BrianBuchanan

In these days of foghorn pongs and woody sharp citrus, the need to compete with male peacocks may have obliged perfumers to boost up their feminines, just to get them heard above the din. But how did we get here? Some...

Mainstream media reports on the plight of growers in the perfume industry In Grasse, droughts, heatwaves, and excessive rainfall have made growing flowers increasingly difficult... https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

Champagne, chocolates, a single red rose... What would you give your Valentine?Wine would last the evening, chocolates maybe the weekend, a cut rose a few days. What about something more permanent, a rose perfume?A...

Before he became the famous industrialist, Coty began as a pharmacy assistant in Paris. He was set to work compounding formulae for cosmetics and colognes, and soon having got the hang of it, started making his own versions. The owner, seeing Coty had talent, advised him to go to Grasse to be trained, but Coty wasn't content to be an apprentice and struck out on his own. He made...

In 1910, the architect Adolf Loos gave a lecture entitled Ornament and Crime. It wasn't a condemnation of jewel thieves but an attack on the naturalistic flourishes of Art Nouveau buildings. Loos thought 'the elimination of ornament from useful objects' was the way to go, and this lead to the Form Follows Function school - which praised grain elevators and similar industrial buildings for their straightforward design....

Fahrenheit is a monument - but it didn't spring from nowhere. Like most great art it had its genesis in what went before and was a product of its time. Fahrenheit is an eighties perfume and is typically...