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Sunday, August 27, 2006

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.”"

11 comments:

  1. Thanks for these links- I was having a devil of a time finding this on the Times website..

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  2. The Susie article sounds really interesting and thanks for the links also.

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  3. They were all fascinating articles. I was a little annoyed at Chandler, though, for plagiarizing himself -- his review of Barbare sounded sooo familiar, so I looked and it's more or less what he wrote on his website months ago.... he couldn't have come up with a new paragraph or two since then?

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  4. I loved the Susie Rushton article--really fascinating! I'm glad they hired a regular perfume critic in Chandler, but I do find his writing (esp. in the reviews) somewhat overblown.

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  5. Tom amd Jennifer,
    You are so welcome!

    March and Judith,
    I am thinking that perhaps he was actually asked to sort of sum up the best pieces from the articles he has already written for this first column.
    I actually enjoy this kind of writing, with lots of metaphors like that with Rose Barbare and Airbus. I fact this is the kind of style I enjoy the most. :-)

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  6. Were all of those in the Style Mag. part? I only saw the first one there. It's so dense w/ ads that I haven't worked my way through it yet. I love Chandler and am very glad he's now a regular contributor at the Times.
    I also really enjoyed the piece on Tolass. I was able to smell two of the scents, Hsidews (Swedish backwards) and Made for Norway Red. They were actually quite wearable, but not worth the extremely high cost. I'd like to see her add some skank to some more conventional notes - but not slaugherhouse. I just can't handle that one.

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  7. Were all of those in the Style Mag. part? I only saw the first one there. It's so dense w/ ads that I haven't worked my way through it yet. I love Chandler and am very glad he's now a regular contributor at the Times.
    I also really enjoyed the piece on Tolass. I was able to smell two of the scents, Hsidews (Swedish backwards) and Made for Norway Red. They were actually quite wearable, but not worth the extremely high cost. I'd like to see her add some skank to some more conventional notes - but not slaugherhouse. I just can't handle that one.

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  8. Oops! Double post. Blogger is being very wierd today.

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  9. Elle,
    The blogger is weird today and always! Sorry about that!
    I'd love to smell Tolass' creations.
    You mentioned Hsidews and I immediately got such a craving for some nice Swedish meatballs. :-D Was the note included in Hsidews? A slave to stereotypes, moi? :-)

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  10. No meatballs in Hsidews. :-) It's been over a year since I tried them, but I remember Hsidews as being quite light and a scent I thought would be appropriate for summer. Very clean. No skank, no sweat. As I said, not worth the big bucks it cost.

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  11. "Very clean. No skank, no sweat."

    *loses interest*

    :-)

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