The Art of Parfum

Niche has become a marketing category rather than a description, which makes it close to useless as a signal. Plenty of niche houses are owned by the same conglomerates as the designer brands they position themselves against. What follows is how to tell, and what to actually look for. What

Danish perfumery is recent enough that most of it has happened in the last fifteen years. There is no long tradition here of the kind France has. What there is instead is a design culture that arrived first and set the terms. Why it looks the way it does Danish

Perfumery is a manufacturing process with an unusual amount of judgement in it. The chemistry is not especially exotic. What takes time is deciding what to leave out. Getting the materials Naturals come out of plants by three main routes. Steam distillation is the oldest and still the most common.

Layering means wearing two fragrances at once so that the result is something neither of them is alone. It is worth knowing that most attempts fail, and that the failures are predictable. Why it usually goes wrong Every fragrance is already a finished composition. It has been balanced so that

Fragrance families are a filing system, not a law. They were invented to help people talk about perfume, and they are useful right up until the point you start treating them as rules. Still, if you are trying to work out what you like, they are the fastest way to

Quiet luxury became a phrase people use to sell things, which has more or less emptied it of meaning. Underneath the phrase there is still a real idea, and in perfume it is quite specific. What it actually means in fragrance A quiet fragrance is not a weak one. Weak

Rose is the most expensive flower in perfumery and the most overused word in its marketing. Almost everything described as a rose fragrance contains no rose at all. That is not necessarily a criticism. It is worth understanding why. The arithmetic It takes somewhere in the region of three to

Lavender has a problem. Most people meet it in soap, in cleaning products and in things designed to help them sleep, so by the time it turns up in a perfume it arrives carrying luggage. That is a shame, because as a perfumery material it is far stranger and more

Every perfume house has a shortlist it keeps coming back to. Not the bestsellers, and not the ones that win prizes, but the compositions that still work thirty years after they were made, when the trend that produced them has long since passed. What follows is not a ranking. It