Month: February 2012

Heartsongs for a Heritage

  – a review of Neela Vermeire Créations

Far away from where I type these words lies a land that has fired and inspired Western minds for over two thousand years. A land so vast, so diverse, so rich, so teeming with life and history it seems to exist somewhere in the Occidental mind between legend and reality, in time and yet somehow above it, only fitting after all for a culture that also gave the world the concept of ‘the eternal now’. Conquering armies have marched across its plains and deserts, through its jungles and mountains in search of its riches and spices, writers and adventurers took its ideas and concepts back to an incredulous Europe, who thought they surely exaggerated, only those Europeans who did come found the stories they were told, the books they had read were far too simple to even begin to describe the world-within-this-world that was, that is and that always has been…

India.

For all I know myself about ancient history and even India’s history, for all my future plans to visit Kerala and Tamil Nadu just to start, for all my favorite Indian-born writers, I’m yet another gobsmacked European trying to wrap my mind around all it was and even is today. When I first began sketching out ideas for my review, I did a brainstorming association exercise first, writing down every adjective or noun that came to mind with the one noun that was India. I counted fifty-five before I had to actually think about the next one, such is the scale of its scope on my imagination.

When the perfumosphere first began to exude rumors of the new niche brand Neela Vermeire Creations shortly before Elements NY, which is where I first read of them on The CandyPerfumeBoy, those first intimations of intrigue and wafts of (imagined) wonders pricked at my relentless curiosity and my nose began to dream in an instant of all this trio of perfumes could evoke and all they might contain.

When Indian-born Neela Vermeire, who is trained in social sciences and has worked as a lawyer, decided to create her own tributes to her Indian childhood, she worked for over a year with Bertrand Duchaufour to pay homage to three aspects of India – the ancient past of the Vedic era of legend, lore and faith with Trayee – the glorious era of the Moghal Empire and the British Raj with Mohur – and the modern, exuberant India of today with Bombay Bling.

Just as friends who traveled to India have said time after time … ‘It was nothing like I thought it would be’, they turned out to be nothing like anything my paltry imagination could conjure.

Trayee is a tribute to the Vedic era, that time of legend contained in the Vedas, in the many stories of the Mahabharata and the tales of that far distant beginning when the world began, the sacred texts of the Vedas with their hymns, their prayers and their songs. Trayee is the perfume of spirit and devotion, the scent of Indian temples with their spices and their prayers ascending to the Gods in a cloud of color and all the holy fragrances of faith. It starts with a bright, uplifting opening of ginger and cinnamon, with an underlying pine-lemon slightly animalic undertone I suspect is the blackcurrant, but as it evolves a wisp of sacred incense, cardamom and jasmine sambac (one of my most favorite notes) peek out and dance their own devotion on my skin and I become my own cliché – transported elsewhere and otherwise to where that seamless blend of spice and wood, oudh and oakmoss somehow manage to weave my many fragmented selves into a prayer all my own. Like not a few Duchaufour creations I’ve tried, the list of notes – complex as they are – read several shades of ‘how-is-this-possible?’, but the evolution is flawless – from that first heady rush of spice all the way through to the rich, earthy, woody drydown breathing its many shades of ‘divine’. I would characterize Trayee as a uniquely transcendental perfume, transporting me to where ritual may be complicated yet true faith is very simple, and for truly evoking that sense of sanctity and history, a perfumed prayer all its own, and those are as rare as unicorns and as precious as any Indian rubies!

Notes for Trayee: Top: Blue ginger from Madagascar, elemi oil, cinnamon bark, ganja effects, blackcurrant absolute, basil Heart: Jasmine sambac absolute, Egyptian jasmine absolute, cardamom absolute, clove, saffron, sandalwood Base: Javanese vetiver, Haitian vetiver, incense, Mysore sandalwood oil, patchouli, myrrh, vanilla, cedar, amber notes, oudh palao from Laos, oakmoss 

Mohur – named for the most valuable gold coin India made until 1918 –  is another facet to the many-hued jewel that is India, a tribute to the glorious, opulent era of the Moghul Empire and the British Raj and to one woman in particular who shaped the Moghul era like perhaps no woman before or since. Her name became Nur Jahan, meaning ‘The Light of the World’, and when she arrived at the court of the Emperor Shah Jahangar in 1607 as a widow, it took no time at all for him to decide that she should become his wife number twenty, and still less when – so their many love stories go – he never touched wives 1 through 19 ever again. Noor Jahan ruled as the unquestioned power behind the throne for over twenty years before a palace revolt exiled her. She devoted the remainder of her days to the art of perfume making.

I can well imagine, if Mohur is anything to go by, that it could have been one of the very perfumes Nur Jahan could have made for herself, or – as I think the intention was here – to create the quintessence of …rose, but not just any rose. Just as Trayee, it begins with a spicy, fiery kick, this time of cardamom and coriander, intimations of musky ambrette and carrot and that incandescent black pepper and before you know it, that fatal, flawless beauty, a veritable Maharani of rose unfurls in slow-motion beneath your nose, defying every rosy perfume cliché you think you know to define something larger than life yet as intricate as any inlaid jewels on a marble Moghul-era façade, with a suggestion of richly tooled leather and a gossamer-fine embroidered veil of violet and orris. A veil that slowly slips to the floor to reveal all this rose’s darkest secrets of wood and oud in sparkling shades of light and dark, patchouli and amber, before it vanishes in a rosy dream with a last sweet sigh of goodbye and vanilla, benzoin and tonka bean. I grasp at the words here, desperately thumbing through thesaurus and dictionary trying to find some description that does it justice, before I realize I’ve written it already.

A Maharani…of rose.

Notes for Mohur: Top: Cardamom absolute, coriander seed oil, ambrette seed, carrot, black pepper, elemi oil Heart: Turkish rose oil, Moroccan rose absolute, 11% rose accords, jasmine accord, orris, aubepin flower, almond milk notes, violet flower and orris, leather vitessence Base: Sandalwood, amber, white woods, patchouli, oudh palao from Laos, Siam benzoin, vanilla, tonka bean

It’s all too easy to overlook the modern India when you’re sideswiped by 5000+ years of history and heritage. Yet modern India doesn’t live in the past or for the future but in the ever-evolving ‘now’ with all the endless exuberance and energy a young population can bring. This is Neela’s wink to the India of today, with the over-the-top glamour of Bollywood dream factories to the streets of south Mumbai and the hectic, glitzy nightclubs where beautiful Bollywood film stars dance the night away with instant stock market millionaires. I came to discover during my research, for instance, that there is a very ritzy nightclub in Mumbai called…Bling!

If you read the notes and reach for the smelling salts or your running shoes to run a mile the other way, dear reader, let me say this is not your deathly ubiquitous fruity-floral generic joke, this is instead a bubbly, happy, day-glo colored perfumed dream that zaps you awake in all the best, most joyous ways, so effervescent, you won’t dare a peep of protest but simply surrender, just as I did, to that intriguing tropical blend of green mango and lychee, with the blackcurrant, cardamom, cistus and cumin adding their own sultry midnight heat. As it develops, the florals – a heady, glorious mix of floral notes that include jasmine sambac, ylang ylang, tuberose, frangipani and gardenia – bloom and sing and dance, and it’s all you can do not to dance a little Busby Berkeley/Bollywood number of your own. Just…roll with it, feel as young and as carefree as you dare, dance the night away and watch the sun rise along with your hopes and your optimism, sense all the colors of life on your skin bloom. A plush drydown of patchouli and tobacco and sandalwood will set you gently down again and make you think in possibilities you thought were too old and jaded to envision – but you weren’t! Life is the eternal ‘now’. Live it!

Notes for Bombay Bling: Top: Mango, lychee, blackcurrant, cardamom, cumin, cistus, rose accord, Turkish rose Heart:  jasmine sambac absolute, Madagascar ylang ylang, white floral accord of tuberose, frangipani, gardenia Base: Patchouli, tobacco, white woods, sandalwood, cedar, vanilla

As a perfume writer, I’m no stranger to the hyperbole of press releases and sometimes hysterically overwrought copy not even I could cook up. I tear my hair out every time I try to express the intangible and describe the perfumes I have the supreme luck to experience. Many have been marvels. Some have made their own way into my perfume cabinet and into my heartstrings and because I’m a hapless if hopeful romantic – in spite of all my life has taught me – there they remain, arguing amongst themselves like the harem of any Moghul emperor… ‘which one will her Majesty pick today?’ ‘Me!’ ‘Me!’ ‘Me!’

This can make anyone a little – or more than a little… jaded. With thousands of new releases a year, with the constant clamor of ‘New!’ ‘Astounding!’ and hyper-luxurious price tags, there’s no lack of wafting wolves out to eat my money or feed my fragrant addictions.

Yet the kind of fragrant transport, the storied genies, the ghosts of a distant past and all the dimensions of teeming, swirling, dancing multitudes of color and life and spice contained in just three sample vials from a brand new line have utterly, completely taken my breath and certainly my words away. I could have said – as my friend Olfactoria once famously did: ‘Great juice! Go buy it!’

Instead, I will say that  each of these extraordinary jeweled juices that travel through time and place have a heartbeat of heritage and an exuberant future ahead.

Life is the eternal ‘now’. Live it!

Neela Vermeire Creations is available at Luckyscent, Jovoy Paris, Parfümerie Osswald in Zürich, Sündhaft München, and directly from Neela Vermeire’s website, where sample sets are also sold.

Images: Vedic artwork of the Shiva in his aspect as Dakshinamurthy, guru and teacher of all knowledge & the Next and Last Incarnation of Lord Vishnu from vedic-art.weebly.com

Image of Nur Jahan: exoticindia.fr

The garden of Diwan-i-Am, Fatehpur Sikri, Uttar Pradesh from gordonbrentingram.ca

Indian Bride, worldstylo.blogspot.com

Photo of the Mumbai skyline known as ‘The Queen’s Necklace’, classygal.wordpress.com

Disclosure: Samples were sent to me for review by Neela Vermeire

The Chill, Paradoxical Hand of Heat

–       a review of Serge Lutens’ ‘L’Eau Froide’

Among perfumistas, the degree of dedication is often delineated by our love of…’skank’, that handy catch-all phrase of all that is animal, dirty or even sexy in perfume. Civet, castoreum, musk and even cumin have all been used in perfumes for hundreds of years to denote a frisson of ardor and heated sensuality, something to bring out the inner animal hiding within. Many immortal pre-reformulation perfumes and even a few modern ones are testaments to ‘la bête sensuelle’, the sensual (if human) beast: Jicky and Shalimar, Bandit, the original Miss Dior and Bal à Versailles or even Francis Kurkdjian’s recent and audacious Absolue pour le Soir, all of them not so innocent at all!

Yet in the mainstream world since the Nineties, clean reigns supreme. Clean as in white musk, clean as in freshly laundered clothing, newly showered bodies…anything that elevates the human animal above its baser self into some rarified, intellectual level of being where we are all whiter than white, nearly abstract concepts, dreaming only the purest and most salient of dreams. It simply wouldn’t do to sully our surroundings with salacious, sexy scents, it was impolite to advertise any seductive intent in our scent trails, to blatantly lay claim to our own…bête humaine.

So while the world continued its love affair with hygiene and perfumes that accented the aquatic, ethereal and non-offensive, the alchemist duo of Serge Lutens and Christopher Sheldrake were meanwhile creating fragrant, fevered odes to the Orient, the very antithesis of trends and fashions, all of which celebrated that inner animal we took such pains to conceal. Perfumes that were difficult and challenging, journeys to far and distant places under foreign heated suns, phantasms that always took you by surprise, that delivered the unexpected.

I’ve since come to discover that M. Lutens likes few things more than the element of surprise unless it would be olfactory puns, and should he be able to combine the two, then so much the better!

That became very clear (all puns intended) when L’Eau was released in 2010 to more or less universal disbelief in the perfume community. It seemed almost an act of sacrilege and betrayal – from the house that gave us so many outrageously opulent creations with all their many convoluted twists and turns of evolution came this ode to The Clean Machine, the very antithesis of all fumes Lutens.

One thing I will say – it got the perfume community talking! About such mundane banalities as laundry detergent, soap, spray starch – all those defining elements of ‘clean’ we tend to take so much for granted in our quotidian lives, and for a Lutens/Sheldrake creation, that was likely the worst sacrilege of all. Motives were discussed on perfume boards and blogs, howls were heard on all sides, and redemption didn’t entirely arrive until the release of the Palais Royal exclusive Boxeuses.

It was not that it was bad, not that it was generic (although many begged to disagree), but that it was a Lutens, and, so the mindset went, as such surely above such mainstream clichés?

I liked it so much, I drained both my samples. You see, I suspected – apart from M. Lutens’ definite sense of mischief in pulling out that Persian rug beneath our perfumed feet – that those outraged perfumoholics were missing a rather valid point – some days, sometimes, all you want to do is be clean and presentable and wear a perfectly ironed shirt, and let them think what they will. Life is quite complicated enough, thank you.

L’Eau to my unsophisticated nose was long-lasting, citrus-y and mint-inflected. It smelled like the very best quality soap you can imagine, a thick towel, and a perfectly ironed linen shirt you don after a long and wearing day and in one simple gesture, your sense of well-being returns. No thrills, no spills and no surprises, unless it was that flinty, mineral drydown that added a little extra steel to my spine. It got me compliments. More than anything else, it got me out the door in a lot less time, since I didn’t have to think which impression I wanted to make. It would be good. The rest – as even the concept behind it – was…immaterial.

Two years on, right when I’ve become accustomed to Oriental carpet rides in bottles and scented journeys through time and space, here we are again with ‘L’Eau Froide’, another angle on ‘clean’, only this time, those perfumed waters are so very, very cold…

With ‘L’Eau Froide’, the focus is on frankincense. Frankincense – one of my most favorite notes in perfume – is surely one of the most astounding materials known to man. The scraggly, unkempt tree of deep desert and rocky crags known as Boswellia comes in several varieties that are literally nothing at all alike. The same species of tree – say, Boswellia carterii – will be richly floral and lemony in Oman, resinous and pine-like in Yemen. Boswellia serrata, the frankincense of India, has an earthy, spicy, slightly patchouli facet.

The Boswellia sacra of Somalia which is highlighted in ‘L’Eau Froide’, unlike its siblings and cousins elsewhere for all it grows in similarly arid, hot locations, is the frankincense of… paradox. Its scent is literally glacial.

I’m lucky enough to have five different versions of frankincense to compare and even a small censer to burn them in. To make sure, I burned all five at different times: Hojari and Silver from Oman, Serrata from India, Carterii from Yemen and Sacra from Somalia. All were glorious, but only the Somali made my seven-year-old complain that it was ‘cold’.

I have no notes for ‘L’Eau Froide’ and so no expectations of trying to find elusive elements that may or may not be there. Instead, there is that same airy kick of citrus, a herbal element that could be rosemary and pine, a cool kiss of eucalyptus to wake you up and make you breathe it deeper. As it develops – which it does, slowly and stealthily – that chill frisson of frankincense comes forward on my skin, and it becomes far less soapy and much more mineral, with an earthy, pine forest feel that reminds me of the background taste of spring water, filtered through layers of stone and bubbling out its icy secrets for you to discover. That frigid frankincense is very much present throughout, and never loses that deathless desert chill until very much later, when musk finally manages to wrap its own warmth around it.

To my idiosyncratic nose, ‘L’Eau Froide’ is nothing like its more aquatic sibling, nor even anything like those many generic aquatic scents that pass for ‘masculine’ perfumes these days. It’s denser and richer and far more unique, definitely unisex.

Perfect for those days you need a little extra resolve, some added high grade steel in your spine, a touch of bright distance to let you concentrate on those all-important abstract tasks of your day, wrapped in that chilly, perfect paradox of heat.

I predict it will be used often precisely for those days I would prefer the world at a slight remove, the better to observe ‘la bête humaine’ in all its many guises and myriads of scents, the days when life becomes quite complicated enough, those days the writer watches life unfold around her for inspiration.

I also predict that not everyone will like it. It is indeed strange, it is indeed cold, it is a deep, deep breath by a hidden, secret spring, and not all secrets are always…appreciated!

As for the mischievous M. Lutens, we can only guess at his intention. But as he stated in the press release:

“I’d say it’s crystal clear.”

I have a giveaway! Leave a comment by midnight CET, Sunday the 26th of February for your chance to try ‘L’Eau Froide’ for yourself. A winner will be chosen by random.org.

L’Eau Froide is now available from the Serge Lutens website, and will be available worldwide in March.

Disclosure: My sample was provided for review by Serge Lutens.

Two Laughs In Winter’s Spite

–  reviews of Parfum d’Empire’s ‘Yuzu Fou’ and ‘Azemour les Orangers’

In Norse mythology, the end of the world as we know it will be preceded by a fimbulwinter, three years of burning ice and barren, brutal cold and snow that kills all hopes almost all of humanity and all possibilities, not least the possibility that winter will ever come to an end.

Buried in the minuscule Ice Age that has hit Europe these past few weeks, I can rather relate to that concept of never-ending winter. Now, in the frozen black cat nights of February, it seems as if this vicious, dry cold will never end, as if spring is only an impossible dream conjured up from fevered tales of light and heat by some delirious Northern mind desperate for anything at all to warm its chilled blood and frigid heart.

Not mine. It’s time to haul out the big guns, to dream those lighter, warmer thoughts, time to conjure up a djinn of sun and heat and happy. And in my own ever-expanding olfactory universe of wafting wonders, with all I’ve come to learn and love, for dreams of warmth and joy I fall back on an olfactory memory from my childhood and a fruit tree that more than any other tree spells light, breathes heat and exudes happy like no other.

At the age of eight, I moved from Virginia Beach to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and in one fell swoop, my life was no longer the same. Instead of hunting for apples to steal off a stranger’s tree, we searched for the mangoes that grew in gardens everywhere, and those glowing orange fruits I was once convinced grew in cartons at the supermarket I could suddenly find anywhere I went, in backyards and front lawns, growing in public parks, glowing through the foliage on the way to school in their perpetual, summery glow.

Ever since, whenever I’ve needed to think ‘happy’, when I seek to breathe joy in an instant, nothing at all takes me back so quickly as the scent of…orange. I remember a day in spring I came home from school and had to wait for my mother to return from work, and so I sat on a swing in the shade of the orange, grapefruit and lemon trees in our garden, fruit burning their color through the dark, glossy green of the leaves and the heady, hypnotic, narcotic sensuous perfume of orange blossom in the afternoon heat. Somehow, under that searing subtropical sun, the memory of that afternoon, that orange tree, those blossoms twinkling like fragrant stars amid the verdant leaves became equated with ‘happy’, ‘heat’ and ‘joy’ ever after.

Lo and behold, these (too) many years later, I can open a tiny vial and I am there again… with all my childhood dreams concocted beneath an orange tree, and these many years later, they are not so very changed and the woman I have become is not so very different from that girl on a swing, conjuring all the possibilities for a future that ‘orange’ and all that word implies and all those blossoms made her believe.

The French niche line of Parfum d’Empire was a line I first encountered through a sample sent to me by Helg of Perfumeshrine, when she enclosed ‘Iskander’ with a sample I won in a draw on her blog. ‘Iskander’ was an olfactory tribute to that inspiration of the ages, Alexander the Great, a tribute to the conquests and wonders he encountered through his short yet epic life. That was an immensely appealing idea to a diehard classicist like me, and I’ve come to discover that the Parfum d’Empire line has a definite dedication to those inspirations from the past – inspirations of travel and adventure, history and heritage – what wasn’t to love about that concept for a history-obsessed budding perfume writer?

Quite a lot I learned, for now Marc Antoine Corticchiato, perfumer and founder of Parfum d’Empire, has moved from world history to personal history and pays tribute to both his childhood and the ancient pilgrimage city of Azemmour in Morocco with his latest creation, Azemour les Orangers.

If I ever thought to capture my happiest childhood memories in a perfume, starting with my personal Tree of Life, the orange tree, then Azemour les Orangers would be it.

Here is … that eternal tree of my life, too, from the tips of its glossy leaves to its snowy white blossoms, from the twigs and the bark to the glowing orange fruit from zest to juice to pith, the sun-baked earth beneath the tree and a sentient green, salty-sweet breeze blowing in from the ocean close by. It isn’t literal in the sense of, say, Andy Tauer’s Orange Star, and miles removed from another favorite orange blossom of mine, the utterly opulent Serge Lutens’ Fleurs d’Oranger, but it has an extraordinary sense of place and time, not least for being that elusive unicorn creature I never thought I would live to see…an orange chypre.

Breathe it all the way in and you are…there…fully and entirely present in a moment beneath that tree, beneath that warm blue sky, with a waft of the souk around the corner to help shock your senses aware and at one with the tree above you and all it simply is, with the dusty, smoky-sunshine scented earth beneath your feet and a restive whiff of salt and sea wrapping all this wonder in an olfactory bow and tying it up for your pleasure in an emerald green, mossy knot. Moss as in oakmoss, that defining element of chypre that grounds and binds and enriches so many of my great immortal perfumes, a bold and defiant and definite green song to summer all its own.

Most orange-based perfumes with a few exceptions are lighthearted, flirty creations that laugh and giggle and are gone with a song on a summer breeze. Not Azemour les Orangers. I’ve tested this five times on different days, and every time, it has surprised me with its evolution and that green, earthy depth. Sometimes spicier, sometimes cooler and saltier, sometimes with the orange blossom unfolding before my nose in its own ode to joy, and always with the heartbeat of earthy heat and verdant happy that reminds me – lest I become blasé – why I love what I do and why I love to breathe as I do. It is neither old-fashioned nor generically modern, but classic in the best sense, constructed with an elegant sleight-of-hand that keeps my nose marveling that such wonders exist and can be found – even in the freezing black cat nights of a fimbulwinter February that seem to never, ever end.

Yuzu Fou, another of Marc Antoine Corticchiato’s creations, shares some notes in common with Azemour les Orangers, but this is a very different take on bottled sunshine with a remarkably different effect.

Supposedly an antidote to the frantic pace of Japanese urban life, I get something entirely different from it. I swear that inside my tiny sample bottle is an imp jumping up and down, singing…

”Wake up! Wake up! Your hibernation is almost over!”

With its zesty open of singing yuzu, grapefruit, orange and kumquat, I am not only awake and aware, but happy about it, too, dancing out the front door leaving a minty-green, kicky verbena trail in the frozen air behind me and nothing at all will ever drag my spirits down this day of all days, I shall grab the world by the tail and show it what I’m worth today. Yuzu Fou is yet another kind of happy, happy in an energetic, upbeat fashion, happy to exude its endless optimism in the face of winter.

But that’s not all Yuzu Fou (Crazy Yuzu) is and not all it remains, because just as with Azemour les Orangers, Yuzu Fou is nothing if not surprising. As that effervescent citrus, verbena and mint fade, it shows a far more contemplative face. Green bamboo accord is listed in the notes along with cedarwood and white musk, and I wonder if they give it that definite feel of Japanese incense I’ve met in other perfumes, adding up to something reminiscent of hinoki but greener, calmer and thoroughly confidence -enhancing.

If current scientific research is anything to go by, the scent of grapefruit can make your surroundings believe you’re up to ten years younger than you are, and at my age, that’s not something to sneeze at! As it dries down and evolves, I feel more and more Zen with every breath, more whole, more centered and less fragmented and believe it or not – still a hopeless optimist!

Both Azemour les Orangers and Yuzu Fou are two defiant, life-affirming laughs in the face of winter, bottled joys to remind you as you breathe them in and marvel as they evolve that no winter will last forever – not even this one!

The Parfum d’Empire line is available at Luckyscent, First in Fragrance and Les Senteurs, as well as directly from the Parfum d’Empire website.

Disclosure: Samples were sent courtesy of the utterly fabulous Nick of Les Senteurs. Nick now has at least twelve more reasons to be thanked  – and adored!

Notes for Azemour les Orangers: Orange, clementine, tangerine, grapefruit, coriander, black and pink pepper, galbanum, cassis, neroli, geranium, orange blossom absolute, rose, hay, oakmoss, henna, woods.

Notes for Yuzu Fou: Yuzu, kumquat, sweet and bitter orange, mint, verbena, neroli, green bamboo accord, cedarwood, white musk.

A whiff of perdition…

The Devilscent Project

A year ago, I had a little project-for-fun on my old blog, Scent Less Sensibilities, in collaboration with Doc Elly of Olympic Orchids. We called it Devilscent. The idea was to create a scent for the Devil as he is portrayed in my rock’n’roll Faustian novel, Quantum Demonology.

What do you know, dear readers, it is now a year later and things have…changed! 

I want to get Quantum Demonology out there, out to where it becomes a viral phenomenon, out where someone wants to get it in print, get it in Kindles, on iPads, and who knows where it could go from there? And what better way to do it in a way no one has ever quite done before – through the medium of…perfume?

A year later, Doc Elly is still very much a part of it. But so are several other very distinguished niche perfumers and some of the best perfume writers and bloggers in the blogosphere.

A year later, we’re going to take it to the next level. Through Facebook, through Twitter, through social media and PR and through the words of our bloggers and the perfumes our perfumers will create for the Devil – not your usual brand of Evil Incarnate – and for his much malcontented wife, Lilith, Queen of the Succubi.

Because in this version, the Devil stalks our hapless Faust, haunts her many dreams and lures her to perdition through…a perfume.

But what would such perfumes be – and what havoc could they wreak?

Read all about it in the weeks to come!