The Perfumed Perspective

The sweet note in Angel, Black Opium and Vanilla 28 is ethyl maltol, a food additive Pfizer filed to patent in 1963 so cake mix and soft drinks would taste better. The perfumer who made Angel put in…

Maître Parfumeur et Gantier is a small Paris perfume house founded in 1988 by Jean-François Laporte, the chemist who had already founded the company that became Sisley and then L'Artisan Parfumeur. It has been sold twice since, and…

Why perfume is a haunting: the science of smell and memory, the ghost flowers inside every lily of the valley and violet perfume, the Osmothèque’s dead perfumes kept under argon in Versailles, and the bottles people keep to…

Nobody has ever been sued for wearing perfume. Not fined, not fired, not taken off a plane. This is the story of why, from a Nova Scotia hospital kitchen to a pigsty in 1610. Scent-free offices, airplane perfume…

Why America smells like a dryer sheet, and why the perfume industry is now copying the laundry aisle. There are two bottles on my table. A Maison Margiela Lazy Sunday Morning, a hundred and seventy dollars, which promises…

I wear the Marquis de Sade. He's a perfume, he costs $237, and the house that sells him can't say who made him or which year he was born. Histoires de Parfums, the Paris niche house founded by…

Why was American perfumery invented in the 1970s? Before 1970 there were perfumes made in America, but no American perfumery: no style you could recognise across competing houses, clean, loud, built to last a working day. By 1980…

The story you were told about vintage fragrance is marketing. One man proved it. Perfume ads all say the same things: rebellious, uncompromising, forbidden, gone forever. This episode takes the biggest story the fragrance industry tells, the myth…

Why you got a body mist and not the house, and why modern perfume dies at hour four. There are two bottles on my tray that have no business being in the same room. A 1984 Givenchy Ysatis,…

Jasmine for perfume comes off the field between three and half past seven in the morning, in the dark, by hand. I took six bottles off my own shelf and followed five natural materials backwards, looking for the…

Bertrand Duchaufour made Avignon, the Comme des Garçons incense that turned into an entire genre. He also made Nuit de Tubéreuse, Timbuktu, Dzongkha, Traversée du Bosphore, Séville à l'aube, Trayee, Mohur and Pichola for Neela Vermeire, Dia Man…

Is the perfume you bought real? I bought four fake perfumes from Temu for about thirty dollars each, and every published method for how to spot fake perfume failed on my own kitchen table. Four boxes, a year…

Creed says 1760. The paper trail starts around 1970. This is the full investigation: the missing two centuries, the perfumers who really composed Aventus and Green Irish Tweed, and the billions that changed hands while nobody could prove…

The 2000s perfume decade, explained: why Coco Mademoiselle, Flowerbomb, Alien, Fierce and 1 Million were all engineered to be that loud, and what it actually cost. A full history of noughties fragrance, from the patchouli that got washed…

Everyone started smelling the same about ten years ago, and it was not an accident. This episode of The Perfumed Perspective takes apart the reason modern perfume converged on one warm, clean, radiant note, and why a growing…

You think you buy perfume for how it smells. You don't. You buy the name on the bottle, the story behind the name, and the quiet promise that a specific person stood behind it. This episode takes the…

Dior sells the most perfume in the business and the most optimised object on the shelf, and it charges you for the confusion. This is a full Dior fragrance house deep dive told through fourteen bottles and one…