Scent And Subversion

An intriguing look at vintage perfume's powerful past, including reviews of more than 300 scents, with stunning period advertisements throughout.

In this comprehensive and engaging volume, medical historian Jonathan Reinarz offers a historiography of smell from ancient to modern times. Synthesizing existing scholarship in the field, he shows how people have relied on their olfactory sense to understand and engage with both their immediate environments and wider corporal and spiritual worlds. This broad survey demonstrates how each community or commodity possesses, or has been thought to possess, its own peculiar scent. Through the meanings associated with smells, osmologies develop--what cultural anthropologists have termed the systems that utilize smells to classify people and objects in ways that define their relations to each other and their relative values within a particular culture. European Christians, for instance, relied on their noses to differentiate Christians from heathens, whites from people of color, women from men, virgins from harlots, artisans from aristocracy, and pollution from perfume. This reliance on smell was not limited to the global North. Around the world, Reinarz shows, people used scents to signify individual and group identity in a morally constructed universe where the good smelled pleasant and their opposites reeked. With chapters including "Heavenly Scents," "Fragrant Lucre," and "Odorous Others," Reinarz's timely survey is a useful and entertaining look at the history of one of our most important but least-understood senses.

As the world's leading perfume authority, Dove leads readers on an extravagant journey through the world of scent, from Ancient Egypt to the present. Beginning with a comprehensive discussion of the sense of smell and the materials of the master perfumer, Dove goes on to celebrate the great classics, the makers who brought them to life and the bottle makers who gave them shape.

A "coming-of-age memoir by a young woman who spent thirteen years as Jackie Kennedy's personal assistant and occasional nanny--and the lessons about life and love she learned from the glamorous [former] first lady"--Amazon.com.

The Perfect Scent is the thrilling inside story of the global perfume industry, told through two creators working on two very different scents.

'I've long wished perfumery to be taken seriously as an art, and for scent critics to be as fierce as opera critics, and for the wearers of certain "fragrances" to be hissed in public, while others are cheered. This year has brought Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, which I breathed in, rather than read, in one delighted gulp.' Hilary Mantel, Guardian Perfumes: The Guide is the culmination of Turin's lifelong obsession and rare scientific flair and Sanchez's stylish and devoted blogging about every scent that she's ever loved and loathed. Together they make a fine and utterly persuasive argument for the unrecognised craft of perfume-making. Perfume writing has certainly never been this honest, compelling or downright entertaining.

A complete introduction to the psychology and science of perfume, with instructions on using and layering scent, and making your own perfumed sprays, oils, and bath and body products. A complete introduction to the psychology and science of perfume, with instructions on using and layering scent, and making your own perfumed sprays, oils, and bath and body products. At a time when advertising bombards us with the hard sell for the latest celebrity perfumes, fragrance expert Karen Gilbert shows how to create and blend your very own signature scent. Perfume: The Art and Craft of Fragrance introduces us to the psychology of smell and explains how fragrance can influence our moods and behavior, and gives a brief overview of perfume through the ages. A key chapter teaches you how to train your nose to recognize the five different fragrance families (floral, oriental, citrus, chypre, fougère), and how to identify the top, middle, and base notes of a perfume. Once you have understood the basics of how to build a fragrance, learn how to layer scents by creating perfume oils, sprays, and solids, plus scented bath and body products and home fragrance sprays from the easy step-by-step recipes. Illustrated throughout with charming artworks and photographs, Perfume: The Art and Craft of Fragrance is the perfect introduction to the art and romance of creating perfume.

Publisher Description

Join Lizzie Ostrom on an olfactory adventure as she explores the trends and crazes that have shaped the way we’ve spritzed. One hundred perfumes and scents in all their fragrant glory reveal a fascinating social history of the past century. From the belle epoque through the swinging sixties, to the naughty nineties and beyond, Ostrom brings intelligence and wit to this most ravishing of subjects.There was the patriotic impact of English Lavender during World War I and perfumes that captured the Egyptomania of the 1920s. Estee Lauder created "Youth Dew" and with it, distilled the essence of 1950's suburbia. Patchouli oil—the "anti-perfume" of the 1960s—was sure to keep money out of the hands of corporations and "the man." And who could forget the fervor created by the grunge androgyny of CK One? Scent is truly the passport to memory, making Perfume both a lush treat and an insightful examination of the twentieth century through the most mysterious of the five sense.