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Essence of Beauty

Beauty radiates from everything that has to do with fragrance and its sources of inspiration, but it is also hidden in the details – the bottles, the packaging, the advertising visuals and more… In this special issue, we invite you to discover the BEAUTIFUL in a report that we hope you’ll enjoy like a guided tour of an art museum.

Antiquities & Classics

Sculptures

Plenty of brands describe their bottles as being sculptural, but when you discover the fragrances of the brand ‘Parfums MDCI,’ they really do look like the work of a sculptor. Having started out with crystal, in the footsteps of brands like Lalique, the designers then thought of using ‘biscuit’ or ‘parian’ – a type of fine, matte porcelain that looks remarkably like marble. For the scents contained within these rare objets evoking museum-quality works (the bottle for their men’s fragrance was inspired by the bust of the Roman emperor Caracalla), the brand called on renowned perfumers like Pierre Bourdon and Francis Kurkdjian. Other statues inspired bottle designers too... Like Romulus and Remus’s mythical she-wolf, transformed by Serge Lutens into a maternal, enveloping scent called Louve (“She-Wolf”). For Lutens, this mysterious statue isn’t hiding in Rome, but in the Louvre. Indeed, a single letter transforms Louve into Louvre… Another statuesque image: in the ad campaign for Thierry Mugler’s new perfume collection Miroir Miroir, the same woman strikes 5 different poses inspired by statues, incarnating imaginary olfactory visions of the past, the present and the future.

Historical Antiquities

Let’s continue our guided tour of the Museum of the BEAUTIFUL in the antiquities department. In these halls devoted to Egypt, you often see elaborate unguent jars and containers. Indeed, the oldest known perfume is Egyptian: kyphi, a sacred scent blended from balms, honey and plants. For the brand Cinq Mondes (“Five Worlds”), Olivia Giacobetti reinterpreted the kyphi myth as Eau Egyptienne. A splash of spices, woods and flowers. The same designer also worked on Lubin’s Idole. To hold this woodsy fragrance, with its smoky-liqueur scent, bottle designer Serge Mansau came up with an African divinity bottle. A “primitive art” bottle that would look perfectly at home in Paris’s new Quai Branly Museum of Primitive Art.

Renaissance Painting

Before moving on to modern painting (Part 2), let’s finish our tour of the first floor in the hall of classical painting. Since there is an abundance of items in this category, here is a selection of 3 incursions into the Renaissance.

Italian Renaissance… A certain je-ne-sais-quoi in this photo by Karl Lagerfeld evokes portraits from the Italian Renaissance. A blend of fragile beauty, embarrassment and a bold look in her eyes, like in Raphael’s painting The Lady and the Unicorn. While the comparison may be fortuitous, Palazzo has indeed announced Fendi’s renaissance in perfumery.

French Renaissance... The portrait on the bottle shows Marguerite de Valois, a.k.a. Queen Margot (1553-1615). First consecrated by French cinema, and now in perfumery too, with this new creation from Maître Parfumeur & Gantier and Nicolas de Barry, which blends amber, musk and jasmine. Three scents the Queen is known to have adored.

Pedigreed portrait… Fragrance designer Mona di Orio poses for her brother Ludovic’s camera... in an homage to her namesake, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa? Perhaps. The image is deliberately unfocussed. The dark and mysterious portrait is like an invitation to take a closer look at the designer and her fragrances.