Saturday, March 2, 2013

The Scent of 1400 Perfumes...Combined!

If you -like me- have ever played at your mother's or grandmother's vanity mixing the liquid of all the little perfume bottles together and ruining the precious juice in the process you know just what a musty, muddled stench such a combination can give and have moved on.  Apparently not every visitor at the French concept store Colette has though, which is why they're displaying that momentous thing in the first place: a giant vial filled with 1400 perfumes samples. Talk about giga-pong!


Actually that's the combined total of ALL the 2012 perfume releases (Remember the times when the most launches a single year saw was only one tenth of that number?)
Dutch duo Lernert and Sander decided to experiment regardless, amassing all the perfumes of 2012, mixing them together and displaying the mix at Colette under the "art project" name Everything; a monster perfume. After Surplus and La Petite Morte and now this, it seems like scent is the playground of artists who want to carve out a novel way to have people intrigued about their ways. Who knows what's coming up next!

pic via jezebel.com

12 comments:

  1. I must say I want to smell this. But you just know it would be the worst kind of least-common-denominator laundry-musk-flower-fractionated-patchouli bomb.

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  2. USC,

    it would!! If it were pre-1980s stuff though, it might have a completely different thing to it (but it would be too potent, too "perfume-y", one is never safe).

    I bet the clientele at Colette are inquisitive about this. At least they picked the right store.

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  3. Anonymous06:47

    Heh it reminds me of something in LTs book about the 'vats'of *pink*, *axe*, etc...., and of my own strange years in the wilderness when upon traveling to the 'Big Smoke", Sydney, when everything smelled the same...a pissy fruitiness and a strident woody thing drove me out of the perfume aisles feeling so let down...
    As an arty type it only confirms my cynical belief that many artists are a bit dumb, yet they are clearly stumbling around a genuine truth about our beloved Art as it is commercialised to buggery...

    ReplyDelete
  4. I would love a big old sniff too!

    Wonder what its like???
    Probably Angel! LOL !!!

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  5. I have a giant old mahogany cabinet that I keep all of my perfume in. There are maybe 2000 bottles and various decants in there. Every time I open the door to this cabinet, the scent that greets me is just incredibly wonderful. I have always wished that someone could bottle the scent of the inside of my perfume cabinet. Granted, the cabinet scent is helped by many vintage fragrances, but I can't help but be intrigued. I want to sniff "Everything"

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  6. Miss Heliotrope23:10

    People playing with scent is good, and I would also be curious about the smell.

    Would be more interested if arty people decided to start playing properly with the concept of perfume - a different approach or the like.

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  7. Eva H.09:33

    Just thinking about it makes me nauseous....even if most new releases smell very similar to each other, I have no desire to smell this concoction.
    Often going to a perfume store and getting hit by the different ´fumes from every direction makes me headache-y.

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  8. Anon,

    absolutely right, everything smells the same these days. I guess with 1400 releases, one is bound to repeat themselves (especially knowing it's a couple of handfuls of people who are doing all the work anyway).

    Ha, on the artists! Yes, you have a point there.

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  9. M,

    reportedly gross ;-)

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  10. KK,

    ah, that is a beautiful and dreamy picture you paint there. But what is volatilised in the air and left hanging there must be different than actually mixing all those things with the ingredients interacting with each other.
    Judging by my own experiments as a kid mixing 4 or 5 different perfumes together, I can vouch for the results being less than pleasant.

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  11. C,

    from your mouth to the artists' ears!

    ReplyDelete
  12. Eva,

    I bet the combined stimuli from all those perfumes would be headache-inducing indeed. One can process only so much.

    ReplyDelete

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