About: Some People Say The Perfume Blogosphere Phenomenon Really Started out in 2006

A Pioneer Perfume Blog est. March 2006 By Chantal-Hélène Wagner.... when what would be called "the perfume blogosphere" was still sleepy and perfume blogs were not taken very seriously at all.

Some People Say The Perfume Blog Phenomenon Really Started out in 2006...

- This blog is for people Into the nitty-gritty of smells & tastes, who are also interested in visual culture and synaesthesia. Our work has been quoted by The NY Times, Independent, Vogue, Elle, and more.

- The Scented Salamander at MimiFroufrou.com was the first perfume blog to creatively establish editorial and conceptual bridges between fine perfumery and food, political space or visual culture (here too) - at a time when critics were positioning perfume as a purist art object, which must be smelled even without reference to its container, the bottle, a position we're not interested in, at all, to this day.

For us, perfume is about life experience as well as an arts-and-craft object to be appreciated. We see it as imbricated into the life of the city in particular and associated with the activity of the flâneur, which also gave rise to the first blog column meshing addresses, promenades in the city and perfume impressions and memories in Scented Paths and Fragrant Addresses.

We remember being the first website to include indie perfume brands when they were not taken seriously even by other bloggers, which led to the first, original series of nation-based perfumers' portraits: North-American Originals. We love firsts here.

From the get-go, we've wanted to underline the team-aspect of perfume authorship - comparable in that respect to what takes place in the movie industry - rather than reify the perfumer as a Romantic artist - but also offer broader sociological context in an industry biased toward aspirational luxury and the simple pursuit of sensualism and hedonism.

I'm a PhD in Anthropology, a former Lavoisier Scholar at Oxford University and Resident Scholar and Anthropology Fellow at Harvard University who's worked on foodways, identity & death, as well as an English literature major now turned perfume blogger & chronicler out of conviction, passion & intellectual curiosity. I've had a Project Associated with UNESCO on the material and immaterial funerary cultures of Inner Asia and feel I'm now tackling the material and immaterial cultures of perfume - that's the short of it.

I've smelled the steppes of Mongolia, the oil fields of Kazakhstan, the alley streets of Tokyo, the kitchens of Seoul, the Garden of Shalimar in Srinagar, Soviet-era apartments, and the subways in New York City and Paris, among many other things.

These all smell strangely unique and exotic, with one common point: all these places diffuse the variegated scents of humanity.

- Highlights of This Perfume Blog's History (to be added)

- Testimonials (to be added)