Does salt have a scent? “It depends on what salt you’re talking about,” says Benoît, who hails from Guérande, a French town in southern Brittany famous for its salt marshes. We meet by chance  at an airport lounge, and as he observes a book I’m reading, Jean-Claude Ellena’s Le Parfum, we strike up a conversation about scents. “Guérande’s fleur de sel smells of violets.” As he explains, refined table salt is about 97 percent sodium chloride and it’s virtually scentless, but sea salts from different regions have  impurities that give them a distinctive flavor and scent. Fleur de sel is hand harvested salt from the tops of salt marshes, and while Benoît is passionate about it, he urges me to try different salts and compare. “If you create a perfume based on Guérande’s fleur de sel, please let me know,” he says as we bid each other goodbye.

While I’m yet to visit Guérande to experience the violet perfume of its famous salt ponds, I’ve been noticing the salty nuances in my perfume bottles. My salt collection has likewise grown. Even the sharp iodine scent of table salt now seems obvious to me, not to mention the roasted aroma of Korean bamboo salt or the earthy bite of Javanese lava salt. I’m suddenly discovering a whole new universe of saline flavors.

Along with sweet, sour, bitter, and umami, salt is one of the five basic tastes and it’s much easier to understand it as such–the sensation that you experience when a salt crystal melts on your tongue. But in perfume, the effect can also be distinctive. Spray The Different Company’s Sel de Vétiver or Lalique’s Encre Noire and notice the briny note that you can almost taste.

Continue reading →

Christian Dior will celebrate Miss Dior perfume with an exhibition at Paris’s Grand Palais next month. Miss Dior was originally created in 1947, and it’s a green mossy blend that inspired many other perfumes in the same bold, distinctive style. Today, if you want to smell it at Dior, you need to ask for Miss Dior Eau de Toilette Originale. The fragrance currently bearing the name of Miss Dior and fronted by Natalie Portman was created in 2005 and launched as Miss Dior Chérie. It’s a fruity-floral gourmand.

It’s not clear which of these perfumes the exhibit is going to celebrate, but according to WWD, it features large-scale artworks by 15 female artists, rare photographs and a selection of outfits including the dresses that Raf Simons designed for Portman to wear in the Miss Dior campaigns.

The Miss Dior exhibition will run at the Grand Palais in Paris from November 13 to 25 (free to public).

Meanwhile at Chanel, Marilyn Monroe is the new face of Chanel No.5. New print and television campaigns will feature the celebrated actress who once proclaimed that she wears nothing but  Chanel No.5 to bed. Since I found the ad with Brad Pitt to be confusing, to put it mildly, I can’t wait to see the new ads.

Andy discovers a gem in Geoffrey Beene’s Grey Flannel.

I thought I had seen all the facets of violet: powdery, sweet, innocent—but a violet “pour homme”? While the masculine violet theme of Geoffrey Beene’s Grey Flannel sounded rather sophisticated, I couldn’t help noticing that the fittingly monochromatic boxes of this perfume sat untouched at my local discount shop for months on end. Was Grey Flannel a hidden gem? Or was it better left forgotten? Deliberating by the clearance shelf last winter, I finally decided to take the plunge, and soon realized I had been missing out on a classic that I now consider my ultimate violet perfume.

Grey Flannel, released in 1975, owes its name to the soft fabric that designer Geoffrey Beene was inspired to use for couture dresses and menswear alike. Like some of Beene’s inimitable fashion designs, Grey Flannel seems to be neither derivative nor have any copycats. Men’s fragrances have long featured floral accords, but few do so as interestingly as Grey Flannel, which entwines violet and moss covered woods in a unique embrace. It subsequently inspired Dior Fahrenheit, itself a major trendsetter, and it still remains a distinctive, memorable fragrance.

Continue reading →

My husband first encountered a persimmon during his first visit to my family home. My stepfather handed it to him and simply said, “Just eat it like an apple.”  For some strange reason, my stepfather prefers persimmons unripe and hard. But my husband wasn’t convinced, as the hard flesh was unyielding and his mouth felt coated with sticky cotton.  It took him a few hours to get rid of the bitter, tannic sensation. The same willingness to please his new in-laws also left my husband unable to refuse yet another shot of vodka, but the consequences of that lasted into the next day. Imagine his surprise when he finally tried a ripe persimmon and discovered that it was a juicy fruit with a delicate perfume.

There are thousands varieties of persimmons, but Fuyu and Hachiya are the most common ones. Fuyu (top left photo) looks like a squat orange tomato, and it can be eaten when it’s hard. It’s sweet and crunchy, with a distinctive flavor of dates and plums. The Hachiya variety (in the photos below) is pointy and elongated, and it’s the kind that tormented my poor husband. As he will tell you, when hard and unripe it tastes even worse than a green banana–bitter and chalky. But give it a few days to soften and it turns sweet and luscious.

Continue reading →

The first article in this series described the process through which the perfume brief goes before it ends up on the perfumer’s desk (Brief). Then, my perfumery school classmate and former colleague Lauren gave you a glimpse of what it’s like to be a perfume evaluator (Evaluator). Today, I will describe the role of the perfumer.

If you’re new to this series, I recommend starting with Part 1: Brief.

Ever since Frédéric Malle highlighted perfumers by adding their names on the fragrances created for Editions de Parfums, these actors, traditionally consigned to ghost writing scents, have become more prominent. We can find out which nose created our favorite perfume, read about perfumers’ work, and even hear them explain their metier. Names of houses that employ perfumers–International Flavors & Fragrances, Givaudan, Firmenich, Symrise, Mane, Robertet–even show up in the traditional media. Magazines call noses rock stars. Fans queue to meet them at store events. Isn’t then the perfumer the most important person in the process of creating a perfume?

Yes and no. With the exception of those who direct their own brands, most perfumers are only one of many groups that influence how a fragrance will smell. Today, it’s hard to speak of a perfumer’s fingerprint on a big brand launch because many fragrances are created as a collaboration among several creators, marketing reps, sales people, and evaluators. In most cases, an individual perfumer may not have a say in the matter and simply has to follow the given direction.

Continue reading →