Perfumes, or poetry of the intangible

What’s more intangible than the poetry perfumes release ?

Perfumes, because they are linked with our sense of smell, the most uncontrollable and mysterious of all our senses, can be the source of intense emotions and extraordinary experiences. From the borders of sin to the frontier of the scared, perfumes stir up our desires and our passions, drawing us into unexplored regions of our emotions and the lost paradise of our memory.

The magic of perfume is that we think we possess them, but they constantly bring us new delight. We think we know them well, but they remain elusive. They are part of us and yet they escape us. They speak to us but we are unable to transcribe their imperceptible harmonies. Perfumes tell of childhood, distant lands, of ecstasy and of the secret rhythms of the world. Perfumes enable us to hear the deafening silence of love.

The Art of perfume is above all, a pleasure. Because odours possess that very rare power of capturing the precise essence of happiness, so difficult to define or formulate. The same is true for love…

An attraction to perfume is never neutral but rather expresses our deepest aspirations. To choose a perfume is to talk about oneself in veiled terms, but it is also to reveal one’s true character. Indeed, perfume is a garment which can develop us, but which sometimes, without knowing it, unmasks us.

They are encapsulated myths, that Emmanuel Ungaro beautifully definded as “at the same time masculine and feminine, fragile and tyrannical, steeped in contradictions.”

Perfume is synonymous of passion and patience…

Coco Chanel used to say that one should wear perfume when she or he’d like to be kissed.

“She left a short while ago

And yet remains near me

With her perfume still

Alive, still warm

From her body, so intoxicating”

Fourteenth-century Chinese poem