You should read the book "The Emperor of Scent" if you haven't! It’s about a scent scientist and perfume savant (he wrote one of the bestselling perfume guides of all time), how / why we smell the way we do, and the drama of French perfume houses. Non-fiction but reads like a crime drama.
What happened to Chandler Burr?! I used to love his regular column in the Times. It would seem like a prime opportunity for the Times to bring him back, like yesterday.
A dear friend of mine is a fragrance engineer at one of the major fragrance houses and has been there for 7+ yrs since graduating as a chemical engineer. The yrs of training they put engineers through to become a "nose" and create fragranced products is no joke - they are tied up with non-competes that seem more serious than financial institutions. Its been crazy to learn about how the fragrance interacts with all elements of the product it goes into - between the actual smell, how to bottle, stabilizing, potential chemical interactions etc. its a complicated business! Also learning about what is considered and marketed as "natural" in fragrance ...
As I was in this class, all the tomato fragrances were getting really popular (flamingo estate, etc.) and our professors thought it was funny that people thought they could be natural, because tomatoes don’t have any oils to give off to create fragrance. They’re all synthetic and that’s not a bad thing! But that whole thought exercise really stuck with me. I’d love to speak to your friend, such a fascinating industry.
I'm still on a cloud from last night's Mets victory at Citi Field. I'll send you a picture and let you know if Andrew and I are going to go to a game next week. It's always been cooler to be a Mets fan than a Yankees fan because we're always the underdog team.
As a Yankee fan pulling his hair just about every pitch in this Royals series, watching the Mets feels like seeing kids get to go outside at recess while you’re stuck in a classroom.
I love perfume and I spend a lot of time on Tiktok and the sundry subreddits and I have many opinions about fragrance collection and fragrance "fandom", the biggest one being that the giant collections creep me out, as well as the people with the giant collections who also buy four backup bottles of scents that aren't discontinued that they've never put a dent in. The whole Kayali Silk Santal drop had people doing nutty things like blind buying five bottles.
Blind buying is also nuts. You see people spending hundreds of dollars because they saw a few videos saying "this perfume is my biggest compliment getter" or "this perfume is the best gourmand" and they get it and then start complaining that all the perfume people are lying because they don't like the scent. There's no discernment. I'd never order something with a lot of tuberose, for example, because my mean grandmother bathed in Fracas and to me it's the scent of being told "your legs look chunky" so even if a perfume influencer I otherwise trusted raved about something with a lot of tuberose I'd never buy it.
I personally get weirdly panicky if I have too many bottles and I've spent a lot of time trying to whittle what I have down. I very rarely buy full bottles. Currently I have six and two of them are Zara dupes I could probably deaccession. I scratch my itch for novelty by buying samples and a Scentbox subscription. I love smelling new scents and one of my friends and I trade the samples and decants amongst ourselves.
hi, perfumer here. I know there's a pile of marketing misinformation, fear-mongering, and confusion in the fragrance space. Happy to answer any ingredient/formulation questions best I can.
That natural = safe; that notes = ingredients; and that there are a large number of dupes in the big brands because perfumers have no IP. Master perfumer Christophe Laudamiel is an incredible resource for information about this.
Paradisi by Scottish perfumer Euan McCall who has his own brand Jorum Studios and works for other brands like the kinda nuts Neandertal.
Warm Bulb by Clue Perfumery - it has a burning dust note & was in this year's Art & Olfaction Artisan awards (the best resource for the best new smells).
And perfumer Michael Nordstrand's fragrance workshops at The Met - he is so sweet, has incredible knowledge, and just did a class on what unicorns smell like!
I took the fragrance course at Pratt in 2014 and loved it. It’s been weird watching niche perfumery blow up lately—so much of it is bad!!! Appreciate your putting in the work of taking a class before writing about it!
Lots of things are considered harmful to our health including cleaning supplies and artificial foods (I'm guessing you're referring to hormone disruptors and carcinogens?) -- I know MERIT specifically uses non-toxic ingredients and avoids irritants in their products.
But with fragrance, whether it's cleaning supplies or detergents or fragrance, everyone has to pick their battles.
Very interested in the class. I keep looking into continuing education classes at parsons (where I went for college) and NYU but the prices are shocking… was FIT in the realm of reality?
i have already gotten myself on the waitlist for a class. thank you for this reminder!!! i needed to remember FIT and 92Y have great affordable classes.
I wrote about Ffern here. TLDR it’s lovely and also I’m a huge sucker. My daughter (13) saves every last time to buy every fragrance that Sol De Janero sells. So much we considered buying shares of L’Occitaine.
I compulsively buy fragrance samples and roller balls but never commit to a big bottle. But when I do, it will be from Thin Wild Mercury. Her scents smell like nothing else. I think you’d like Girl of the Year, Emily. Or potentially Chateau, which is supposed to smell like the Chateau Marmont. Chateau really does smell like opening an old mahogany dresser drawer where the wood hasn’t been sealed. It’s warm and rose-forward without being sweet or cloying.
What is the average amount of rounds it takes to get a fragrance completed? Is 200 a lot or close to the norm? Also, is there ever smelling exhaustion on the perfumer's end? I feel like I would lose interest in reformulating and re-smelling everything around 50 rounds or so... How does one fight the fatigue?
The amount of ventilation we had in my fragrance class was really crazy. You also usually smell on testers, not directly from bottles or else I think your head would fall off. Sometimes I had migraines after class. My teacher was so chic, she owns a brownstone on Prospect Park and her most recent job was like flavoring all the new ciroc products lol
I’ve been firmly in the sandalwood cologne camp since I was in my early 20s. And I still feel it complements everything I do pretty well. Obviously Santal was cool in that realm, but I dislike that shared scent with everyone. Or people recognizing the name without ever having seen it before. I also really like Jo Malone wood sage and sea salt. I usually have them layered on top of the regular scented everyday oil… was kinda hoping for suggestions in that realm for guys or something like that that leans even more masculine (for like a date night type of thing) a lot of the oud and leather stuff doesn’t do it for me ALL the time…
You should read the book "The Emperor of Scent" if you haven't! It’s about a scent scientist and perfume savant (he wrote one of the bestselling perfume guides of all time), how / why we smell the way we do, and the drama of French perfume houses. Non-fiction but reads like a crime drama.
What happened to Chandler Burr?! I used to love his regular column in the Times. It would seem like a prime opportunity for the Times to bring him back, like yesterday.
A dear friend of mine is a fragrance engineer at one of the major fragrance houses and has been there for 7+ yrs since graduating as a chemical engineer. The yrs of training they put engineers through to become a "nose" and create fragranced products is no joke - they are tied up with non-competes that seem more serious than financial institutions. Its been crazy to learn about how the fragrance interacts with all elements of the product it goes into - between the actual smell, how to bottle, stabilizing, potential chemical interactions etc. its a complicated business! Also learning about what is considered and marketed as "natural" in fragrance ...
As I was in this class, all the tomato fragrances were getting really popular (flamingo estate, etc.) and our professors thought it was funny that people thought they could be natural, because tomatoes don’t have any oils to give off to create fragrance. They’re all synthetic and that’s not a bad thing! But that whole thought exercise really stuck with me. I’d love to speak to your friend, such a fascinating industry.
I'm still on a cloud from last night's Mets victory at Citi Field. I'll send you a picture and let you know if Andrew and I are going to go to a game next week. It's always been cooler to be a Mets fan than a Yankees fan because we're always the underdog team.
As a Yankee fan pulling his hair just about every pitch in this Royals series, watching the Mets feels like seeing kids get to go outside at recess while you’re stuck in a classroom.
I want to come tell me if you go. How has the stadium been this year?
I think Citi Field is generally a great place to see a game! Good luck to the Mets, they seem like they're having so much fun this postseason.
We have been fair-weather fans. So much heartache over the decades. Last night was our first visit.
I love perfume and I spend a lot of time on Tiktok and the sundry subreddits and I have many opinions about fragrance collection and fragrance "fandom", the biggest one being that the giant collections creep me out, as well as the people with the giant collections who also buy four backup bottles of scents that aren't discontinued that they've never put a dent in. The whole Kayali Silk Santal drop had people doing nutty things like blind buying five bottles.
Blind buying is also nuts. You see people spending hundreds of dollars because they saw a few videos saying "this perfume is my biggest compliment getter" or "this perfume is the best gourmand" and they get it and then start complaining that all the perfume people are lying because they don't like the scent. There's no discernment. I'd never order something with a lot of tuberose, for example, because my mean grandmother bathed in Fracas and to me it's the scent of being told "your legs look chunky" so even if a perfume influencer I otherwise trusted raved about something with a lot of tuberose I'd never buy it.
I personally get weirdly panicky if I have too many bottles and I've spent a lot of time trying to whittle what I have down. I very rarely buy full bottles. Currently I have six and two of them are Zara dupes I could probably deaccession. I scratch my itch for novelty by buying samples and a Scentbox subscription. I love smelling new scents and one of my friends and I trade the samples and decants amongst ourselves.
Feed Me party at Citi Field? lets get a box and do business
Ok I would actually do this. Comment if you’d be down
Yessss
hi, perfumer here. I know there's a pile of marketing misinformation, fear-mongering, and confusion in the fragrance space. Happy to answer any ingredient/formulation questions best I can.
What do YOU think are the biggest misconceptions in the space right now?
That natural = safe; that notes = ingredients; and that there are a large number of dupes in the big brands because perfumers have no IP. Master perfumer Christophe Laudamiel is an incredible resource for information about this.
What are you digging right now
Paradisi by Scottish perfumer Euan McCall who has his own brand Jorum Studios and works for other brands like the kinda nuts Neandertal.
Warm Bulb by Clue Perfumery - it has a burning dust note & was in this year's Art & Olfaction Artisan awards (the best resource for the best new smells).
And perfumer Michael Nordstrand's fragrance workshops at The Met - he is so sweet, has incredible knowledge, and just did a class on what unicorns smell like!
I took the fragrance course at Pratt in 2014 and loved it. It’s been weird watching niche perfumery blow up lately—so much of it is bad!!! Appreciate your putting in the work of taking a class before writing about it!
It helper me cover this category so much! I used to have a dedicated section in Feed Me every few weeks about fragrance, but I retired it.
Curious your thoughts about how fragrances can apparently be harmful to our health?
Also have you heard of this brand:
https://www.instagram.com/houseofbo.co?igsh=NDY5aDUyN2Niamp3
Lots of things are considered harmful to our health including cleaning supplies and artificial foods (I'm guessing you're referring to hormone disruptors and carcinogens?) -- I know MERIT specifically uses non-toxic ingredients and avoids irritants in their products.
But with fragrance, whether it's cleaning supplies or detergents or fragrance, everyone has to pick their battles.
Are you okay with never wearing a Yankees hat as an accessory again?
Very interested in the class. I keep looking into continuing education classes at parsons (where I went for college) and NYU but the prices are shocking… was FIT in the realm of reality?
Totally, it was a few hundred bucks
holy shit
Because it's a trade school, I also think they have some of the best faculty in the state.
i have already gotten myself on the waitlist for a class. thank you for this reminder!!! i needed to remember FIT and 92Y have great affordable classes.
A Feed Me endorsement is the last piece of the puzzle for the Mets this year. Jump on board Emily.
I wrote about Ffern here. TLDR it’s lovely and also I’m a huge sucker. My daughter (13) saves every last time to buy every fragrance that Sol De Janero sells. So much we considered buying shares of L’Occitaine.
https://open.substack.com/pub/somesuchwhatnot/p/hold-on-baby-ive-got-a-sharpie?r=lqqon&utm_medium=ios
I compulsively buy fragrance samples and roller balls but never commit to a big bottle. But when I do, it will be from Thin Wild Mercury. Her scents smell like nothing else. I think you’d like Girl of the Year, Emily. Or potentially Chateau, which is supposed to smell like the Chateau Marmont. Chateau really does smell like opening an old mahogany dresser drawer where the wood hasn’t been sealed. It’s warm and rose-forward without being sweet or cloying.
What is the average amount of rounds it takes to get a fragrance completed? Is 200 a lot or close to the norm? Also, is there ever smelling exhaustion on the perfumer's end? I feel like I would lose interest in reformulating and re-smelling everything around 50 rounds or so... How does one fight the fatigue?
The amount of ventilation we had in my fragrance class was really crazy. You also usually smell on testers, not directly from bottles or else I think your head would fall off. Sometimes I had migraines after class. My teacher was so chic, she owns a brownstone on Prospect Park and her most recent job was like flavoring all the new ciroc products lol
dont hide your natural scent. A big part of the online dating frustration is that fairmones don't register. let your inner animal out.
I’ve been firmly in the sandalwood cologne camp since I was in my early 20s. And I still feel it complements everything I do pretty well. Obviously Santal was cool in that realm, but I dislike that shared scent with everyone. Or people recognizing the name without ever having seen it before. I also really like Jo Malone wood sage and sea salt. I usually have them layered on top of the regular scented everyday oil… was kinda hoping for suggestions in that realm for guys or something like that that leans even more masculine (for like a date night type of thing) a lot of the oud and leather stuff doesn’t do it for me ALL the time…