niche perfume

Perfume & Poetry

SMELL IS A POTENT WIZARD THAT TRANSPORTS YOU ACROSS A THOUSAND MILES AND ALL THE YEARS YOU HAVE LIVED.

– HELEN KELLER

 

IT IS THE GOLDEN MAXIM TO CULTIVATE THE GARDEN FOR THE NOSE, AND THE EYES WILL TAKE CARE OF THEMSELVES.

– ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

My wife Wendy Bourgeois got me into perfume. She has built her obsession for years now, while I am a total novice. It wasn’t precisely that I wanted to catch up with her nose, but I have my own obsessive ways of apprehending a thing. I began to think about perfume as a problem to solve, and it was out of this need to solve a problem that I came upon the idea to this project.

Patrick S. Rogers

Patrick S. Rogers

Wendy Bourgeois

Wendy Bourgeois

Wendy Noonan

Wendy Noonan

Sara Kolp

Sara Kolp

I had just applied and been accepted to PSU for an MFA in poetry, but at the last minute I found I was two credits shy of completing my undergraduate degree. I had to scramble to find a suitable course of study I could complete by the end of summer. I had been tinkering around and talking with Wendy about the idea of putting together perfume related description writing workshop. She suggested I use that idea as my class. 

I’m pretty heady when it comes to my obsessions and as a result of that headiness I have the tendency to make things more difficult than sometimes necessary. While constructing the class, I thought one way to think about perfume would be to think of each one like a text, or like a novel. I thought what if each perfume acted as a novel for the nose. With this in mind I wanted to bring the perfume to the writers stripped of context. I was interested in how one perceives the very thingness of scent. As a reader of perfume and then to write about them, I didn’t want to be influenced by the maker’s name, or the name of the perfume; I only wanted to read the smell. 

It was then Wendy and I contacted Tracy and André at Fumerie Parfumerie. They were gracious enough to curate the experience. For five weeks straight, Wendy and I devised a different writing exercise each week and each week André put together a package of unmarked samples for us to smell. After the first week, this exchange became like a conversation. We, the readers groped around in the dark trying to find new ways to access meaning, while André and Tracy were our light bringers showing us the way. Each week we came back with more questions, and each week they responded with their own questions: “What about this?”,  “How about these three?” or “What if you thought about this variation on a theme?”.

The work we writers performed is varied and expansive: ruminations on specific memories, philosophical questions of just how memory works, magical realist travel to places in the imagination, animals, plants, sex, love, revulsion—everything from the sacred to the profane. 

Profumum Roma Trunk Show Photos

The evening of October 26 was a celebration of the elegant creations of Italian niche perfume house Profumum Roma featuring special guests Luciano Durante and Fabrizio Cipriani. Durante is one of the founders of the perfume house and Cipriani is a longtime friend of the Durante family and currently serves as the North American brand manager for Profumum Roma.

Over the course of the two-hour long event, Durante and Cipriani discussed the origins of the house, the inspiration behind many of Profumum Roma's creations and what drives the Durante family to create new fragrances. Durante and Cipriani then fielded questions from audience members with Cipriani listening intently and acting as Durante's interpreter.

Audience members were then invited to sample the collection of over two dozen fragrances, all of which were laid out on the counter. Check out some of the photos from the event below. We would like to thank everyone who attended the event and a offer a very special thanks to Luciano Durante for flying all the way from Italy and to Fabrizio Cipriani for participating in and helping to plan this wonderful night!

Apologies for the low quality of some of the images—circumstances forced us to use an iPhone camera to photograph the event so they aren't as sharp as usual.