Scented Thoughts Archives

Comme des Garçons Perfume ©The Scented Salamander I predict that one day when the time is finally ripe and the times have become really ironic, there will be the launch of a perfume simply called "Niche Perfume". This will be a...

Les Fleurs du mal by Carlos Schwabe, 1900 The musings below were written two years ago, in July of 2010. The list of perfumes corresponding to the type of "venomous fruits and flowers of summer" I have yet to...

Smelling an organic Verna lemon from Spain, it hits you out of the blue. The fruit smells like a chypré perfume. It seems to reveal a lady-like sillage for a little while. Then, this elegant urbane nuance fades away as...

Today, I met a merchant of lavender in Paris. His wares were on the pavement, looking intensely rustic with several degrees of separation from the usual open-market lavender seller. And now I know what was different, his lavender had...

Guang-Zhou Opera House by Zaha Hadid, 2006Scent critic Chandler Burr has long been fascinated by the possibility to arrive at a pure apprehension of the olfactory form separate from its usual trappings: name, container, story-telling, advertising imagery, color. Is it...

Generation 3 by Ruud Van Empel, 2010I was thinking how a perfume blog has the unique privilege of bringing to the attention of perfume lovers worldwide, perfumes that are meant for a single market or just a few. Not all...

Iris by Nall, 1985-1986 By Marie-Hélène WagnerI once had under my fork a tasty roasted eggplant for dinner. I do not know the varietal. I had been eating eggplants all my life. But on that evening, a couple of years into...

Lily by Robert Mapplethrope By Marie-Hélène WagnerThe florist brought out humongous bouquets of white and pink lilies onto the city curb. She studded them with a plastic price tag like a big hat pin protuding out of a giant bun. The...

By Marie-Hélène Wagner One of the most under-reported scents of Paris and which yet is so typical of its ambient air is the perfume of Horse Chestnut trees......

Bouquet de roses by Maurice de VlaminckBy Marie-Hélène WagnerAt the very least, a perfume signals simple luxury and care, like the gesture of offering a bouquet of flowers. Likewise, it's a pause in the day, a parenthesis of beauty in...

Penelope Cruz by Paolo Pellegrin, 2008In the beginnings of the blog, questions about how to best think about perfume and extract ideas and correct sensations from them was a preoccupation.These two past essays look at the virtue or vice of...

One of the pleasures of exploring the world of fragrances is to see the bridges that have been purposefully or accidentally built between scents meant for the nose, and those scents meant for the mouth. One thing you might have...

On Valentine's Day 2012, a somewhat playfully whimsical thought occurs to me. Yesterday I was perusing through a few books containing recipes of aphrodisiacs as I was searching for some information on sandalwood, my Valentine's Day note of choice for...

 En ce jour de la Saint Valentin 2012, une pensée un peu mutine me vient: j'ai lu hier quelques ouvrages contenant des recettes aphrodisiaques car je recherchais des renseignements sur le santal, ma note de la Saint Valentin pour cette...