Category Archive: Fragrance Event

Barnes Fragrance Fair – Saturday 17 May 2025

Barnes Fragrance Fair is returning on Saturday 17 May 2025 and it’s bigger than ever. If you’re not familiar with the fair, it was created in 2023 by Amanda Carr, one half of popular fragrance blog We Wear Perfume, and aims to celebrate the importance of fragrance in our everyday lives. Now in its third year, Barnes has even more to offer, with more brands, more talks, and more workshops. It’s going to be great.

The fair runs from 09:30-17:00 at the Barnes Green Centre, with talks and workshops hosted at nearby venues (full details here). I’ll most definitely be there but if you’re on the fence about going I’d like to try and convince you by telling you exactly why you should absolutely attend (other than to hang out with me, of course). So here we go: four reasons why you most definitely should be at Barnes Fragrance fair this year.

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Perfume: A Sensory Journey Through Contemporary Scent @ Somerset House

Perfume @ Somerset House
Perfume @ Somerset House

“Metal, Flowers, Blood, Smoky Ink, Milk, Sweat, Wood, Purple Iris, Semen, Saliva, Roots, Hot Sand, Creosote, Chlorine, Fog Machines, Sandalwood, Smoke, Souk Spices, Cookies.”

The first thing one sees when entering Perfume: A Sensory Journey Through Contemporary Scent, the brand new and very exciting exhibition held at Somerset House, London, is a list of words that describe a variety of odours. These disembodied smells represent the ethos of the exhibition, which is to remove perfume from the commercial setting and allow it to be experienced as something more immersive than one would find on the department store shelves, despite the fact that the scents themselves can be found in such a place. This is perfume as an experience, rather than a consumable product. It shows that it can be something more than just a pretty smell to make a person smell good.

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Explore the fragrance archive at La Maison Guerlain in Paris with The Perfume Society

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The Perfume Society Trip to Paris

Have you ever wanted to raid the archives at La Maison Guerlain in Paris? I know I certainly have and if you have too, then The Perfume Society have arranged the perfect trip for you. On Saturday 25 February 2017 they will be hosting a group of Guerlain-addicts at the brand’s Champs-Élysées HQ to sniff a number of scents recreated masterfully from the Guerlain archives. The event is described as follows:

La Maison Guerlain is inviting you via The Perfume Society for a very special two-and-a-half hour session at which you’ll be able to smell treasures including the original Après L’Ondée, Guerlain’s own Chypre de Paris, Coque d’Or, Pourquoi J’Aimais Rosine?, Rue de La Paix, and other lost legends: fragrances which had literally vanished, until Thierry and his colleague Frédéric Sacone brought them back to life, following the original formulas in the historic ‘recipe’ books. They can only be smelled at these very exclusive, private workshops, which take place in the beautifully appointed private drawing room. So we’re delighted to be able to share this incredible behind-the-scenes experience over tea with our subscribers.

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Brilliance or Bullshit? Concepts in Fragrance – A New Fragrant Event

Thursday 01 September 2011 – 19:00 – 20:00

Get your bullshit detectors and brilliance radars at the ready we are going to uncover the truth and lies embedded in the concepts of fragrance, performance and everyday life! The Candy Perfume Boy returns to the loft as part of the Instability-in-Stability project where he and Cara will decipher just what performance and perfume can evoke in us, questioning how influenced our opinions of the these illustrious industries are by what we read in press releases, project blurbs and reviews.

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A Special Fragrant Event – The Videos

A massive thank you to everyone who viewed the special fragrant event for the Instability-in-Stability Loft Project. We had a great discussion about scent memory and it was excellent to have such a fantastic interaction from our viewers.

Above is Part 1 (of 6) of the event for those of you who missed it or for those who would like to watch it again. If you have any comments or thoughts about the event or about scent memory then please leave a comment in the box below the jump.

Apologies for taking so long to get the videos on here but I’ve had some problems with LiveStream and embedding.

Parts 2-6 below the jump…

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