Business scents and the art of nose

By Bronwyn Cosgrave - Published: December 18 2004

Aftel makes fragrances that work both as beauty products and motivational tools, and by doing so she's attracted a long list of author/clients, including the novelist and ician, JT Leroy and poet and singer Leonard Cohen.

In beauty, as in fashion, every trend has its counter-trend. Thus, while perfume industry authority the Fragrance Foundation says celebrity scents are "hot, hot, hot," a booming industry generating an estimated annual revenue of $100m, a growing band of connoisseurs and createurs is heading in the other direction.

For every Donald Trump, who cashed in on his hit reality-TV series The Apprentice by launching an eponymous after-shave, for every "Curious Britney Spears", and "Still Jennifer Lopez", there is now an art house equivalent - one inspired by high art instead of popular culture.

Consider, for example, Yves Saint Laurent's Cinéma. A pretty, intriguing mix of jasmine and peony flowers spiked with playful notes of perky clementine and smooth vanilla, Cinéma was created as an olfactory tribute to vintage celebrity culture as characterised by Greta Garbo, Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth. Its gold bottle is made in the sculptural style pioneered by Line Vautrin, an art jeweller Saint Laurent very much admired who thrived in 1950s Paris from a boutique on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

Meanwhile, at Scent Systems, a perfumery in London's Soho, almost every fragrance was inspired by the arts and culture - indeed the environment of the shop itself is reminiscent of Jay

Jopling's contemporary art gallery, White Cube. Inside the tiny, square- shaped, pristine white retail space, every perfume is a cutting-edge work, lit and displayed as though it is an artefact. Histoires de Parfums, a luxurious, unisex fragrance line created by France's Gérald Ghislain is a case in point: imagine numerous bottled aromas meant to recreate the moods, personalities and lifestyles of five individuals considered pivotal in French history, such as Empress Eugénie, Jules Verne and Mata Hari.

"Who needs another formulaic perfume or, for that matter, another scented candle?" asks Hiram Green, the perfumery's proprietor, explaining his sales strategy and then spritzing the air with Ginger Ciao, a blend of tiger lily, ylang-ylang, coconut and basil. Admittedly, Ginger Ciao didn't begin life as an artwork, but it has given birth to a book: Yosh Han, the Japanese, San Francisco-based perfumer who created the scent is at work converting its playful qualities into a romance novel.

And the most popular perfume at Scent Systems, Aftelier's Pink Lotus (created in 2003 especially for Madonna), is the creation of California- based Mandy Aftel whose scented career was inspired by her dual occupation as a non-fiction writer and literary therapist.

Aftel has produced a series of books on scent - including Essence and Alchemy (Bloomsbury) in 2000, a history of perfume, and, last month, Aroma (Artisan), a cookbook-cum- perfume-recipe-coffee-table tome. A trained psychologist, Aftel also counsels authors through the writing process. Both sidelines, she says, stimulate her imagination when it comes to making perfume.

Aftel makes fragrances that work both as beauty products and motivational tools, and by doing so she's attracted a long list of author/clients, including the novelist and icon, JT Leroy and poet and singer Leonard Cohen.

Of course, this is not exactly new. Scents inspired by arts and culture have long been produced by major beauty and fashion brands, explains fragrance expert Roja Dove. "Geurlain's Chamode and Bel Ami by Hermès were created in response to, respectively, Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse and Guy de Maupassant's second novel," he says.

Still, finding an arts scent takes a bit of hunting. Many have been discontinued and the new ones are coveted for the same reason that limited edition luxury goods products, such as a Hermès Birkin bag, are sought after: their relative scarcity and the expertise that goes into making them.

"Here, people come to find their own signature scent - a perfume that's individual and one that has a sense of depth," explains Annika Hakansson, manager of perfumery Les Senteurs. Though Les Senteurs is an integral part of Belgravia's boutique row, it feels more like a charming old-fashioned bookshop than a glossy beauty emporium. Nestled on bookshelves are perfumes blended as tributes to historical figures such as George Sand, the 19th century writer, and the emperor Hadrien.

Of course, the exclusive appeal of art scents means they are slightly more expensive than packaged fashion fragrances. They can cost thousands, if a nose like Mandy Aftel custom blends one for a client.

Laura Tonatto, the Grasse-based perfume creator from Italy recently blended a custom domestic art scent for a collector of Caravaggio. The collector wanted the scent to permeate the area around his canvases, enriching the viewing experience. But Tonatto also sells a line of eponymous perfumes, complete with predictable spin-offs such as bath products and scented candles, and creates fragrances for clients like Giorgio Armani and the Park Hyatt, Milan. Her commercial ventures subsidise her loftier desire (and pet project) to make scent an integral part of visiting galleries and museums.

Touring Italy in January 2005 is "Naso e Parno", an exhibition first staged in France and then last autumn at Waterstone's flagship bookshop in Picadilly, which explores the relationship between literature and the sense of smell. Piped throughout the Art Deco shop were a series of Tonatto scents inspired by passages found in great literary works, including Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Now Tonatto is collaborating with a curator from the Hermitage museum on an aromatically-enhanced exhibition that will open next year in the Russian fine arts institution. It gives new meaning to "the art of the nose".