Need some summer reading? The latest ingredient-focused special issues of Nez: Jasmin Grandiflorum In Perfumery and Lemon in Perfumery. 96 pages each for $29, at Luckyscent, where you'll also find lots of back issues.
The Museum of Scent by Mandy Aftel ~ new perfume book
The Museum of Scent: Exploring the Curious and Wondrous World of Fragrance, by Mandy Aftel of indie perfume house Aftelier, will be published in October of this year. Aftel’s prior books on perfumery include Essence & Alchemy, Fragrant: The Secret Life of Scent, The Art of Flavor: Practices and Principles for Creating Delicious Food, Scents & Sensibility and Aroma.
Mandy Aftel is one of the world’s leading bespoke perfumers, with a clientele ranging from the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen to Sir Jony Ive, the former chief design officer of Apple…
The daily lemming
Issue 14 (the music issue!) of Nez is out: "The realms of music and perfume have long corresponded and echoed each other. How are these two immaterial modes of expression related? Nez takes you on an olfactory journey around the world through the prism of history, anthropology, science, art, literature, trade and marketing. The final destination? A greater understanding of the power that the sense of smell has in our lives." 160 pages, $35 at Luckyscent.
Parmesan can smell like pineapple
Everyone knows cheese can smell like stinky feet. But did you know parmesan can smell like pineapple, green teas carry a whiff of seashore, and Belgian beers share an aroma with Band-Aids and horse stables?
“Smell is a really interesting sense, maybe the most interesting sense, because it’s our most intimate and direct contact with the outside world,” said Harold McGee, author of the book “Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells.”
— Read more in What Harold McGee learned after decade of sniffing durian, keyboards, outer space at The Harvard Gazette.
The daily lemming
A possibility for your 2023 reading list? Coming in April from Harvard University Press, Elixir: A Parisian Perfume House and the Quest for the Secret of Life. "For centuries, scientists believed that living matter possessed a special quality—a spirit or essence—that differentiated it from nonliving matter. But by the nineteenth century, the scientific consensus was that the building blocks of one were identical to the building blocks of the other. Elixir tells the story of two young chemists who were not convinced, and how their work rewrote the boundary between life and nonlife. In the 1830s, Édouard Laugier and Auguste Laurent were working in Laugier Père et Fils, the oldest perfume house in Paris. By day they prepared the perfumery’s revitalizing elixirs and rejuvenating eaux, drawing on alchemical traditions that equated a plant’s vitality with its aroma. In their spare time they hunted the vital force that promised to reveal the secret to life itself." $32.95 for the hardcover.