The ‘foodie‘ focus of modern perfume started in the late 19th century, coincidentally at the start of chemically synthetic perfumery. We tend to highlight the abstract perfumes from this era, such as the fougère, the chypre and the oriental. The fougère has long been defined by its lack of food scent and proudly accepts “soapy” jibes. But the chypre contains citrus, albeit the rarely eaten bergamot orange,...

The problem of the fruity floral isn't a problem of genre. It's a problem of abstraction. Abstraction is critical to the art of perfumery because it is key to separating notes and building accords.I use the word abstraction a lot in talking about perfume, so I should explain my meaning. Abstraction is considering an idea or thing without its associations or known characteristics. It is freedom from representation....

The fruity floral tends to be a dismal genre. It's not intrinsically bad, but producers in the 2000s chased the least common denominators of the hybrid down a well of banality until there were only two controls left on the soundboard, marked 'sweetness' and 'kool-aid'. Both dials were stripped from sweaty overuse and wound up stuck at volume 11.Badgley Miskchka's and Juicy Couture's eponymous...

Bogue is a small perfume company featuring the work of perfumer Antonio Gardoni. The approach is artisanal in nature in that fine, rare, exotic materials are the basic components, extraction and refinement methods are done in-house and limited volumes are produced. Implied in the artisanal approach is a reproach to large scale production in favor of a return to neglected, traditional...

Perfumers are often associated with a particular genre or style. Instead Tauer takes a flower and makes it his focus. He uses it to find his way through and around a number of identifiable genres. He uses rose to play with the notion of what a "note" is.With each of the perfumes, we're questioned. Is rose a material? Is rose a note? A set of notes? Is the rose...

For visual diagrams, we have traditionally relied on two dimensional forms. Diagrams aren't direct visual translations, but representations, devices. They are models, and however rudimentary, they are intellectual constructs. They have rules and, like all description, they seek to reduce an object or restrict a concept to a set of identifiers. Diagrams can’t quite be said to have an intention, but by the nature...

How is a line of perfume best viewed? Comparison is easier to see when it’s apples to apples. But the comparison to other perfume houses doesn’t shed much light on Slumberhouse.Why does the comparison of Slumberhouse, and perfumer Josh Lobb, to other perfume lines give so little information? Take Tauer Perfumes and Parfums de Nicolai, two other niche companies that, like Slumberhouse, feature the work...

The start: Grès Cabochard, 1959.Expectation works against Grès Cabochard, poor dear. Many compare it in its current form to a vintage model. I’ve never smelled vintage Cabochard, so that expectation isn’t an issue. Cabochard is the reference leather chypre of the mid-20th century. It was popular, critically acclaimed and directly influenced the decades of chypres that followed it.My expectation,...

Authenticity is perfumery’s Achilles' heel.Classical perfumery is wounded. The IFRA barbarians are at the gate. The chypre has left the building, orientals have deflated into gourmands, leather is now ‘notes of suede’ and flowers have lost their bite but gained a sweet-tooth. Flankers of flankers of perfumes that were originally designed to be flankable in the first place are released weekly....

Notes describe qualities of a fragrance. They offer a side door into the discussion of perfume with points of comparison. If you have smelled a lemon, then a "lemon" note will make sense to you. Notes are used like similes. A “rose” note smells like rose. Bvlgari Black smells like rubber. (I exclude imagistic description couched as notes, typically in product description, eg. notes of burly arctic breeze or forlorn longing.)Parfumo,...

By the late 70s, perfume came from large corporate brands (eg. Estée Lauder, Coty), commercial fashion brands (eg. Halston, Pierre Cardin, Calvin Klein) and the old guard like Caron and Guerlain. The common thread is that investors saw perfume as a cash cow and designer-celebrity culture was a cheap ticket to the show. The perfumer was in the closet, the consumer rabidly craved identifiability in branding and the ‘coarsening...

I decided to stop compulsively buying perfumes Nov 2013. If I said I didn't have days where I still think about making an "exception" I'd be lying again. But with my meager 3 month no-buy wisdom I am starting to realize that we can always make "exceptions". There will always be the LTD, the incredible deal, the discontinued, and the once in a life time purchases. I now find it pretty funny that I once...