Perfume's colour

Yesterday I received a gift. Nothing to do with perfumery, it’s an object I need when I dive (no technical details added). The person who gave it to me me explained that it was a bargain because the object is white, and thus was paid a half. During the dive, this device indicates if something is going wrong, and warns me if I'm doing something dangerous: when you’re meters and meters under water, a malfunctioning device can even make the difference between life and death. But it seems as if it’s white, nobody wants it. People are willing to pay twice the price for the black version. Something you entrust your life to, is less valuable, if the color is wrong.

The thought was automatic. Even in commercial perfumery things tend to work the same way: marketing creates products you choose with your eyes. It’s with eyes that we look at commercials with famous testimonials, the packaging seduces us with shapes and colors carefully studied to hit our sight, it’s with the eyes that we read the name on the bottle, see the color of the juice and all the other details. In today’s scents, the right look is all. And the winning look used to sold items in spring-summer 2009 may differ a lot from the one that will help selling the same item during winter, the same year. People seem to choose with their eyes something they will smell all day long. Absurd.

Scents enter into us through the nose, their aromatic molecules stimulate our nervous system without electric media. Simply touching it. They gets in with every breath. And speak to our soul, to the collective imaginary and to our instincts very close, from inside of us, sitting on our olfactory receptors, a few centimeters inside our heads. Generally, when people think of a scent, they think in terms of images, but fragrance made for the eye are boring in the long term: it’s not the sight, the correct means to experience them! Some time ago I was talking with Nynive and Alex, a Basenoter studying at the Prodarom perfumery school in Grasse. We were wondering why today's fragrances (commercial ones) are often so badly fixed, evenescent, lacking "roundness" and body, compared to the wonders of the past and to the artistic ones. Among many considerations we did, I’ll just report one: fixers, particularly animal ones, are characterized by a very dark color and even diluted tend to darken the juice inside the bottle. Well, a brown perfume is hardly sold, today. Out of the artistic perfumery, a place populated by individuals still believing in the nose as the only way to get in touch with fragrances, transparency and color are determining factor for the purchase and success of a fragrance. Yellow, pale pink, pale green or light blue are allowed, but are rarely used and should be lightweight and above all, completely transparent. With good peace of Alessandro Gualtieri (Nasomatto), Serge Lutens, and all those of us who couldn’t care less of colors.

It's caviar, took picture from here