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Browsing by author: Marcello

KyotEau: Bottled Memories ~ perfume books

Posted by Marcello on 8 October 2009 13 Comments

In my late teens I often dreamed about moving to Japan. I longed to experience different colors, shapes, and tastes, and felt a strange, visceral attraction to Japanese style and culture. I pictured myself living in an old regal city like Kyoto, surrounded by temples and shrines, losing myself in a sea of red maples and blossoms. I ended up working in a Japanese company for nearly a decade, which was altogether a good thing, but my urge to relocate eventually faded away. That is until I recently got hold of Della Chuang’s latest book, which rekindled my old fascination with Japanese life and tradition.

KyotEau: Bottled Memories documents the creative process behind KyotEau (or Eau de Kyoto), a tribute to the author’s favorite city. A former art director at Ralph Lauren Fragrances and Tom Ford Beauty, Taiwanese-born Della Chuang tells us about the idea behind the project, its conception, and the hurdles she had to take before it was brought to completion. She reflects on Japanese art, design, culture, and philosophy, and uses her own photography, sketchwork, and correspondence with friends and colleagues to bring these subjects to life. In a cut out insert in the back of the book you’ll find a sample vial of KyotEau, created by none other than perfumer Christophe Laudamiel. In the book they discuss the transformation from the original brief to the actual composition of the fragrance, which features jasmine, incense, patchouli, jatamansi, cypriol, and some very elegant soft floral and woody accords…

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The Chemistry of Fragrances by Charles Sell (ed.) ~ perfume books

Posted by Marcello on 9 May 2009 18 Comments

The Chemistry of Fragrances book coverAs a kid I spent many hours watching my father restoring old saxophones. He’d disassemble them at our dinner table, work on the mechanical parts, replace the pads under the keys, and put all the tiny bits and screws back in place. His work always paid off, giving us both a great feeling of satisfaction and pride. I’ve loved beautiful instruments and machines for as long as I can remember, and have always looked up to people with technical skills. Browsing through the second edition of The Chemistry of Fragrances painfully reminded me that I have no such skills myself. It made me realize that I’ve been wearing fragrances for over a decade, and that I was only vaguely aware of how perfumes are actually created and developed. This book, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, deals with all the essential steps in the industrial-creative process, from handling perfume ingredients to toxicological testing and the outlining of a fragrance brief.

Rather than a do-it-yourself guide for budding perfumers, this is a comprehensive reference book with lots of in-depth insights into technical issues. Like Sagarin’s The Science and Art of Perfumery (1945), Theimer’s Fragrance Chemistry (1982), and Muller & Lamparski’s Perfumes: Art, Science and Technology (1991), it’s more likely to be found on the shelves of fragrance manufacturers than in a perfumista’s collection. But if you know your way around in chemistry, you might find this an incredibly rewarding read.

The first twenty pages are easily accessible to anyone…

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The Scent Trail by Celia Lyttelton ~ perfume books

Posted by Marcello on 27 March 2009 36 Comments

The Scent Trail by Celia LytteltonMost people can only dream of having a perfume made just for themselves. Celia Lyttelton saw that dream turn into reality when she approached Anastasia Brozler, the founder of London-based Creative Perfumers, and asked her to develop a unique, personalized fragrance. Brozler is a former head of perfume marketing at Estée Lauder and L’Oreál in Europe, and was a sales director at Crown Perfumery before she opened her own company in 1999. She helped Lyttelton in selecting the ingredients, and then assigned the project to perfumer Norbert Bijaoui, who took care of the actual composition. Meanwhile, Lyttelton embarked on a trip around the world to learn more about the materials of her choice. Together with her husband Stephen and their young son Tarquin, she followed the trail of her bespoke perfume on a long journey to France, Morocco, Turkey, Italy, Sri Lanka, India, and Yemen. This book is her travel diary.

Much like Jean-Paul Guerlain’s Les Routes de mes parfums (2002), Lyttelton guides us through these countries to explore the art and craft of perfumery. Each chapter features one or two ingredients, and leads to a different region…

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The Essence of Perfume by Roja Dove ~ perfume book review

Posted by Marcello on 4 December 2008 17 Comments

Roja Dove, The Essence of Perfume, book covervintage Guerlain perfume bottles

With the winter holidays approaching fast, it's time to discuss a book that has been sitting on my shelf for several months now. It's one of those rare books that combine pleasure and knowledge in equal measure — beautiful looks, matched with refreshing and original content. Which is no small accomplishment, when you think of all the coffee-table books we've reviewed on these pages alone. Author Roja Dove needs no further introduction*, and many of you have either read about The Essence of Perfume on other blogs, or perhaps even own a copy already. What I want to do here is to give a brief overview of its contents, and then add a small critical note, which I hope won't resonate too badly with the author. We'll see.

If you're covering a big topic like perfumery in one book, you're bound to make concessions. This one starts with a very brief introduction to the sense of smell, which is obviously not the author's strongest point. But if olfaction is what you're most interested in, there's an ample choice of specialized books to consult instead. Chapter two is a far more elaborate sketch of the origins of modern perfumery. It features, among other things, stunning images of three unique Guerlain bottles…

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If There Ever Was… a book of extinct and impossible smells, by Robert Blackson ~ perfume books

Posted by Marcello on 23 October 2008 25 Comments

If There Ever Was by Robert BlacksonWhat does communism smell like? How about the Sun, or Cleopatra’s perfume, or the atomic blast that destroyed the city of Hiroshima? This booklet, published on the occasion of the exhibition If There Ever Was, attempts to bring distant, elusive, and sometimes impossible olfactory experiences to life. Curator Robert Blackson commissioned thirteen fragrances from eleven perfumers and smell artists, including Bertrand Duchaufour, Christophe Laudamiel, Christoph Hornetz, Mark Buxton, Sissel Tolaas, and Geza Schön. If, like me, you missed the show at the Reg Vardy Gallery, this booklet gives you a chance to smell them all in the comfort of your own home.

Each scent of the exhibition is encapsulated in a scratch-n-sniff card, and comes with a short explanatory text. What these fragrances have in common is that they all refer to objects that are absent from our experience: they represent things that are temporally and/or spatially remote. There are no traces, for instance, of the original recipe to Cleopatra’s perfume; we can only guess what it really smelled like…

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