Secrets of Aromatic Jewelry


Book Description

This colorfully illustrated book explores the many types of jewelry and objects designed throughout time to carry perfume while chronicling the history of this trend and reviewing its popularity in the present day.




Scents and Sensibilities


Book Description

Delve into the world of natural aromas and discover their profound effect on emotional well-being, from relieving stress to enhancing sensuality.




Scents and Sensibility


Book Description

This lively, accessible book is the first to explore Victorian literature through scent and perfume, presenting an extensive range of well-known and unfamiliar texts in intriguing and imaginative new ways that make us re-think literature's relation with the senses. Concentrating on aesthetic and decadent authors, Scents and Sensibility introduces a rich selection of poems, essays, and fiction, exploring these texts with reference to both the little-known cultural history of perfume use and the appreciation of natural fragrance in Victorian Britain. It shows how scent and perfume are used to convey not merely moods and atmospheres but the nuances of the aesthete or decadent's carefully cultivated identity, personality, or sensibility. A key theme is the emergence of the olfactif, the cultivated individual with a refined sense of smell, influentially represented by the poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne, who is emulated by a host of canonical and less well-known aesthetic and decadent successors such as Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse, John Addington Symonds, Lafcadio Hearn, Michael Field, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Mark André Raffalovich, Theodore Wratislaw, and A. Mary F. Robinson. This book explores how scent and perfume pervade the work of these authors in many different ways, signifying such diverse things as style, atmosphere, influence, sexuality, sensibility, spirituality, refinement, individuality, the expression of love and poetic creativity, and the aura of personality, dandyism, modernity, and memory. A coda explores the contrasting twentieth-century responses of Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie to the scent of Victorian literature.




Spritzing to Success with the Woman Who Brought an Industry to Its Senses


Book Description

“I bestow on you a special award - that of High Priestess of the Fragrance World with power of divination.” Jean Pierre Lippman President, Christian Dior, On the occasion of the June l985 Fragrance Foundation Awards Ceremony “In ‘Spritzing to Success’ Annette reveals how she deliberately and successfully transcended the fickle limitations of fashion and fragrance trends. She took a tiny industry under her wing and before she could count to ten (years) the fragrance world was spritzing to success with her.” Carmen Dell’Orefice Legendary model “Annette Green was ‘the Mother of Invention’ creating the legacy of the Fragrance Foundation and the Wardrobe of Fragrance concept. Her mark upon the fragrance industry is immeasurable. A trail blazer in business, she is a role model to women everywhere.” Marc Rosen Renown Beauty & Fragrance Package Designer “Thanks to the industry’s ‘unsinkable Molly Brown,’ fragrance has become a universal language and the essence of the global economy.” Burt Tansky, President, Bergdorf Goodman and Lawrence Aiken, President Sanofi Beaute and Chairman of the Fragrance Foundation at 1993 Fashion Institute of Technology ceremonies at which Annette Green was honored with its ‘One Person Makes a Difference’ annual award. “Annette Green has long been the workhorse of the Fragrance Foundation. Tonight she is our muse.” Philip Shearer, President, Perfume and Beauty Division, Cosmair and Board Chairman, the Fragrance Foundation who announced the creation of the Annette Green Perfume Museum at the 1999 “FiFi” Awards ceremony. Annette Green brought the art and science of fragrance together as few industry leaders have done before her and since. For those of us with an academic interest in fragrance, she has been a champion of basic research and an enthusiast for the science of smell and its special connection to human pleasure. Gary Beauchamp, Ph. D. Distinguished Member, Director and President Emeritus Monell Chemical Senses Center




The Nose


Book Description

Each year Americans spend billions of dollars on their noses. From over-the-counter sinus remedies to cosmetic surgery, aromatherapy to Chanel no. 5, we are a nation immersed in all things nasal. But how did this one vital organ become an object of beauty, a status symbol, the basis for judging character? What led to the invention of cotton tissues? Why do we follow our noses when seeking a mate -- or choosing a president? The Nose is a fascinating tour of its subject through history and biology, art and culture, sex and sensibility, sickness and health. Gabrielle Glaser breathes life into her research by offering engaging anecdotes and personal interviews with physicians and their patients; members of the FDA and the Fragrance Foundation; a rabbi who contemplates the nose in sacred Jewish texts; and a plastic surgeon who finally puts his own proboscis under the knife. Sure to awaken the senses of anyone who has pondered, probed, concealed, or cosmetically altered their noses, this book proves that there¹s more to the nose than meets the eye.




The Scent of Empires


Book Description

Can a drop of perfume tell the story of the twentieth century? Can a smell bear the traces of history? What can we learn about the history of the twentieth century by examining the fate of perfumes? In this remarkable book, Karl Schlögel unravels the interconnected histories of two of the world’s most celebrated perfumes. In tsarist Russia, two French perfumers – Ernest Beaux and Auguste Michel – developed related fragrances honouring Catherine the Great for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. During the Russian Revolution and Civil War, Beaux fled Russia and took the formula for his perfume with him to France, where he sought to adapt it to his new French circumstances. He presented Coco Chanel with a series of ten fragrance samples in his laboratory and, after smelling each, she chose number five – the scent that would later go by the name Chanel No. 5. Meanwhile, as the perfume industry was being revived in Soviet Russia, Auguste Michel used his original fragrance to create Red Moscow for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. Piecing together the intertwined histories of these two famous perfumes, which shared a common origin, Schlögel tells a surprising story of power, intrigue and betrayal that offers an altogether unique perspective on the turbulent events and high politics of the twentieth century. This brilliant account of perfume and politics in twentieth-century Europe will be of interest to a wide general readership.




Essence and Alchemy


Book Description

For centuries, people have taken what seems to be an instinctive pleasure in rubbing scents into their skin, and using them to pray, to heal, and to make love. Yet in many ways perfumery is a lost art, its creative and sensual possibilities eclipsed by the dominance of synthetic ingredients. In "Essence and Alchemy," winner of the Sense of Smell Institute's Richard B. Solomon Award, Mandy Aftel unearths a forgotten world in which scent was celebrated by poets, contemplated by philosophers, and universally appreciated for its profound resonance with body, mind, and soul. And she seduces the adventurous into experiencing firsthand the pleasures of working with natural essences.




Ornamentalism


Book Description

Original essays by leading scholars on the significance of accessories in the cultural, social, and political lives of men and women in the Renaissance




Vanity Fair


Book Description




The Ephemeral History of Perfume


Book Description

In contrast to the other senses, smell has long been thought of as too elusive, too fleeting for traditional historical study. Holly Dugan disagrees, arguing that there are rich accounts documenting how men and women produced, consumed, and represented perfumes and their ephemeral effects. She delves deeply into the cultural archive of olfaction to explore what a sense of smell reveals about everyday life in early modern England. In this book, Dugan focuses on six important scents -- incense, rose, sassafras, rosemary, ambergris, and jasmine. She links these smells to the unique spaces they inhabited -- churches, courts, contact zones, plague-ridden households, luxury markets, and pleasure gardens -- and the objects used to dispense them. This original approach provides a rare opportunity to study how early modern men and women negotiated the environment in their everyday lives and the importance of smell to their daily actions. Dugan defines perfume broadly to include spices, flowers, herbs, animal parts, trees, resins, and other ingredients used to produce artificial scents, smokes, fumes, airs, balms, powders, and liquids. In researching these Renaissance aromas, Dugan uncovers the extraordinary ways, now largely lost, that people at the time spoke and wrote about smell: objects "ambered, civited, expired, fetored, halited, resented, and smeeked" or were described as "breathful, embathed, endulced, gracious, halited, incensial, odorant, pulvil, redolent, and suffite." A unique contribution to early modern studies, The Ephemeral History of Perfume is an unparalleled study of olfaction in the Renaissance, a period in which new scents and important cultural theories about smell were developed. Dugan's inspired analysis of a wide range of underexplored sources makes available to scholars a remarkable wealth of information on the topic.