Posted by Angela
on
16 January 2012
The Oregon Experiment by Keith Scribner features a professor of anarchy newly arrived in a small town in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, his wife the perfumer, a “sensuous free spirit called Sequoia” and a complicated anarchist. The review copy came with a sample of perfume called “The Oregon Experiment” by Yosh Han.
Could there be a better book for me to review? I like to read and I like perfume. Also, I’m a Portlander and live in a neighborhood so liberal that my Gore-Lieberman lawn sign was vandalized for not touting Nader. Sequoia is one of the more subtle hippie-girl names within a five-block radius of my house, which includes the fabled Peoples Co-op. Scribner, I’ll see your anarchist and raise you a freegan.
So, I opened The Oregon Experiment with relish. The novel is beautifully written — polished to a high shine, and full of lush turns of phrase. But in the end, it’s like an intricately carved chair of satiny wood that is too high to sit in, or only has three legs…
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Posted by Alyssa
on
20 December 2011
When I think about perfume, I think of gifts and gratitude. It’s difficult to make outsiders understand just how deeply giving things away is woven into the perfume world. It’s built into the industry — all those testers and samples floating around. It’s even part of perfume itself — to wear it is to share it. And when I try to explain how generous perfume people are, all my fellow decanters and swappers, I find myself talking about gardeners in zucchini season.
It’s not quite the right metaphor though, because perfume generosity isn’t just about having too much of the stuff. I’ve received packages so full they made me dizzy — a bottle where there should have been a decant, a dozen samples when I expected one. But I’ve also been bowled over by a single milliliter vial with a tiny dab of some rarity carefully transferred from a bottle no bigger than a nickel because the sender thought I might love it, or because we were talking about it, or because someone just couldn’t bear for its beauty to go unknown. We give our perfume away to share the astonishment and delight and pleasure we felt the first time we smelled it. Oh, you just have to try it. Please let me send you some.
In the days when my entire collection fit easily inside a small wooden cigar box, those gifts made me both very happy and very uncomfortable…
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Posted by Robin
on
14 December 2011
Michael Edwards will release the latest version of his “fragrance bible”, Fragrances of the World 2012, in January. The reference book lists over 8000 fragrances grouped by fragrance family, and is used by numerous retailers to help customers find fragrances they might like based on the scent(s) they already know and enjoy…
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Posted by Robin
on
8 December 2011
This book was a great opportunity to show this business the way it is rather than romanticizing it to death like everybody does. It’s really very beautiful just the way it is.
— Frédéric Malle on his new book, On Perfume Making. Read more at Frédéric Malle | ‘On Perfume Making’ at the New York Times.
Posted by Robin
on
5 December 2011
Frédéric Malle’s On Perfume Making will be published in Spring 2012:
Frédéric Malle was born in 1962 into the world of perfume…
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