Coal Perfume by Sissel Tolaas: Would you Wear it?

Even if your answer to this question is yes, you have to allow for extremely limited production: only10 pieces are produced for inquisitive "noses" in the industry to smell. Sissel Tollas, the famous Norwegian olfactory researcher and artist, created a charcoal perfume for SHOWstudio.

Coal is nothing new to perfumery actually: several of perfumery's materials have been produced via coal and tar byproducts since the late 19th century. Tolaas, in her credo of "there are no inherently good or bad smells" tried to capture the sooty mineral of the coal mines of the North Pole intact into an olfactory project called "Coal Perfume".

"Scent artist Sissel Tolaas pushes the boundaries of the olfactory sense, inverting our preconceptions of how things should smell, how things can smell, and what a scent can say. With COAL Tolaas created a wearable perfume made from coal extracted from the deepest mine in the North Pole. Tolaas' perfume evokes a strange sense of deceit: the bottled Essence Absolue of fired carbon opposes our expectation of a floral fragrance, drawing allusions to the olfactory alchemy of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, antihero of Patrick Suskind's Perfume".


The 75 ml bottle in black dye with a pump atomiser is looks like a sensuous elixir of seduction....what irony!

Available at SHOWstudio for 200GBP. 

Mapping Scentscapes: How to Do it

"Perhaps the earliest attempt to make an urban smell map dates back to Paris in the 1790s, when new ideas about both political equality and hygiene combined to send physician Jean-Noël Hallé on a six-mile odor-recording expedition along the banks of the Seine. His map-making technology consisted of nothing more than a notebook and pencil -- and, of course, his nose."

Sissel Tolaas of course doesn't merely rely on antiquated methods. In her quest to olfactorily map urban landscapes (has already mapped Paris, New York City and Mexico City and is currently working on Kansas City). Tolaas however uses Living Flower Technology in situ: Dr. Braja Mookherjee, a scientist at IFF, one of the world's largest fragrance and flavor companies. Mookherjee was obsessed with capturing the exact odor you experience when you put your nose up to, say, a living jasmine flower, rather than relying on an extract, or "absolute," as it's called in the perfumery business. In a paper (pdf) published in 1990 -- the same year IFF trademarked Mookherjee's discovery as "IFF Living Flower Technology" -- Mookherjee described his dissatisfaction with natural oils and extracts"

Writer Nicola Twilley writes in an extensive (and informative) article in the Atlantic: "My scratch-and-sniff maps show how New Yorkers' smell, rather than what. To make them, I extrapolated data from the as-yet-unpublished results of an extensive study that tested the responses of four hundred New Yorkers to sixty-six different smells over a two-year period from March 2005. The experiment was conducted by Andreas Keller and Leslie B. Vosshall at the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, The Rockefeller University. "Our main goal was to try to find the difference between different variants in the DNA and different ways that people rank the smells on a seven-point scale from extremely unpleasant to extremely pleasant," Keller said. "We collected our subjects' demographic information just to control for those types of influences."
Nonetheless, that demographic information revealed some fascinating and significant differences in smell perception between men and women, young and old, and different ethnicities. For my map, I chose twelve of Vosshall and Keller's most interesting test smells, from complex natural extracts such as nutmeg and vanilla to single-note synthetic molecules such as octyl acetate, which is the basis for many artificial orange flavors as well as a key ingredient in Chanel No.5."

Read more on how to map a city scent-wise following the link above.

Sissel Tolaas: Smell Anarchist

The woman who has described herself saying "I’m a professional provocateur" gives an exclusive interview to Extrait.it at Pitti fragrance exhibition in Florence.

Pitti Imagine Fragranze 8: Perfume Exhibition

From Friday to Sunday, 10-12 September 2010, Pitti Immagine presents the eighth edition of Fragranze at the Stazione Leopolda, Florence, the first fair-event in Italy dedicated to top level artistic perfumery created through research and sophisticated processes: essences, body-care and wellness products, cosmetic specialties and scented accessories.

In recent years, FRAGRANZE has become an observatory following the evolution of olfactory culture thanks to a full calendar of special projects, preview presentations, talk shows and press conferences -– organized by Pitti Immagine and the exhibitors. Last September FRAGRANZE presented over 160 brands and was attended by 1,700 buyers, a 35% increase compared to the previous edition, with double the number of foreign buyers attending from France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. 114 journalists were registered representing a total of 72 publications from all over the world.

The theme for the new setting of FRAGRANZE, curated by Alessandro Moradei, will be the maieutic qualities of nature: colorful, spontaneous and geometric plants will harmoniously invade the Stazione Leopolda, creating an atmosphere that triggers warm, natural feelings, stimulating dialogue. Spring and Charms, the two most recent exhibition projects, will each have their own layout which will be coherent with and functional to their respective products.

Sissel Tolaas, the Norwegian scientist, artist and scent provocateur has been invited to attend this edition of Fragranze. From her Berlin laboratory where, to date, she has filed away up to 6730 odors – in a kind of olfactory diary/library - with her creations and artistic performances, Tolaas has launched a unique olfactory education project: training people to recognize, accept and define the odors of places, things, bodies and emotions. Sissel Tolaas will present part of her research at the Stazione Leopolda and will illustrate the reasons behind her extraordinary work and the methods she uses.

Watch the Pitti video on this link.
Information on booking and participants on www.pittimmagine.com