Posted by Angela
on
6 October 2011
When I cracked open the novel Damage Control, I knew I’d have some good reading ahead. The dedication began, “This one’s for the perfumistas.” Add that the book’s author, Denise Hamilton (shown above right), is the Los Angeles Times’ fragrance columnist as well as a bestselling crime writer, and I was ready to call in sick and spend the day on the couch, book in hand.
Damage Control is about Maggie Silver, a budding perfumista and PR flack. She works for the Blair Company, a public relations firm that handles the big jobs. If a company wants word spread about its new potato chips, it can go elsewhere. The Blair Company steps in, for example, when a married governor knocks up his housekeeper then lives a double life with the resulting love child, or when a similarly married governor professes to have found his soul mate in South America.
In Damage Control, a senator’s aide is found murdered in circumstances that don’t reflect well on the senator. Maggie Silver is assigned to his case. The complication is that Maggie was good friends with the senator’s daughter, Annabelle, until Annabelle was sexually assaulted when they were teens. Maggie’s relationship with Annabelle was borderline obsessive — Annabelle had the cultured, coddled life Maggie desired (not to mention the mother with the bureau stocked with Guerlain Vol de Nuit). Covering this case means Maggie must deal with past as well as current puzzles…
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Posted by Alyssa
on
21 April 2011
Until quite recently, if you had asked me how I felt about the rise of the perfumer-as-star I would have told you enthusiastically that I thought it could only be a good thing. Though some have complained about his omnipresence in the press, I think Jean-Claude Ellena’s ability to articulate his vision and his process have done more to raise the general public’s Perfume IQ than any ad campaign, as have the varied projects of perfume adventurers like Christophe Laudamiel, Mandy Aftel, Bertrand Duchaufour, and Francis Kurkdjian, just to name a few. I was moved by the passage in Chandler Burr’s The Perfect Scent where a perfumer recalls drifting anonymously around a launch party, forbidden to claim any part of the spotlight. I assumed Frederic Malle’s auteur model would give perfumers a greater share of power along with credit and name recognition.
The recent launch of Belle d’Opium made me re-think my views. The PR campaign featured videos of the talented perfumers Honorine Blanc and Alberto Morillas, but their mark seemed absent from the perfume itself which, at best, hews carefully to market-tested preferences. In the middle of it all, I found myself thinking about the far more anonymous creators of the original Opium. I wondered how they might feel watching the relatively high amount of attention paid to perfumers, while knowing that the launch depended on their original, now reformulated, work. Would it seem like the industry had changed for better or worse?
Recently one of Opium’s creators, Raymond Chaillan, was gracious enough to answer a few of my questions by email…
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Posted by Alyssa
on
21 July 2010
In Part 2 of her interview, Enfleurage owner Trygve Harris discusses the ethics of sourcing agarwood, the challenges of pleasures of living in Oman, and her modern enfleurage project in Colombia. You can find Part 1 here.
In your FAQ and articles on the Enfleurage website, you make it clear that the aromatics trade is politically and ethically complex. It’s sometimes difficult to tell where exactly something is coming from, and you often deal with regions that are rife with conflict. Can you talk about a difficulty you’ve faced?
Yeah, I’ve gotten pretty cynical over the years, whether it’s finding what “organic” might mean in Nepal, or just being in New York. You might find that everyone is screaming “endangered species” just because everyone else is, or that we all accept a line of BS just because we want to. Sometimes you have to keep looking and follow your hunch.
I am probably best known for agarwood. It was (and still is) on all the lists, as endangered and overharvested etc. Believe me it was weird to be on the other side of the environmental argument. It was not comfortable at all. I don’t know that we all resolved it to mutual satisfaction as I still hear all about this “sustainable harvest” oil, but it’s very complex.
My argument was basically that we are losing the forests of SE Asia despite, not because of agarwood, although the wild supply in Laos is pretty well finished…
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Posted by Alyssa
on
20 July 2010
I first heard of Trygve Harris and her West Village shop, Enfleurage, from a friend who is nearly religious in his devotion to rare aromatics. He spoke of the integrity of her sourcing and the quality of her product in hushed, respectful tones. I visited the store on my next trip to New York, but it wasn’t until my first newsletter arrived that I understood the Harris magic.
“I could pray to this flower. I might pray to this flower! Ok, I did pray to this flower!” she wrote about frangipani oil from a farmer in India. Then I looked at the website: “This is the rawest and most volatile of the oudhs,” she wrote, about Agarwood Hindi Birrin. “He is like a wild young man, completely out of control. […] though he might make you uncomfortable, there is something alluring and seductive about him, even if you feel a little weird about it afterward.” All right then, I thought, this woman is one of us.
I began following Harris’ blog just as her modern enfleurage project in Colombia yielded the world’s first commercially available gardenia oil in seventy years….
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Posted by Robin
on
22 November 2005
Florentine perfumer Lorenzo Villoresi came to the fragrance business in a rather round-about way. After studying psychology at the University of Florence, he spent a year in New York before returning to Italy to complete degrees in philosophy and religion. Subsequent travels in North Africa and the Middle East sparked an interest in spices and other fragrant materials, and eventually he was asked to create fragrances for friends, and then scented candles for Fendi.
He officially launched his own business in 1990, and continues to create custom perfumes in addition to his ready-made line. His next fragrance release will be Alamut, an oriental scent that should launch in February or March of next year.
I understand that you have a degree in philosophy, and I am wondering what career you would have pursued if you had not become a perfumer?
Theoretically I would have become a kind of Academic, a researcher in Ancient Philosophy or perhaps I would have moved rather towards the Ancient past: Sumerian or Acadian culture, Semitics, Ancient Minor Asian Thought or even Anthropology…
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