Culture: 426 posts

Over the past couple of weeks, some of you have brought up the topic of perfume ads, and I couldn’t think of a better way to continue the discussion than by sharing Tinsel Creation’s Art and Perfume Advertising. It’s a series of articles and short posts exploring the evolution of perfume advertisements, the inspirations their creators drew from various art forms, and many other themes. Tinsel Creation is a blog by Jessica, whose perfume reviews you might know from Now Smell This. And if you don’t know this already, Jessica is a professional art historian and curator, and she’s perfectly qualified to explore this fascinating subject.

Jessica started her Art and Perfume Advertising series several years ago, so you have plenty of enjoyable reading ahead of you. For instance, you can learn how Estée Lauder’s Pleasures advertisement echoes the frothy charm of The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard or ponder the similarities between a 1966 photograph of Jane Fonda on the beach and Jennifer Aniston’s fragrance image. Today the majority of a perfume’s budget is spent on the ads, and it’s interesting to reflect on which traditions they draw and what they mean to convey to us, the viewers and fragrance wearers.

Our reader Sofie proposes this question to you: has there been an ad that inspired you to try a perfume?

Image: Caron, 1961.

The Virgin Mary has just given birth. She’s reclining under a sumptuous red cover decorated with gold embroidery, while baby Jesus is given a bath. That Cennino Cennini, a fourteenth century Sienese artist, chose such an intimate rendition of the nativity is unexpected, but equally intriguing is the setting. Instead of a fantasy land or a barn from the biblical story, the event is taking place in a palace that any contemporary viewer in Siena would have found familiar. Cennini wanted to emphasize that God was not in some distant, faraway land. He was right here, in this city.

During my days as an art student, I was repeatedly told by my teachers to listen to the colors. It was the same advice I received years later as a perfumery trainee. In order to compose an accord that would be more than just a pleasant odor, you have to listen to scents. Each note has its feel, shape and character. Like fragrances, colors are powerful, and they can convey emotion as readily as gestures and lines.

Continue reading →

Parfums de Nicolaï is celebrating its 25th anniversary, and to mark the occasion, Patricia de Nicolaï and her husband Jean-Louis Michau, the founders of the perfume house, have published a book about their work. Titled Nicolaï, Parfumeur créateur: un métier d’artiste, this 145 page volume covers the story of the collection and their creators.

Patricia de Nicolaï is part of the Guerlain family, a granddaughter of Pierre Guerlain, Jacques Guerlain‘s brother. She grew up in the world of perfumery and quickly found her way into the lab. In her book, she describes her childhood, her apprenticeship and her thoughts on creation in general.

Continue reading →

I’m a latecomer to Virginia Woolf’s writing. Mrs Dalloway was the first Woolf’s novel I read, and its prose, such as the excerpt below demonstrates, is so hypnotizing, I look forward to discovering more of her work.

“There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there were irises. Ah yes–so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed her help, and thought her kind, for kind she had been years ago; very kind, but she looked older, this year, turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness.

And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale–as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas and roses after the superb summer’s day, with its almost blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower–roses, carnations, irises, lilac–glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!

Continue reading →

Patricia on perfume and poetry.

For me poetry first meant the limericks and nursery rhymes in The Golden Treasury of Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer and containing lovely illustrations by Joan Walsh Anglund. The pages of this book became dog-eared and torn over the years, and the cover finally fell off. Once I could read, I graduated to the longer poems within, such as “The Highwayman” and “Paul Revere’s Ride.” But it wasn’t until high school, when I was introduced to a wider range of poetry, especially modern verse, that I felt the power of poetry to take one on an incredible journey within the space of only a few verses. As a teenager, the poems of e e cummings were early favorites, and I still have a copy of Poems 1923-1954, my name written on the flyleaf in loopy handwriting I hardly recognize.

The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems About Perfume, edited by Jehanne Dubrow and Lindsay Lusby, is a collection of one hundred original poems about fragrance written by American poets. These poets were sent perfume vials, all different and carefully chosen by the editors, and asked to “…write a poem that engages with or responds to the fragrance that we have sent you.” The editors go into detailed explanation of the book’s inception in the Introduction, and Alyssa Harad, author of Coming to My Senses, provides her thoughts on scent and literature in a well-written Preface. A very useful Contributors’ and Matchmaking Notes section appears at the end of the book and gives biographical information on each poet as well as the name of the assigned perfume.

Continue reading →