Karen Gilbert’s Perfume: The Art & Craft Of Fragrance is a dangerous book. Such restraint on the part of brands is impossible to imagine now. For instance, in his Foreword, Michael Edwards points out that in 1963, the year which saw the birth of the BSP, only three (yes, that’s right: three!) new perfumes were launched: Diorling, Penhaligon’s Extract Of Limes and Kiehl’s Original Musk. The historical tidbits are priceless too. The photos are especially noteworthy, as they depict a world inhabited not by angst-ridden artists daydreaming in fields of jasmine, but a quintessentially English realm of people operating complex equipment in labs or enjoying the questionable pleasures of committee meetings. The result is an interesting – if rather specialised – examination of the role of Britain in the perfume world, a role which is perhaps more significant than the average high street customer might imagine. Here, the emphasis is on perfume as the product of an industry: for every entry on a Penhaligon’s or a Grossmith, there’s a mention of a Givaudan or a Unilever.
This hefty piece of work is brand-focussed too, but not exclusively so. A real shame.Įqually glossy is British Perfumery: A Fragrant History, published to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the British Society Of Perfumers. But as there are plenty of people fluent in both English and French, the shoddiness is hard to excuse. Had the text originally been written in some near-extinct language spoken only by three tribespeople in the deepest Amazon, it would have been easy to forgive the odd bit of awkward expression.
My French is by no means perfect, but even I was able to work out that certain words and phrases had been grossly disfigured along their journey to English. It’s certainly handy to have all these biogs in one volume, but the translation leaves a great deal to be desired. Inspired by the growing respectability of niche brands in France – a market notoriously resistant to non-mainstream scents – the elegant tome is essentially a series of mini-profiles of various firms, from obvious choices like Frederic Malle and Serge Lutens to somewhat more esoteric fare, such as Les Nez and Carthusia. Four fragrance-related books have been released in recent weeks, and of these Rare Perfumes – penned by Sabine Chabbert and Laurence Ferat – is perhaps the most coffee-table-friendly.
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