s article is brought to you by Ann. After buying a set of Scent on Canvas samples, she was so excited about the perfumes that she asked me if she could share her favorites with you. Ann is a seasoned perfume lover, and she has been wearing fragrance ever since she was a little girl. Pine scented bath beads, Prell shampoo (circa 1970), and her grandmother’s 4711 Eau de Cologne were among the first scents Ann remembers. As a teenager, she began to venture beyond her stash of samples and hand-me-down perfumes to her own flasks, sometimes owning as many as three at a time. Then a couple of years ago, Turin and Sanchez’s “A to Z Perfume Guide” crossed her path and she stumbled upon perfume blogs… and so began her uninhibited daily adventures with beauty and art just an arms-length away.

If perfumes tell stories, then why not illustrate them? New niche perfume company Scent on Canvas has set about to do just that with their five fragrances, Rose Opéra, Brun Sicilien, Noir de Mars, Ocre Doré, and Blanc de Paris. “Our aim is to unite the arts of the perfumer with a pictorial creation,” says owner and perfumer Béatrice Aguilar-Cassarà. On the website she explains that fragrance notes were given to artists, who in turn created art to match the scents, which were then named after color pigments in the paintings. Next, a color engraving was made of each work for reproduction in a limited number of boxes in which the perfume is packaged.

I was drawn to the multimedia nature of the project that combined art and artists, perfume and perfumers, and business and marketing. However, when my package of five samples arrived from Barcelona along with charming scents strips in the shape of paintbrushes, I decided to just focus on the scents without the distraction of the companion art. It turned out to be an adventure with some unexpected turns.

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