Welcome to Serious Scent

 

PERFUME is ART

and DESERVES to be taken SERIOUS

When perfume is mentioned in various magazines, it is often from a narrow perspective. Fragrance is a foreign language that only a few speak and that has made the industry immune to criticism. The result is bad quality and mass production of generic platitudes that has squeezed the professional pride to the very last drop. In many cases perfume has become the opposite of what the billboard promises; impersonal, unoriginal and inelegant.

I believe the same criteria of quality should apply to perfume, which applies to all other arts

This should inspire creativity in the industry and reflect that the chemical and artistic craftsmanship is taken serious. I will use the same procedure in the description of a perfume, that good writers uses in describing a clothing line, TV series or a poem. Today we are bombarded with odors, to such an extent that we forget the importance of their presence and the complexity of the unique compositions that the perfumers master.

In recent years, a handful of niche perfumes has started to move out of the department stores and into luxurious boutiques. But buyers still do not know why they should choose one bottle over another. The design and decoration of the flacon is often a decisive factor in a decision that should be rooted in something personal. I have created SERIOUS SCENT to celebrate an industry in transition. I offer in-depth portraits of perfumery and presents the reader for a personal assessment of each creation.

I am interested in writing exactly why a perfume is interesting, who made it and why they made it. I want to pay tribute to the perfumers who value content over.

Everyone who dares to bring their emotions to a bottle
Everyone who wears their perfume, like an extra layer of skin
Everyone who uses perfume to flatter, attract or seduce their surroundings
Everyone who only wears perfume for their own sake
Everyone who understands perfume as an invisible portrait of who we are – and who we can be

All those who wish to take perfume serious

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Listen to a voice of reason

Gorilla Perfumes is what we need in these days; bold, beautiful and ballsy

Explore the more risqué side of perfume

Everything smells better in the himalayas

Back from two months travel in Nepal/India where I have experienced my best and worst olfactory moments to date. The pictures are from a 50 bottle homemade perfume cornershop in Varanasi, juniper in 15.000 feet found in the great himalayas and a Delhi spicemarket.

The too sweet smell of succes

This is the guide to celebrity scents, subjectively navigating through the best and the worst. So who doesn't have a perfume in their name these days? Here is a little list only counting female musicians and actresses who has:

Christina Aguilera, Pamela Anderson, Jennifer Aniston, Mary Kate & Ashley, Victoria Beckham, Beyonce, Halle Berry, Mary J. Blige, Brandy, Naomi Campbell, Mariah Carey, Cher, Celine Dion, Hillary Duff, Carmen Electra, Fergie, Daisy Fuentes, Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez, Salma Hayek, Faith Hill, Paris Hilton, Queen Latifah, Avril Lavigne, Leona Lewis, Eva Longoria, Jennifer Lopez, Madonna, Niurka Marcos, Nicki Minaj, Dannii Minogue, Kylie Minogue, Kim Kardashian, Karen Mok, Kate Moss, Heidi Klum, Patti LaBelle, Sarah Jessica Parker, Katy Perry, Nicole Polizzi, Katie Price, Denise Richards, Nicole Richie, Rihanna, Jessica Simpson, Shakira, Jordin Sparks, Britney Spears, Gwen Stefani, Taylor Swift, Elizabeth Taylor, Dita Von Teese, Shania Twain, Reese Witherspoon.

Most of these women have more than one bottle with their name on and girls like Jlo, Paris, Britney and Beyonce almost launches a new one each years. Britney has been in the olfactory business for more than 8 years producing 11 different fragrances from 2004-2012 and Jlo made a good 50 million dollars on fragrance sales in 2012. Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds was the first celebrity-endorsed scent making it's debut 20 years ago.These fragrances are generic, simple and conservative. If you read the reviews of celebrity fragrances in Luca Turin and Tania Sanchezs Perfumes Guide, most of them get mediocre rating, not being good or bad but just boring. I believe that this is the case concerning most of them.

Celebrity-endorsed perfumes are commonly manufactured by either Coty, Elizabeth Arden or Avon and created from the same formulas by the same perfumers. This makes most of them pretty much the same. Still some of them stand out. This happens in the case where they are either surprisingly well made or beyond horribly smelling. For example I have heard good things about Sarah Jessica Parker's fragrance Covet and some surprisingly positive reviews on Madonna's Truth or Dare. The following is my thoughts on some of the ones that you should definitely stay away from.

Circus Fantasy Britney Spears

What the hell is a ‘Circus Fantasy’? Until she launched this scent in 2009, women everywhere had to cover themselves in popcorn, beer, fried Oreos and elephant dung to properly mimic the sweet odor of circus life. Now women can have it all in just one bottle. So do you have a circus fantasy? If it happens to be a vanilla and apricot smelling trapeze artist or a clown for the day, then Circus Fantasy is the scent for you.

Lollipop Bling Mariah Carey

This scent is nothing but sickening. With ingredients like melon, cucumber and to much jasmine you wished that you had scoured yourself in a random lollipop instead of putting on this shit. New York Times perfume critic Chandler Burr recently wrote “They take the cotton candy molecule, pour it in a condom, add some helium, put it in a bottle, and sell it” reviewing Mariah Carey M. I get a similar vibe from this one.  

  
Royal Desire Christina Aguilera
This is the yuck sensation bottled. Too sweet, too sugary, too fruity and way too many marshmallows. Perfumers experiment with many funky ingredients now a days but marshmallows is not something that anyone has mastered yet. I have no idea how she got the idea to named it Royal something with the subtitle “Fell like a queen”. It's more of a teenage tart desire - if even that.

 

Fancy Night Jessica Simpson

Adam Green once sang “Jessica Simpson where has your love gone, It's not in your music." It's not in her perfumes either. I guess that someone will like it if their idea of a fancy night is jelly shots and a stripper pole. I'm sure that Jessica Simpson doesn't own the largest vocabulary and this shows in the use of words for her fragrances. For some reason they are all called something fancy, starting with Jessica Simpson Fancy and then Fancy Love, Fancy Night and I Fancy You.

Sex ad(dicts)

 

 

What happend to the silent italian?

For almost a hundred years Aqua Di Parma didn’t make a sound. No new fragrances, no changing the formula, no advertising, no nothing. It just stood there on the shelves around ever changing perfume bottles and shinned with its iconic yellow signature. It represents the Mediterranean feeling of Italian sunshine and olive oil and it’s one of the finest fresh, citrus fragrances ever made. Recently it was bought by powerhouse LVMH and they have started to produces new Parma scents, some definitely better than others. Here is a little story about one of them

The best Dior ever did

Mystery in Venice

What to think of the new Coco Noir by Chanel? It's inspired by Venice at night and the time Coco spent in the mysterious water city. Right of the bat the contrast of a floral scent with white musk and Indonesian patchouli is interesting for a commercial Chanel product and all in all it's a well made fragrance, plus the bottle is really nice. But on the other hand if I was to go with a noir perfume, I would properly choose Caron Narcise Noir or Orris Noir by Ormonde Jayne.

Something gotta give (up)

The "we are to exclusive to make perfume" Vuitton has announced that they will launch a fragrance in 2013 and have of course just hired master perfumer Jacques Cavallier-Belletrud to do the job. And why are they making a perfume after a 100 years off the marked? Getting sick of fashion? Just bored? Money?  I don't know it's just a wild guess