Chandler Burr
About Chandler Burr
As well as being the New York Times first perfume critic, Chandler Burr is also the author of two fragrance books - The Emperor of Scent, and The Perfect Scent.
7 found. Showing stories 1 to 7, with most recent first.
Madeleines and chocolate bridges - scent and memory ~ Deleted Scenes from the Perfect Scent
22 January 2008 Articles
This is a section I wrote around two things. First was the famous Proust quote about smell, memory, & the Madeleine. I had to go look it up. Everyone has heard of it, and no one I know—including me—has actually read the thing, or at least I hadn’t read it. You think it’s a little paragraph you’re going to whiz through. In fact, it turns out to be pages and pages of extremely densely written text. The guy goes on and on. I read it in French and then, because I didn’t really understand it, I read it in English. I spent hours getting it down to an essential core that I liked. The other reason was my friend Rich “Toast” Trost, who mentioned to me that his favorite NPR piece was about how the Chicago bridges smelled like brownies....
Yves de Chiris on marketing and Angel ~ Deleted Scenes from the Perfect Scent
21 January 2008 Articles
This is an analysis by Yves de Chiris, one of the perfume industry’s most experienced executives and consultants, of the marketing of perfumes. I got it via a long telephone conversation with Yves where he spoke and I got it into the computer as fast as my fingers would move. I think it’s extremely interesting, but my editor and I finally decided we couldn’t figure out how to change it from a simple direct word-for-word repetition of what Yves was saying. I wound up using this information in a somewhat different, more organic form elsewhere in the book....
Jean-Claude Ellena and Michael Edwards ~ Deleted scenes from The Perfect Scent
19 January 2008 Articles
I sat in on a meeting at Hermès’ Pantin headquarters in which Michael Edwards was interviewing Jean-Claude Ellena re several of Ellena’s recent perfumes, which Edwards was classifying in his database. I was absolutely fascinated—I use Michael’s database every professional day of my life—and I assumed the scene was a slam-dunk to make it into the book. But in George—who is not a perfume guy and whose job it was, as my editor, to make sure that the book would be readable by the general public—it set off an alarm bell...
Raw Materials and how they smell ~ deleted scenes from The Perfect Scent ~ Part 4
17 January 2008 Articles
I wrote this section first to emphasize the constant struggle I go through trying to put in just the right number of molecular names. A delicate balance, and I wanted to say something about what my editors will and won’t allow in The Times. I lose battles there every day. And second because I wanted to communicate what smelling the raw materials is like. Near the end of the editing process, George decided we simply already had enough on raw materials in the book, so he asked me to take it out.
...Christopher Brosius and why we don't perceive perfume as art ~ deleted scenes from The Perfect Scent
15 January 2008 Articles
In the third of our series of 'deleted scenes' from the forthcoming book The Perfect Scent, Burr recounts an exchange with perfumer Christopher Brosius (Demeter and CB I Hate Perfume) about our senses
...The media and the reactions ~ deleted scenes from The Perfect Scent
13 January 2008 Articles
In the second of our series of 'deleted scenes' from the forthcoming book The Perfect Scent, Burr discusses the reactions generated from his appointment as NYT scent critic and how perfume is linked to fashion and art....
How I became the New York Times' perfume critic ~ deleted scenes from The Perfect Scent
11 January 2008 Articles
This is the first of our exclusive 'deleted scenes' from Chandler Burr's forthcoming book, The Perfect Scent. In this extract Chandler describes how he landed the job of the NYT's first ever perfume critic....
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