Perfume Section in The New York Times T Style Magazine

Dark Victory by Chandler Burr. On darkness as a quality in perfume and various ways of capturing it. Examples include Rose Barbare ("The result sweeps over you like the silent, massive shadow of an Airbus A340, a tactile component that makes you narrow your eyes"), Pomegranate Noir, Bigarade Concentrée. Synthetic No. 5 by Chandler Burr. On predjudices and misperceptions about synthetics in perfume. "As all perfumers know, synthetics are the essence of modern perfume. Creating a perfume without them is like painting a picture without blues or reds. You could do it, but why? Synthetics give you range, from the amazing milky molecule lactone, which makes Gucci’s Rush the ingenious piece of abstract art that it is, to the gorgeous synthetic iris that the perfumer Olivier Polge created when he made Dior Homme. " The Sweat Hog by Susie Rushton. A fascinating article on the work of an odor artist Sissel Tolaas. "Tolaas calls the West “the smell-blinded.” Overloaded with fragrances — from scented toilet paper to the fake aroma of freshly baked bread pumped out at grocery stores — we’re insensible to our own unadulterated body smells and what they may communicate (...) If each of us had our own body smell parsed into a perfume, Tolaas suggests, the ultimate bespoke fragrance would be at hand: “Perfumes smell different on everybody — that’s an old story. But if you wore your own base, your body smell, you could choose different molecules to add to it. Maybe you’d have one perfume for sex, one for business, whatever.”"