I’ve been invited on behalf of the BSP (British Society of Perfumers) to give an evening lecture on the subject of social media and influencers in the perfume industry. There are two dates – London (Thursday 18 October 2018) and Manchester (Monday 22 October 2018) – and it promises to be an interesting insight into my world, which is the world of an influencer in the perfume industry! Tickets are £25 for non-members and can be purchased here.
Leather is just not my vibe. I can just about rock a leather jacket (I have a very casual John Varvatos one that I feel comfortable in) but anything else feels like a stretch outside of my personality. So you’ll never catch me at the Folsom Street Fair rocking a harness, as cool as that would be. My discomfort with leather also covers fragrances and I’m about as likely to wear Cuir de Russie as I am leather chaps – it’s just not gonna happen. For me, leather in fragrance is often too overwhelming – too dry, too meaty, too smoky. But every now and then I find a palatable leather that I can get on with – OMBRÉ LEATHER, the latest from TOM FORD, is one such fragrance.
The Scent of You on My Skin
The scent of you on my skin, is salty.
It attracts me – magnetises me to you.
A whisper, a trail.
The scent of you on my skin, marks me.
It colours me with invisible ink – a tattoo in vibrant colours.
A pattern of you, an imprint.
The scent of you on my skin, is violets in warm earth.
They bloom in shades of purple – statues rising from the ground.
A flower, a totem.
L’Artisan Parfumeur has been at the forefront of niche perfumery for forty years and in those four decades they have not only reshaped the landscape of perfumery, they have created a vast number of iconic and beautiful fragrances. Today, the brand continues to offer intriguing olfactory editions mixing accessibility with a strangeness that features heavily in the DNA of the brand.
The two latest launches from L’Artisan Parfumeur are Mont de Narcisse and Mandarina Corsica. They sit in ‘Les Paysages’ a collection of fragrances inspired by different regions of the brand’s native France. Here the subjects are the rustic Auvergne and the hot Corsican vistas, with two fragrances that celebrate the physical, botanical and olfactory landscapes of France.
The colour white is achromatic – it has no hue. But white is not the absence of colour, it is the abundance of it. White is what the eye sees when the three primary colours are viewed simultaneously. So despite our connotations of purity, of perfect white snow and blankness, the colour white is actually representative of something multifaceted, chaotic and brilliant. For Map of the Heart, the subversive Australian niche brand, the colour white represents love.
White Heart v.7 is Map of the Heart’s latest fragrance. It follow’s last year’s Pink Heart v.6 and is billed as ‘The Heart of Love’. It’s actually a very tricky perfume to define one that seems to enjoy jumping across many fragrance families and presenting florals, woods, spices, and aldehydes in a jumbled composition that holds interest due to its contrasting and confusing nature. I bet that description has caught your interest…
Over the coming weeks I’m going to be sharing my top five fragrances from some of my favourite perfume brands in a series I’m creatively calling “Top Five”…
CHANEL – just the word evokes luxury, simplicity, and abstraction. When I think of CHANEL I think of quality – beauty presented without fuss or gimmick. The fragrances have a purity to them – a clarity that is instantly recognisable as CHANEL. Remember, this is a brand that is responsible for launching the most famous fragrance in the world, a bottle of which sells every 30 seconds. Perfume and CHANEL are linked together in the same way that couture and CHANEL are. They are symbiotic and I tell you what, they have some utter crackers in their collection.
Here’s my top five CHANEL fragrances.
The Candy Perfume Boy 