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The Tuberose of My Resistance

Posted by on 19 July 2012

Coming to My Senses by Alyssa HaradAlyssa Harad

Note: the following is an excerpt from Alyssa Harad’s (yes, our Alyssa!) just-published Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride. Tomorrow, join us again for a Q&A with Alyssa about her new book.

Andy Warhol, who knew a thing or two about perfume and cool (a serious devotee, he was buried clutching a bottle of Estee Lauder’s Beautiful), wrote that perfume is another great way to take up space. Nobody knows this better than adolescents, even if they generally all want to take up exactly the same kind of space.

Perhaps you remember clouds of Alyssa Ashley and Drakkar Noir, or Anais Anais and CK One. In my junior high, Ralph Lauren reigned supreme. The boys–the right boys–wore Polo, splashing it on with abandon from the handsome hunter-green bottles they kept in their lockers. Their female counterparts patrolled the halls in clouds of the original Lauren, passing that deep-red square bottle from girl to girl until all were fully anointed.

Polo was a swoon-worthy scent of deep, smoky-sweet woods and gentlemanly confidence, good even when broadcast at very high volume…

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Yes, you are a (perfume) nerd

Posted by on 12 July 2012

Guerlain Les Parisiennes + NES controller

About the author: Arielle Weinberg is a Johns Hopkins University Natural Sciences major and aspiring perfumer. She writes about perfume, Star Trek, and her cat for her perfume blog, Scents of Self.

Hi there, Now Smell This! We’re going to start things off with a little quiz!

1. Do you read blogs about perfume? (We know that you read at least one!)

2. Have you ever had to correct a perfume salesperson?

3. Can you name at least three perfumers?

4. Have you ever attended a meet-up or convention for perfume lovers?

5. Do friends give you concerned looks when they see the size of your perfume collection?

6. Are you prone to using perfumista lingo? Examples of perfumista lingo include “sillage monster”, “IFRA restrictions”, or “evil scent twin”.

7. Do you have a favorite classic Guerlain? (Pssst… Nahéma doesn’t count! It was released in 1979.)

8. Did you know that perfumes are frequently reformulated due to issues with ingredients or costs?

9. Do you have a system for keeping track of your perfume samples, such as a written catalogue or a computer spreadsheet?

10. Do you have strong opinions on the IFRA regulations of perfumery ingredients such as oakmoss and sandalwood?

If you answered “yes” to even a single one of these questions, congratulations! You are a nerd…

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5 things to think about before you start a perfume blog

Posted by on 9 February 2012

About the author: By profession Vanessa Musson is a freelance market researcher, specializing in industrial products. Her work involves a lot of overseas travel, to places as varied as chemical plants and wind farms, oil fields and cotton fields, stately homes and sewers. In her free time Vanessa writes the blog Bonkers about Perfume, which combines lighthearted perfume reviews with zany travelogues and the occasional post on beauty products for that unfortunate crossover condition of “problem mature skin”.

I am a relative newcomer to perfume: for most of my life I was largely indifferent to scent, occasionally succumbing to the heavy sell tactics of sales assistants at airport duty frees, and politely wearing whatever anyone might think to give me as a gift. Not very often, mind, for when I was struck down out of the blue by “sudden onset perfume mania” in 2008, I had just one rancid bottle of Estée Lauder Intuition to my name, barely touched in the seven years I had owned it.

But all that changed, and within weeks I went from zero to raging “fumehead”, and I’ve never looked back. 18 months on, I decided to start a blog. For the previous eight years I had written a humorous column for a business magazine, based on my misadventures on overseas work trips. Its sudden closure prompted me to seek out another creative writing outlet, and my newfound interest in fragrance provided the perfect vehicle. Bonkers about Perfume was born. And now another two years or more have passed, and here you have it: 5 things you might wish to consider if you are thinking of starting a perfume blog of your own…

Do you have anything new to add to the conversation?

A while back, there was a post on Grain de Musc about the recent proliferation of perfume blogs. Denyse used the colourful phrase: “metastasising like crazy”, which troubled me at the time, though I don’t think the analogy between newbie bloggers and rampant tumours was meant to be taken too literally…

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A brush with fame: perfume at the Oscars

Posted by on 25 February 2011

Oscar statue

About the author: Diana is the author of the Feminine Things blog. She works in the insurance industry to support her art projects and perfume habit, and at any given time is probably the best smelling person with a law degree in the Pacific Northwest.

I love movies.

Don’t get me wrong. I love television. I love books. I love live theater and concerts and musicals and live dance productions, from Bill T. Jones to the London Ballet Company. I even have affection for the symphony, the opera, and live ice skating.

But there is little I enjoy more than seeing a really good movie. This Sunday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will come together for the 83rd time to celebrate the movie industry’s best and brightest. And one of my friends, by virtue of a parental connection, gets to go see The Academy Awards live and in person every year. Since I have been watching them from afar all my life, this makes me positively chartreuse with envy.

For my dear friend, though, the thrill wore off a few years ago. So she and her siblings, bored from their oh-so-many star sightings, decided to raise the stakes. They invented a game they call “Brush with Fame.” The goal is to see who, by the end of the night, can come the closest to an honest-to-goodness world-renowned celebrity — possibly even brushing against or bumping into them — without that star noticing. I believe there are bonus points if the famous person in question is also one of the night’s winners. The sibling pack are the arbiters of which star shines the brightest, and the winner gets family bragging rights for the year. Last year my friend, the baby of the group, beat out her siblings by getting close enough to ‘bump’ into Rob Pattinson, the world’s most famous sparkly vampire.

Upon discovering this game, I did what any obsessive film geek would do: I began imagining who I would try to ‘bump’ into. But as a diehard perfumista, I was equally enamored by a concurrent mystery: if I did get that close, close enough to touch them, what would they smell like?

If I were in my friend’s shoes, here’s who I’d be aiming for this Sunday and what I’d hope to smell as I was passing by…

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Dior Illustrated: Rene Gruau and the Line of Beauty ~ exhibit in London

Posted by on 12 December 2010

About the author: Nina is our guest shopper for London. She’s on the road this weekend, so will be slow to respond to comments.

Once upon a time, print ads for Christian Dior perfumes consisted of beautiful illustrations, rather than photos of Jude Law.

If you love those illustrations, then you’re a fan of René Gruau, who drew them all.

Somerset House in London is currently hosting an exhibition of most of Gruau’s original artwork for the House of Dior, including several drawings that were never used. It’s a joyful insight into the shared vision of Gruau and Christian Dior, who were close friends as well as colleagues.

Dior and Gruau (it’s pronounced Grooh-oh) were both illustrators when they met on the fashion desk of Le Figaro in 1936. They seem to have taken to each other at once, coming from similar bourgeois backgrounds, with the same wistful attraction to the memory of Belle Epoque elegance.

When Dior launched his New Look in early 1947, he asked Gruau to illustrate his designs. Launching Miss Dior, his first perfume, later that same year, Dior called on Gruau again. “Do exactly what you want,” he said. “We speak the same language.”

It became one of the most fruitful relationships in the history of illustration. In fact, so successful was Gruau’s work for Dior, he continued to illustrate for Christian Dior Perfumes for over twenty years after Dior’s death in 1957. His last work was the 1984 campaign for Jules, for which the company had originally commissioned photographers; inspired by the challenge, Gruau produced a series of illustrations anyway, and the company were so impressed, they used his work rather than the commissioned photos….

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