Tag: competition

Show us your #smellfie & join in the celebrations for National Fragrance Day!

National Fragrance Day is on March 21st every year, and we want you to all join in by putting your best face – and fragrance – forward for a #smellfie, to have fun and be in with a chance to WIN amazing perfume prizes...

Five years ago, at The Perfume Society we came up with the idea of the #smellfie – a selfie with a scent you love – to highlight this special day.

Little did we know it would lead to thousands of fragrance fans all over the world sharing their photos, with celebrities (including Little Mix, Katy Perry, Charlotte Tilbury, and Richard E. Grant) joining in and, last year, the combined photos people posted getting over 41,000 likes!

This year we want you to help us make it even bigger, and to join in some of the great celebrations the Fragrance Foundation have planned, so scroll down to see how you can get involved.

How to post your #smellfie:

On Instagram: hashtag #smellfie and tag @theperfumesociety in your photo

On Facebook: hashtag #smellfie and tag @ThePerfumSociety in your photo

On Twitter: hashtag #smellfie and tag @Perfume_Society in your post/photo

After all the images are in, we’ll be choosing our top 5 favourites: the most inventive, the most artistic, the ones with the best captions! Every winner will receive a subscription to The Perfume Society’s VIP Club. The overall winner will receive a subscription and a fragrance bundle worth £300!

Overseas winners will receive an International Subscription to The Scented Letter, our online magazine dedicated to scent, so an entire year’s worth of fragrant reading.

Now you’ve set March 21 in your diary, we asked The Fragrance Foundation what they have planned. Head to their Calendar of Events for some fabulous scented happenings and giveaways spread over the entire week.

Written by Suzy Nightingale

Marty the Mighty Nose – smelly poems required!

Do you know a child aged 7-11 who loves writing and exploring their sense of smell? Get those nostrils in training, for The Fragrance Foundation‘s Marty the Mighty Nose Awards are once again open for smell-inspired poetic entries!

Kids tend to be far more naturally connected to their sense of smell than most adults, and the annual competition invites Key Stage Two pupils to explore this sense even more, by taking ‘…an aromatic approach to creative writing, as we invite them to write their own smell-inspired poems for the chance to win prizes for themselves and for their schools.’

The Fragrance Foundation say: ‘Whether it is inviting children to develop their use of simile and metaphor in English by writing smell-inspired poems or learning about history through the stinky aromas of the past (Ancient Egyptian Mummification anyone?), structured activities incorporating fragrance and smell can truly support and inspire pupils of all abilities.’

Marty the Mighty Nose entries can be made by schools, or by individual parents and guardians, and details of the competition and how to submit an entry are explained, below. Poems are judged and awarded prizes individually, but there’s also a Best Class prize to the highest overall scoring class, so the more who join in, the merrier Marty will be.

The Fragrance Foundation encourage pupils to write poems inspired by the sense of smell (the whiffy socks of an older brother has been a previous winner’s poetic theme!) and these are then read and chosen by a distinguished panel of judges each year, with this year’s Head Judge being Nicky Cox MBE, Editor of young person’s newspaper First News, who are this year supporting the awards.

Entering Marty The Mighty Nose Awards is easy – download the entry pack here. The deadline for submissions is the 14th December 2018, and entries can be sent online or through the post.

Here’s one of last year’s winning entries, to get you inspired…

Smelly Seasons
Suncream and salty air,
Summer smells are here,
Candyfloss and doughnuts,
Sweet smells at the pier.
Lavender and Wisteria,
Spring flowers in bloom,
Bluebell and lilac,
All smelling of sweet perfume.
Fireworks, pumpkin soup,
And smoky burning leaves,
Toasted sweet marshmallows,
Fill the autumn’s breeze.
Frost morning air,
Cloves, cinnamon and pine,
Pretty burning candles,
Christmas is my favourite time!

– Bella Barlow
Shiplake C.E Primary School

We always wonder if the talented children who enter the awards with their smell-inspired poems could well be the noses behind future fragrances – or the journalists writing about them –  either way, we can’t wait to read the results, so get those kids’ noses in training…

Written by Suzy Nightingale

WIN a signed bottle of Marina Barcenilla Spring Rain!

Multi-award winning natural perfumer Marina Barcenilla is something of a fragrant wonder. In 2011 she launched The Perfume Garden, a small artisan perfumery based in Glastonbury. With a collection of six oil-based perfumes – alongside a selection of body oils, bath salts and sugar scrubs, originally blended to order – she has since seen her passion turn into an industry-acclaimed fragrance house.

Marina’s vision was for a return to more traditional ways of creating perfume, but infused with the elegance, passion and lightness of touch that only the finest ingredients and the poetic soul of an artistic perfumer can produce…

As founder and perfumer, she wanted to be involved in every aspect of the perfume creation process, from sourcing rare and precious aromatic essences from around the world to blending fragrances by hand in her own perfume studio, based in Glastonbury.

Marina is a dear friend to The Perfume Society, and we have so enjoyed watching her blossom! Very generously, Marina has granted our VIP club members 20% off any 30ml bottle of fragrance purchased online during August. Go here to claim your discount code.

Not only that, but Marina is giving one lucky person a the opportunity to WIN a signed bottle of her beautiful Spring Rain perfume!

Just enter your details below and the bottle of Marina Barcenilla Spring Rain perfume could be yours.

About that prize…it just happens to be their most cooling, delightfully luscious scent – SO perfect for the warm weather!

The Story: Your soul awakens as the whisper of a thousand new leaves announces the season. Blades of green grass, brilliant amongst the carpet of crocuses and daffodils, invites a moment of quiet reflection. A dawn chorus, accompanied by the caress of Spring Rain, softens your horizon and brings with it the promise of a new beginning.

The Description: Fresh and aromatic. An herbaceous elegance harmonises with a silent rose before a bed of tree moss, frankincense and white soft woods provides complexity and body to this effervescent creation.

The Notes: Bergamot mint, rosemary, leaf alcohol, lavender, geranium, rose, blood orange, lemon, nagarmotha, cabreuva wood, Indian frankincense and treemoss.

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Prize Draw Terms & Conditions

Winner will be chosen at random after the prize draw closes on September 1st 2018. There is no cash alterative to this prize. The prize can only be shipped within the UK, and Marina Barcenilla will post the bottle of Spring Rain to the prize-draw winner by the end of September 2018.

WIN! Signed bottle of Ruth Mastenbroek’s Firedance

We were thrilled to hear that Ruth Mastenbroek‘s Firedance perfume has been selected as a finalist for this year’s prestigious Fragrance Foundation Awards. And Ruth very kindly popped in to sign a full-size bottle of Firedance for one of our lucky V.I.P’s to win!

Scroll down for the entry form, below – closing date is 31st May 2018…

‘A story of celebration… rejoicing in each moment of contentment in life. In Firedance, Ruth presents a scorching, modern interpretation of the classic rose perfume, as exotic leather dances in surprise harmony with the main character – smouldering Damask rose. Set against a warming backdrop of oudh and patchouli, a shining amber note radiates from the skin in this memorably intimate and sexy perfume.’

Do not be scared of that ‘oudh’ word, either – this is a stunningly sophisticated interpretation, and no wonder it’s up for an award. We know you’ll adore it.

Terms & Conditions: No cash alternative to the prizes will be offered. The prizes are not transferable. Prizes are subject to availability and we reserve the right to substitute any prize with another of equivalent value without giving notice. Closing date for entry will be 31/05/2018. After this date no further entries to the prize draw will be accepted.

Good luck!

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Follow your noses on our fragrantly-themed Easter Egg hunt…

Easter egg hunts are all very well, in theory, but the idyllic image of rosy-cheeked children bounding through meadows is often replaced with the reality of dreary, drizzly or downright awful weather. And this year, we have more snow predicted for some parts of the UK. Oh joy!

Fear not: we’ve set up a fragrantly-themed ‘hunt’ right here, to indulge in from the comfort of your own home.

THREE lucky winners will receive Green & Black’s Easter eggs. Feast your eyes, above (we’re drooling already!)

Deliciously intense, the milk chocolate egg is joined by two large milk chocolate bars – milk chocolate with butterscotch, and milk chocolate with Anglesey sea salt.

To share or keep for yourself? We rather think the latter, don’t you?

How to hunt: Simply read the clues and set off in search for all the colourful eggs pictured below (FIVE in total) scattered across our website, then drop us an email [email protected] telling us the location of each egg.

Closing date: Monday 2nd April 2018

ostereier_farben_vieleFragrant clues to egg hiding places around our website:

1 – The newest scents to get your nose around, all boxed up…

2 – In-house for Hermès, which perfumer says she’d love to create a perfume for Eve?

3 – The era that Estée Lauder’s bath oil changed everything?

4 – When this couturier recently passed away, President Emmanuel Macron declared, ‘France has lost a master…’

5 – All a-bloom right now, this heady flower smells like burying your nose in springtime itself!

We wish you all a very happy Easter, and good luck!

Terms & Conditions: No cash alternative to the prizes will be offered. The prizes are not transferable. Prizes are subject to availability and we reserve the right to substitute any prize with another of equivalent value without giving notice. Closing date for entry will be 02/04/2018. After this date no further entries to the prize draw will be accepted.

Marty The Mighty Nose Awards – open for entries

Get those nostrils flapping in preparation, for The Fragrance Foundation‘s Marty the Mighty Nose Awards are once again open for smell-inspired poetic writing…
The annual competition invites Key Stage Two pupils (aged 7-11) to ‘take an aromatic approach to creative writing, as we invite them to write their own smell-inspired poems for the chance to win prizes for themselves and for their schools.’

The Fragrance Foundation say: ‘Whether it is inviting children to develop their use of simile and metaphor in English by writing smell-inspired poems or learning about history through the stinky aromas of the past (Ancient Egyptian Mummification anyone?), structured activities incorporating fragrance and smell can truly support and inspire pupils of all abilities.’
Entries can be made by schools, by individual parents and guardians, and details of the competition and how to submit an entry are explained, below…

The Fragrance Foundation encourage pupils to write poems inspired by the sense of smell (the whiffy socks of an older brother has been a previous winner’s poetic theme!) and these are then read and chosen by a distinguished panel of judges each year, with awards being presented to the children and schools during the prestigious Jasmine Awards ceremony, held at BAFTA.

Known as ‘The Oscars for fragrance journalism’, The Jasmine’s are highly sought after, celebrating innovative and creative fragrance writing from the top-selling glossy magazines, newspapers, independent blogs and beyond. And when The Mighty Nose Awards are read out during the ceremony, there’s always a ripple of absolute delight within the industry professionals present.
Teachers can view and download materials to aid the scent training, and request t-shirts and scratch-‘n-sniff stickers from the Marty the Mighty Nose website, but for now, why not sit back and relax while Richard E. Grant guides you through your very own workshop in the film, below?

Entering The Mighty Nose Awards is easy – download the entry pack here.
We’ve been highly honoured at The Perfume Society to be nominated for and win several Jasmine Awards, and always wonder if the talented children who enter the awards with their smell-inspired poems could well be the fragrance writers – and noses behind the fragrances of the future! So get those kids’ noses in training…
Written by Suzy Nightingale

Design In Scent: WIN The Wedding Fragrance Discovery Experience

Looking for a unique wedding gift or a bespoke scent for your happy day? We think we’ve found it!
What could be more special than making your wedding totally tailored to you, as a couple? For those about-to-be-weds who long for something truly memorable, Design In Scent offer Fragrance Journeys™ – not only for couples to wear on their wedding day, but with complimenting candles and ambience mists to scent the celebration itself.
And, very generously, they are giving away a Wedding Fragrance Discovery Experience for you to explore, and a bottle of your favourite perfume!
Read on for details of how to enter the competition…
Design In Scent say: ‘We are giving away a Wedding Fragrance Discovery Experience and a bottle of your favourite fragrance from the new Design In Scent Wedding Collection. Searching for your perfect wedding scent is a beautiful experience for you to enjoy with your partner during planning. When you scent your wedding venue with the fragrance you love and gift it to guests it becomes an incredibly meaningful part of your day.
The Design In Scent Wedding Collection features four Fragrance Journeys™ for couples to wear, scent their wedding with and gift to loved ones. Each Fragrance Journey™ contains three complementing fragrances – a Feminine eau de parfum, a Masculine eau de parfum and a Union ambience fragrance that fuses the two into a new but recognisable scent. Capture the precious memories of your wedding with the magic of scent…’

Founded by Gemma Hopkins in 2015, Design is Scent utilises Gemma’s early career as a multi-sensory designer, coming into contact with Heston Blumenthal’s revolutionary work and inspiring her to enrich our most neglected sense: smell. Gemma teamed up with lawyer turned wedding-planner, Meghan Fay, after Meghan attended a wedding Gemma had created a bespoke fragrance for – so taken by the scent that she tracked Gemma down, eventually becomming the Partner and Managing Director of the company.
Until this year, their work was purely for VIPs on a couture basis, creating fragrances for exclusive events at luxury venues such as The Arts Club, The Shard and Battersea Power Station. Now the fragrant duo are opening up their world of scent by allowing couples to explore four ‘masculine’ and four ‘feminine’ fragrances together, along with four other ‘Union’ scents to try – and it’s definitely a case of exploration, as they ‘…encourage people to break the fragrnce ‘rules’ and simply choose what they love A bride may wear a Masculine fragrance and vice versa,’ and of course they can be layered together.
To find out more, visit Design In Scent’s website…
How to win: Simply fill in your details, below, and we’ll enter you into the prize draw.
Prize: A beautifully presented Wedding Fragrance Discovery Collection and – once you have chosen your favourite –  a bottle of your favourite perfume!
Closing date: No further entires will be accepted after 10am Thursday 10th August, 2017
Good luck!
[contact-form-7 id=”145448″ title=”Design In Scent Wedding Collection Competition”]

Terms & Conditions: No cash alternative to the prizes will be offered. The prizes are not transferable. Prizes are subject to availability and we reserve the right to substitute any prize with another of equivalent value without giving notice. Closing date for entry will be 10/08/2017. After this date no further entries to the competition will be accepted.

Do you Cinéhaïku? Enter the MEMO Paris weekly poetic short film competition to win $500 or $10,000!

Cinematically inclined scent-o-philes are encouraged to indulge their creativity with a plunge in to the world of short films… As Clara Molloy, founder of MEMO Paris perfumes breezed through town, today, to launch Eau de Memo (watch this space!), she told us all about a rather exciting competition that we know many of our artistic readership would love to get involved
MEMO Paris perfumes have established a weekly competition of poetic films – merely between 20 and 30 seconds in length, yet expressing timeless stories far deeper than the actual time frame may suggest. Through MEMO’s dedicated Cinéhaïku website, film directors both amateur and professional are invited to express themselves through a simple exercise: adapt the rules of haiku to an audiovisual format.
So what, exactly, is a Haiku? Well, Jack Kerouac put it as ‘A sentence that’s short and sweet with a sudden jump of thought in it, is a kind of haiku,’ though if you want a more in-depth description, there are countless websites dedicated to the art and history of this poetic medium. But how to translate this in to a short film? The rules to follow are on the Cinéhaiku competition page under how to participate, but basically it’s a 20-30 second snippet of something that ‘captures a lived moment.’

Each week, from March 6 to June 29, 2017, a winner will be chosen by Cinéhaïku members and awarded a $500 prize. The prize-winning films are then automatically entered into the Cinéhaïku Festival to compete for the annual prize. The overall winner of the year’s best Cinéhaïku will be invited to France to receive a quite incredible $10,000 prize awarded by a professional jury selected from the world of art, film and literature, and the winner will also be given a separate, dedicated space in the festival.
Cinéhaïku say: ‘The annual Cinéhaïku festival will showcase all of the weekly winning films at a temporary exhibition held from July 7 to 21, 2017 throughout the town of Gordes, in the Luberon region of southern France. The Cinéhaïkus will be broadcast on screens along an aesthetic trail, providing festival-goers with a true moment of poetry suspended in time.’
Our film would just have to be about perfume and the sense of smell, of course – but what would you haiku…?
Written by Suzy Nightingale

We've looked through thousands of your #smellfies… did YOURS win a prize? Check out some of our fragrant faves!

Just a couple of years agao,  we had the idea to celebrate the long-established National Fragrance Day by getting people to post selfies with their favourite fragrances, and calling them a #smellfie.
The idea was to celebrate the importance of fragrance by putting a face to what can sometimes be a closed industry, and more than that, to see YOU – the people who actually buy the perfumes – hear why they love them, what they really mean.
This year our #smellfie competition became an international perfume phenomenon – with people all over the world who joined in our campaign. And what a diverse group you were… with some dressing in specially made outfits or painting their faces to match their favourite scents; pets, children and family members getting involved and celebs including Richard E Grant and even Little Mix (gawd bless ’em!) all joining in.
We’re not ashamed to say we all got a bit teary at Perfume Society Towers when the #smellfie photos kept on pouring in.
Just search for the hashtag #smellfie on Instagram to see how many brilliant entries we had to choose from!
But we’d made a rod for own backs by saying we’d choose some favourites to award prizes to, didn’t we? And, though it has caused us much anguish having to choose at all, choose we must. So here are our finalists…


@jadainga99 is our overall (geddit?) winner who cleaned up (okay, we’ll stop now) and will receive a full year’s print subscription to our award-winning magazine, The Scented Letter, worth £80. Congrats!
The following five winners all receive a signed copy of The Perfume Bible…


So adorable, and we’d love to snuggle up with this perfume, too…

A veritable halo of scent from a fellow fragrance obsessive who just couldn’t pick one fave (we feel ya!)

Truly impressive makeup skills employed for this pretty in pink pic…

We were blown away with the elegant creativity of this paper-doll loving perfumista!

Beautifully shot, great selection, so much to love right here…

❤❤❤❤❤ Thank you SO much to everyone who took part – it means so much – we so loved seeing you share your favourite fragrances with us. And we simply cannot wait for next year’s #smellfie extravaganza. Let’s make sure it’s the most scent-sational year yet! ❤❤❤❤❤

Written by Suzy Nightingale

Forgot the card? Panic over, as Penhaligon's invite you to create a virtual Valentine's bouquet!

That sickening moment you realise it’s all too late: you’ve forgotten the Valentine’s card and now you’re going to be in the dog house…
Oh dear.
But fear not, forgetful ones! Penhaligon’s have created a brilliant (and gorgeously realised) way to present a virtual bouquet, and it’s all to do with the “Language of Flowers.”

‘Thank Heavens for floriography’ they say. ‘A mysterious language of love. Cryptic communications, hidden revelations and coded declarations!’
On Penhaligon’s website, you beging by choosing from a number of flowers, having read their individual “coded” meanings. They vary wildly, so be very careful how you choose, and even more careful who you send that coded message to…
When you’ve selected three flowers, you are guided to the next page where your virtual bouquet is assembled, ready for you to present via email. Ta-da!
We just love the dreamy vintage-style illustrations – and that you get to learn a little of this “secret language” (so beloved by the Victorians, in particular) of flowers and their possible hidden messages.

Even better – everyone who sends one of these virtual bouquets will be entered in with a chance to win the Penhaligon’s Portraits Collection. And once you have sighed in contentment (and relief) at having saved the day, you can see which of the Penhaligon’s perfumes would best be suited to the flowers you chose for the bouquet.
Far from a lost opportunity, and depending on how well the recipient receives your e-card, it might turn out that your forgetfulness might end in a fragrantly wonderful win/win!
Now then, we wonder: who will you be sending yours to…?
Written by Suzy Nightingale