Italian niche distributor Calé has added two more fragrances, Fulgor and Roboris, to the Calé Fragranze d’Autore collection (you can see the first eight here). Both fragrances were inspired by a thunderstorm in Death Valley in August...

Salvador Dali launches Laguna Maravilla this month. The new fragrance for women is a flanker to 1991's Laguna.

LAGUNA MARAVILLA expresses the spirit and originality that made Laguna such a success...

Though he died just short of his 85^th birthday, Salvador Dalí was the eternal evil teen; his pronouncements and gestures were designed to startle his “audience” — the World! Dalí seemed sure everyone, everywhere watched him with unflagging fascination and cared what he said and did. Perhaps Dalí’s attention-grabbing ways masked deep insecurities; one wonders if the weird, cruel, inexplicable opinions Dalí proclaimed were true expressions of his heart and mind, or only empty words intended to shock and awe. Did Dalí really “spit for pleasure on the portrait”¹ of his dead mother; applaud the murder of his friend Federico García Lorca (“The moment I learned of his death…I cried 'Olé'!’”)²; and support Franco's torture and killing of dissidents (“Three times more executions are needed…. Personally I’m against freedom. I’m for the Holy Inquisition.”)³?

What type of perfume would Dalí have created? I imagine him saying something like: “Doesn’t everyone love the scent of blood and dung, sweaty breasts, fuzzy tongues and turtle shells, lady bug shellac and horses’ milk!? Let’s bottle the scent of desperation, the aroma of time running out.” (Actually, that sounds more like García Lorca than Dalí!) Dalí did say, "Of the five senses, the sense of smell is incontestably the one that best conveys a sense of immortality.”⁴ Dalí, always looking for ways to make money, signed a licensing agreement with Jean-Pierre Grivory of COFCI (now, Cofinluxe) in Paris on Dec. 17, 1982, and the Salvador Dalí brand was born...

Van Cleef & Arpels plans to launch Collection Extraordinaire in September. It will be the brand's first foray into high-end niche perfume, and will debut at around the same time as Cartier's upcoming collection, Les Heures du Parfum.

The Collection Extraordinaire fragrances, meant to pay homage to nature, are Gardénia Pétale, Orchidée Vanille, Lys Carmin, Muguet Blanc, Bois d'Iris and Cologne Noire...

The fragrances are meant to disclose "the personality through color code", and on the Mark Buxton website* you can find the fragrance that suits you best by looking at a series of color blocks, then clicking on the color that appeals to you most. I don't know that there is any fool-proof method of selecting suitable fragrances online, but I didn't find this system particularly helpful.

Of the seven fragrances, two of them (Black Angel, Sounds & Visions) left me entirely cold...

Perfumer Mark Buxton has launched his own line of fragrances:

One of the sharpest "noses" ever. Author of fragrances for Givenchy, Versace, Paco Rabanne, Burberry, Salvador Dali, Cartier, Chopard, Ferre. One of the brilliant pages of his perfumer career concerns his companionship of many years with Comme des Garcons. Mark's personal testament has always been "Simplicity is the ultimate degree of luxury". This credo is incarnated in his works as well as in his life...

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...

The Six Scents Fragrance Initiative is a new, ongoing collaboration between Symrise, Metaproject and Seven New York. The group plans to launch six new fragrances every year with a percentage of the proceeds going to charity. Six Scents: Series One will launch next month, and will benefit Designers Against AIDS' International AIDS Awareness Education Center in Antwerp, Belgium.

Each of the six fragrances was developed by a celebrated designer working in conjunction with a Symrise perfumer. The fragrances for Series One, curated by Joseph Quartana of Seven New York, are:

Fragrance 1: Urban Tropicalia ~ by Alexandre Herchcovitch. According to perfumer Joachim Correll, "The inspiration for this fragrance was driven by the way that Alexandre creates fashion: The creative liberty he uses to design fashion which can be used equally by men or women..."

Linari, best known for their home fragrances, has launched a range of four personal scents:

Notte Bianca (shown) ~ "As exciting and beguiling as a sleepless night with fruity, delicate accents of pink grapefruit, fresh bergamot and Italian orange in a delightful interplay with aromatically lively notes of star anise, absinthe elixir, cloves, sage and fine cashmere wood. Haitian chords of Vetiver and Tonka, underlined by white musk and amber give the base a seductively sensual character." By perfumer Mark Buxton...

Lots of people are doing three fragrances, but only at an expensive price, as a limited edition. Here, the idea was to say we will propose a capsule wardrobe of fragrances...at a price that is in line with the market...