A Fragrance Book Shaped like a Famous Flacon {Fragrant Reading}

Perusing the virtual book aisles yields the information that there is going to be a bountiful crop of fragrance books in the upcoming months. If you like perfume as well as to sit by the fireplace, all at the same time, you can already plan on stacking a few books by your armchair. One of them has already been released in May of 2011. It is entitled Histoires des Parfums by Michelle Brachet, a French copywriter and consultant living in England...

For people who insist on possessing design-conscious books, this is one shaped in the iconic form of the No.5 by Chanel.

This is a general history of perfumes, from the antiquity to the present day. An estimated 30 000 fragrances are currently present on the international market according to the book, so you can't ignore them.

The little information divulged by the publishing house indicates a more mainstream designer approach to the creation of perfumes. In such books, Christian Dior himself blended his fashionable scents rather than the real technical experts, the perfumers, and the creative teams.

In state-of-the-art appreciation of the art of perfumery as advocated by this blog from the start, one ought to look at the many actors who intervene in the making and creation of a perfume: noses, evaluators, art directors, fashion designers, muses etc. We're still hoping to see the demystification of perfume take place, like it is routinely done in the film industry, in the film credits. Nobody believes that Ben Hur was created single-handedly by Cecil B. DeMille.

Histoires des parfums, Editions Fetjaine, 20,80€