First it is a personal vision of beauty / fragrance / world. Usually it starts by its own definition of fragrance like:
- fragrance is pure abstraction
- fragrance is the reinvention of Nature
- fragrance is the quintessence of Nature
- fragrance is in the end only sex, sex, sex
- fragrance is just ornament, etc.
Every possible definition brings ideas about the fragrance type. The first one is only about inventing smells that do no exist, with a great attention to avoid any evocative power. The second is about illusion and figurative perfumery. The third would be about how to distill in metaphors natural smells / products / sensations. The final one is about fragrances that surround you like an air and never make a statement - the essence of impalpable and undescriptible.
Second, a manifesto is about style and manner, about the art of composing.
Is it baroque or minimal, is it operatic or Bach music?
Is it contrasted or very smooth like a nocturne from Chopin ?
Is it expressionist, impressionist, primitive, neoclassical like Ingres ?
Is it a sculptural fragrance (shapes molded in volume), a pictorial (ingredients with same type of evaporation with contrasts played on shades and not on the scale of time), decorative (like embroidery or oriental calligraphy, an intricate never-ending ornament where nothing is obvious or dominant), etc?
What is more important - the contrast between elements with strong individuality (cold cardamom and velvety Iso E Super) or the proportion between them (patchouli-coumarine-eugenol)?
Is it a general shape made out of 4-5 elements or is it a suite of several stories, a narrative fragrance with several sequential themes?
Is it Jacques Ange Gabriel architecture or Zaha Hadid?
Third, a manifesto is about what you put and what you reject inside the perfume.
Is it about a restrained selection of materials or more about the general style of composing?
Is it about a recognizable fingerprint (an accord, a raw material) or about a more abstract idea like freshness, opulence, etc?
What is the personal vision on general fragrance families? What is "your oriental"?
In classic painting when I was trained, I was told not to use black but to recreate if from other colors and to avoid the black line around objects in the definition of volumes. Both Toulouse Lautrec, Gruau or Buffet made out of this their stamp.
Forth … there are so many other ideas to be written here with the risk of becoming iconoclast.
The mistake of many brands today including niche is the desire to offer the entire spectrum of possible fragrance families without a personal interpretation / vision.
- fragrance is pure abstraction
- fragrance is the reinvention of Nature
- fragrance is the quintessence of Nature
- fragrance is in the end only sex, sex, sex
- fragrance is just ornament, etc.
Every possible definition brings ideas about the fragrance type. The first one is only about inventing smells that do no exist, with a great attention to avoid any evocative power. The second is about illusion and figurative perfumery. The third would be about how to distill in metaphors natural smells / products / sensations. The final one is about fragrances that surround you like an air and never make a statement - the essence of impalpable and undescriptible.
Second, a manifesto is about style and manner, about the art of composing.
Is it baroque or minimal, is it operatic or Bach music?
Is it contrasted or very smooth like a nocturne from Chopin ?
Is it expressionist, impressionist, primitive, neoclassical like Ingres ?
Is it a sculptural fragrance (shapes molded in volume), a pictorial (ingredients with same type of evaporation with contrasts played on shades and not on the scale of time), decorative (like embroidery or oriental calligraphy, an intricate never-ending ornament where nothing is obvious or dominant), etc?
What is more important - the contrast between elements with strong individuality (cold cardamom and velvety Iso E Super) or the proportion between them (patchouli-coumarine-eugenol)?
Is it a general shape made out of 4-5 elements or is it a suite of several stories, a narrative fragrance with several sequential themes?
Is it Jacques Ange Gabriel architecture or Zaha Hadid?
Third, a manifesto is about what you put and what you reject inside the perfume.
Is it about a restrained selection of materials or more about the general style of composing?
Is it about a recognizable fingerprint (an accord, a raw material) or about a more abstract idea like freshness, opulence, etc?
What is the personal vision on general fragrance families? What is "your oriental"?
In classic painting when I was trained, I was told not to use black but to recreate if from other colors and to avoid the black line around objects in the definition of volumes. Both Toulouse Lautrec, Gruau or Buffet made out of this their stamp.
Forth … there are so many other ideas to be written here with the risk of becoming iconoclast.
The mistake of many brands today including niche is the desire to offer the entire spectrum of possible fragrance families without a personal interpretation / vision.
Photo: Ingres, Oedip and the Sphynx
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Fragrance is the 8th Art - Octavian Coifan - Le Parfum est le 8ème Art
