The language of perfumery

[Guest guest]

Recently I acquired Perfume: Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin; a cultural

history of fragrance from 1750 to the present ( Stamelman,

2006). It's a massive tome, with great perfume imagery of all kinds,

and dense with text. There's too much text for it to be a coffee-

table book. I'd call it an illustrated bible of the art. I opened to

a section that looked interesting and found the following:

" Perfume is a language with its own unique rhetoric and its own

distinctive syntax or combination of associations, which give rise to

a kind of poetry where feelings of love, desire, seduction, romance,

and bliss come together to create a sensual fantasy. This is a

reality that advertisements for many contemporary fragrances never

let us forget.... Such rhetorical intensity as the scented

imagination possesses, such magic to inspire dreams, fantasies, and

desires, and such force to make us love or even to provoke acts of

collective violence, as happens at the end of Suskind's novel

Perfume, was recognized by writers, pre-surrealist and surrealist,

early in the 20th century. Mallarmé, whose knowledge of the Parisian

fashion world was extensive, even sensed a poetic threat coming from

fin-de-siecle practitioners of the perfume arts. " They have taken all

our words, " he admitted to the poet Valéry, who passed the

comment on to Breton in a letter of March 1916. And in Le Musicien de

Saint-Merry, a poem from 1914, Apollinaire offered the following

advice to fellow wordsmiths: " Poet, emulate the labels of perfumers. " "

Sage advice from a time before synthetics really took hold, when

(natural) perfumers had long since learned to use the language of

fantasy and desire.

[Guest guest]

Adam Gottschalk wrote:

>

> Sage advice from a time before synthetics really took hold, when

> (natural) perfumers had long since learned to use the language of

> fantasy and desire.

Hi Adam...List...

I think you've put a finger on something here....

There's certain elements today that will state that perfumery only

really got started in the late 1800's, i.e. with the introduction of

synthetic essences...

Had they lived in Old Egypt, these folks probably would have been

executed at the insistance of the perfumer priests for heresy....<G>....

The advent and acceptance of synthetic based essences had significant

results in the history of perfumery...

The pallette for the perfumer was increased, and became more

economical....hence perfume became available to a wider number of

folk.....

Perfume also became a commodity item, moved away from the purview of the

*artisan* to the laboratory...

NP, by it's very nature, is *geared* to the artisanal approach...if for

no other reason than the nature of the natural essences...

Thanks to the prior popularity of AT, and to an extent the food

industry, and the growing force of NP itself, the NP artisan of today

has broader essence availibilty than the counterpart of the pre syn days

ever had...

So....in a sense NP's a step back in time, so to speak....

But because of new elements readily available, NP also has *new*

potentials.....it's not just a repeat of the old...

New ways to speak the langage.....

--

W. Bourbonais

L'Hermite Aromatique

A.J.P. (GIA)

[Guest guest]

> So....in a sense NP's a step back in time, so to speak....

> But because of new elements readily available, NP also has *new*

> potentials.....it's not just a repeat of the old...

> New ways to speak the langage.....

> W. Bourbonais

Yes! It's a way for us to interpret our culture while being grounded

in history.

I was just reading Brosius' blog (he was just featured in

Daily Candy) and how he gags when he smells certain synthetic elements

and yet he uses synthetics that can be just as offensive to others.

How can he claim to hate perfume and then goes on to make the very

thing he claims to hate. Am I missing something here? In no way does

he state that he is a natural perfumer, perhaps I'm making a gross

assumption . . .

Maggie