Victoria’s Note: Today Daisy Bow will take us through the Art of Scent Exhibit at the Museum of Art and Design in New York. You may know Daisy from her comments here and from her fun blog, Cool Cook Style. Daisy recently completed her doctoral degree in French Literature from New York University, and she is currently teaching a course on French Food and Culture as part-time faculty at the New School. Her love affair with perfume began with Dune at the tender age of 14. She has smelled great ever since. 

“Scent can do what all art does: change the way we perceive the world,” says Chandler Burr, the director of the olfactory art department at the Museum of Art and Design. According to him, the fundamental concept for The Art of Scent exhibit, its layout, and its chronological organization has its genesis in a talk that he gave in 2008 at The Times Center when he was still the scent critic for the newspaper. For the sold-out event, individual blotters for each of the 15 different fragrances chosen were provided to over 400 guests. As the runners did their work, Burr played a piece of music that was also representative of the style of the scent distributed. Each work was accompanied by visual presentations of painting, sculpture, and architecture too.

Since its opening in New York, much of the discussion on The Art of Scent has focused on how Burr uses different artistic movements and schools to talk about different works of olfactory art. Burr emphasizes that “none of these analogies are exact.” The parallels drawn between scent and other mediums exist to provide us an intellectual tool with which to talk about it as art. “I want to place scent as an artistic medium in the center of all the arts: music, dance, literature, painting, and sculpture. [Scent is] just one medium. Each medium is different. Some of them used certain schools and some of them didn’t. For example, Romanticism from roughly 1800-1840 was ascendant in literature, poetry, and painting. However Romanticism in music was in the late 1800’s. [Alfred] Einstein, the great cataloguer of music, takes the Romantic period up to 1940. Not every medium used it at the same time,” Burr explains.

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L’Artisan Parfumeur is bringing back two perfumes as limited editions this summer. Ananas Fizz (originally created by Anne Flipo in 2004) and Côte d’Amour (by Céline Ellena in 2009) will join the collection in May.

Ananas Fizz is “a celebration of summer and of the Victoria pineapple, typical of the French Reunion Island, in the Indian Ocean.” It’s a blend of citrus, lychee, and pineapple, with a twist of frangipani and vanilla. A light fragrance, it’s designed to be used liberally, as a cologne.

Côte d’Amour is “like a voluptuous, caressing marine breeze,” a fragrance  inspired by a stroll along the coast in Loire-Atlantique, in the West of France. It includes notes of dune flower, cypress, pine, wet woods, marine and salty notes.

100ml Eau de Toilette will retail for £55/70€. Via press release

Several years ago I walked around an exhibit devoted to Marlene Dietrich’s collection at the fashion museum in Paris, The Musée Galliera. Among her famous pant suits, feather dresses and sexy lingerie (you had to look through a peep hole for a glimpse of her lacy underthings), were bottles of  cosmetics and tanning oils. One was labelled rose, and another–jasmine.  I don’t remember who made them or what the bottles looked like, but the image of Dietrich stretching out her gorgeous long legs, her glistening skin catching the fine granules of sand, is what surfaces in my mind whenever I hear the star’s name. I can almost smell the rose tanning oil and salt on her warm skin.

I don’t know if in creating La Fille de Berlin, the dream team of Serge Lutens and Christopher Sheldrake thought about Dietrich, and I have never visited Berlin to understand their source of inspiration completely. For me though, it’s a perfume that I imagine Dietrich wearing. It’s beautiful and surprising, but with a dark side. A classical Lutens, in other words.

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For spring, Tocca is inspired by lily of the valley. The newest fragrance Liliana is a tribute to this delicate spring flower. Liliana includes notes of Italian bergamot, neroli, watery peach, lily of the valley, gardenia, white peony, sandalwood, musk, benzoin, and patchouli.

“A lush, green, rolling lawn is the setting for a roaring 20s party in full swing. Liliana conjures a reveler in the bloom of youth dancing the Charleston amidst flowing bottles of champagne and a spirited jazz band. The lowering sun casts a golden sparkle as an intoxicating bouquet of muguet, gardenia and peony wafts from the gardens, filling the night with joie de vivre.”

Tocca Liliana Eau de Parfum will be available at Sephora, Anthropologie and Barney’s stores, and online at tocca.com, sephora.com, bluemercury.com, and beauty.com beginning March 2013. 50ml/$68 Via press release

Whenever we decide to savor something, we prepare ourselves for enjoyment. We relax, slow down, and cast aside our worldly cares in favor of finding pleasure in what we are about to experience. As a result, no matter what we decide to savor, it is a most disappointing feeling when quality lets us down—the moment when the tea tastes flat, the perfume smells lifeless, and we are left unsatisfied.

Part 1 : Black and Oolong Teas

Part 2 : Green, White and Herbal Teas

Part 3 : Tea Brewing Basics

Part 4 : How to Brew a Perfect Cup of Tea

Of course, quality is not only an important consideration when discussing perfume, but also tea, which can vary greatly from company to company. In the case of perfume, a skillfully created fragrance that is composed of a few simple, inexpensive ingredients may not necessarily smell worse than a complex formula filled with costly flower absolutes and other precious raw materials. However, in the case of tea, one major difference is that the tea we buy is the raw material, and as long as the tea is brewed properly, the quality of the tea leaf can often be directly related to the quality of our tea drinking experience.

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