Articles
59 found. Showing stories 1 to 12, with most recent first.
Lavender
by Walker Minton, 28 April 2008
Creed Royal Scottish Lavender is my favourite fragrance but I cannot wear it anymore.... Lavender is quite possibly the perfume note I enjoy most of all. It takes a very interesting position in the mix, straddling the top and heart notes, not as effervescent as most citrus heads but lighter than most floral hearts....
Virtual Sniffing - a look at the role of fragrance in Second Life
by Liz Upton, 25 March 2008
Let’s face it. If you’re a regular Basenotes user – if you keep tabs on your growing collection using the wardrobe, if you participate in the community to crow about your latest buy, and if you use the directory to research all your fragrance purchases – odds are that you might have a slightly addictive personality. ...
Valentine's Day Fragrance Gift Round-Up
by Danielle Cooper, 07 February 2008
Seven, yes just seven, days stand between us and the most romantic holiday of the year. When we consider the effect that fragrance can conjure, it is easy to understand why it is such an eternally popular Valentine's Day gift. With this in mind our Valentine's Day choices need careful consideration, so Basenotes has put together a shopping guide to assist in this most romantic of purchases. Includes discount codes too!...
Relatives
by Walker Minton, 28 January 2008
My nephew has a bottle of Jules by Dior. Or perhaps he has two. He may have several stashed away, I'm not sure. I have great memories of wearing Jules in the 80s. Sweet boozy citrusy aldehydic leathery manliness in a bottle. A mist of highly composed chemical potion encapsulating the tail end of modernism. However, I didn't see it like that at the time....
Madeleines and chocolate bridges - scent and memory ~ Deleted Scenes from the Perfect Scent
by Chandler Burr, 22 January 2008
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
by Chandler Burr, 21 January 2008
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
by Chandler Burr, 19 January 2008
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
by Chandler Burr, 17 January 2008
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
by Chandler Burr, 15 January 2008
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
by Chandler Burr, 13 January 2008
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
by Chandler Burr, 11 January 2008
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....
In search of Oud on Oxford Street
by Liz Upton, 20 December 2007
Oud is a note I fell in love with long before I found out what it was. About ten years ago, in search of some Lebanese ingredients for a dinner party, I found myself standing rigid in the middle of the pavement, trying to locate a curiously wonderful smell....
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