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 tomorrow…
National Fragrance Day is a wonderful day in the perfume calendar, entirely devoted to revelling in fragrance’s glories.
Four years ago, we came up with the idea of the #smellfie – a selfie with a scent you love. Little did we know it would lead to thousands of fragrance fans all over the world sharing their photos, with celebrities (including all of Little Mix) joining in!
The Perfume Society is inviting everyone to upload a #smellfie – holding an all-time favourite fragrance, or simply to share the scent you’ve chosen to wear that day.
Once you’ve selected your scent (and believe us, we feel your pain in choosing!) simply take a picture of you holding it and upload to Instagram, using the hashtag #smellfie and mentioning@theperfumesociety, so we can spot your photos.
We’ll be keeping an eye on our feeds all day long, and we’ll repost as many as possible that really tickle our fancy. (Creativity is encouraged!)
What’s more, we’re offering five signed copies of The Perfume Bible (which we’ll also send internationally!), with a year’s print subscription to The Scented Letter in addition for the #smellfie we love the most.
Happy snapping – we cannot WAIT to see what you come up with this year!
Few contemporary fragrances have shaken up the scent world in quite the way Calvin Klein‘s Obsession did in 1985. Youthfully warm, spicy yet layered with waves of freshness, it evoked the heady joy of first love in a style that suggested to the under 30s – this is a perfume for YOU!
Celebrating the reinvention of this contemporary classic in the form of Calvin Klein’s Obsessed, the fragrance has been reinterpreted for both men and women, with a billowing softness of violet leaf, lavender and purple sage for her; grapefruit, pepper and cardamom for him. Both leave intriguing trails of vanilla-y ambrox in the dry-down that we can’t get enough of.
And what better true celebration for the new campaign than to dig through the archives and discover lost footage and the most dreamily beautiful shots of Kate Moss from the original? As Raf Simmons, Chief Creative Officer for Calvin Klein explains, ‘I suppose you could say we were obsessed by Obsession. If one thing summed up Calvin Klein for us visually, it was Mario Sorrenti’s Obsession campaign with Kate Moss. It lived in our heads for so many years and became a touchstone of sensuality… We thought about a scent that could reflect such an idea of memory and desire for today. Of male and female, of the memory of somebody else on your skin.’
A revealing interview with the equally ground-breaking photographer of Obsession, Mario Sorrenti, shows tenderness, passion and talent combined to make not only the scent itself, but the adversiting aesthetic for it, utterly iconic…
What was the creative process like for OBSESSION?
‘It was very natural and instinctive, just Kate and me going off and making pictures. I had a Bolex and my Pentax, and even though we were sent there to work, it felt like we were on vacation. It was personal and intimate.’
What was it like working with Kate at that time? How would you describe your relationship?
‘It was great. We were young and in love and I loved photographing her. When we did Obsession she was 18 and I was 20, just starting out in our lives with no pressure about anything. We were just going off and having fun.’
Why do you think Obsession became such an iconic campaign?
‘I have no idea! I don’t know why it became iconic, it just did. I didn’t really approach it with the intention of taking iconic pictures. We didn’t know what we were going to do. We were just going to make something intimate and beautiful and simple. Looking back, maybe it became iconic because it was honest.
All of a sudden people were going crazy about it. It became very controversial. Some loved it and others hated it. Maybe it was too personal for some. The ones that loved it were mostly our age. It was very intense.’
What is the concept for the Obsessed campaign?
‘It’s about revisiting those pictures and bringing them back as memories. There was a lot of material that hadn’t been used and had never been seen. Hours of 16mm footage. It’s about the old prints, that archive of work, going through old contact sheets, re-editing, discovering new images, you know, reliving that time and those photographs and films.’
How has your creative process changed from then to today?
‘It’s changed a lot. Well, I have more people helping me now—that’s amazing—and it’s much more focused. Back then it was very instinctive. I was still learning a lot about photography, you know, about the art and the craft of it. I was very naïve. I think today I’m much more aware of what I’m doing…’
Calvin Klein Obsessed for Women £35 for 30ml eau de parfum, Calvin Klein Obsessed for Men £45 for 75ml eau de toilette
Buy them at The Perfume Shop
Written by Suzy Nightingale
A mysterious perfume house run by a reclusive man, a fragrance inspired by Marilyn Monroe‘s minx-ishly tousled photo shoot alluringly wrapped in sheets and immortalized by Douglas Kirkland in 1961, composed by one of this century’s greatest perfumers – Dominique Ropion. The elements of intrigue are all there, and this latest launch by A Lab On Fire doesn’t disappoint. With a cheekily suggestive name like Messy Sexy Just Rolled Out of Bed, well, how could we resist a sniff…?
A Lab On Fire is a niche brand that delights in being shrouded in mystery, asking some of the most brilliant noses in the world to create the fragrances they have always dreamed of making, letting their imaginations and talents run wild. Founded by a chap called Carlos Kusubayashi, we are told he was born in São Paulo, Brazil, grew up in Japan, and now lives in Texas; that he’s variously worked in a car factory, as an apprentice to a ‘Master Kyoji’ in calligraphy, and contributed toward bringing Asian art to the Parisian art scene. But quite why he turned to perfume remains quite the mystery.
Clearly exploring his own creativity, though, he released an accompanying poem to evoke the spirit of Sexy Messy Just Rolled Out of Bed. How fitting to read it on National Poetry Day…
Simple, clean sunlight. Warmth from the sheets wrapped between my legs. Warmth from you lingers on my skin. I just rolled out of bed. The rest of the day, the night—what we can do together—depends on how the sun warms my body, how close I allow you to get, how we touch.
Kusubayashi adds ‘The pictures of Marilyn are the quintessence of being sexy, a way of entering into the intimacy of the great diva full of hopeful innocence. There is something magically vulnerable in these photos, the light, the atmosphere… And this is the initial inspiration which I asked the nose Dominique Ropion to capture in a bottle’.
And so how does this ‘morning after the night before’ scent unfold on the skin? The opening is a slowly unfurling blossom, an indulgently joyous yawn into the warm skin-like softness of rose petals and peach fuzz underpinned by smooth woods, milky musks and something suggesting the reason those sheets are rumpled…
It’s the olfactory embodiment of ‘I woke up like this’ déshabillé diva that looks effortless in a photo shoot, but in our experience is somewhat harder to attain! At least now we can keep this by the bed to spritz on some instant glamour… Messy Sexy Just Rolled Out of Bed £90 for 60ml eau de parfum
Buy it at Avery Perfume Gallery
Written by Suzy Nightingale
What was the creative process like for OBSESSION?
