Fragrance Book of the Year 2021

The Essence: Discovering the World of Scent, Perfume & Fragrance

It's back -- the de facto fragrance compendium for the modern world has risen from beneath the pandemic infopocalypse to be nominated as Fragrance Book of the Year for 2021. 

Released in Europe in late 2019, then in the United States in early 2020, this book was immediately overshadowed by the pandemic, and has now come back to life. 

Nominated by the Perfumed Plume, it stands against the legendary author of culinary bible On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee, who just released his second major book in over 30 years. His new book is called Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World of Smells. This is stiff competition for a book that could have been one of the earliest victims of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Perfumed Plume has been awarding fragrance journalism and fragrance books since 2016. They shine a spotlight on writing that both informs and entertains us, offering an engaging view into the oftentimes clandestine, esoteric world of fragrance and olfactory experience. 

They couldn't have picked a better book for that. Described by Fragrantica editor John Biebel as a "highly aesthetic experience," The Essence is a 288-page, full color, hardcover, stitch bound book full of essays, research, inforgraphics, interviews, histories and photographs. The book is a world unto itself. Without reading a single word, this is one of the most beautiful books you'll ever hold. (Bias alert: I did contribute two essays to this book.)

The publisher, Die Gestalten Verlag, is known for their 600 books on art, architecture, design, photography and typography, and is the only publisher where all the editors are designers. And it shows. You put this book on your coffeetable and you might never leave your apartment again. (Sarcasm alert: some of us are still on lockdown due to the pandemic and can't leave our apartments anyway.) 

Writeup by John Biebel of Fragrantica

It's a visually compelling time capsule of fragrance, art, and history rolled into one thick volume. ... Also featured are many revealing essays about culture and smell, such as "The Smell of Fear", "Gender and Identity", and "The Future of Scent". The editorial finesse in a project like "Essence" comes about through the keen balance of compelling graphics, thorough research, and a "something for everyone" approach to content.

Writeup by gestalten

The Essence: Discovering the World of Scent, Perfume & Fragrance, edited by Robert Klanten, founder and CEO of gestalten as well as Carla Seipp, fragrance writer, is the first publication by gestalten recognizing the world of scent and the figures who shape the field.

Writeup on Limbic Signal

Written in the pre-covid era, February 2020

The Designer's Coffeetable

I am very excited to announce a new book about scent that comes out any day now.

It's called The Essence: Discovering the World of Scent, Perfume & Fragrance, and it's being published by Die Gestalten Verlag, who is known for their 600 books on art, architecture, design, photography and typography.

The book is a compendium of fragrance and includes some of the most provocative and important people in the world of smell. It's filled with interviews, stories, essays and data candy about the most understudied of senses. I was lucky enough to contribute a couple essays on the neuromechanics of smell and the smell of the human body. 

Having spent the majority of my career instructing on the principles and elements of visual design, I must say, this book is a visual powerhouse. I would read it just for the sake of looking at the typography, those curves.

Gestalten is the only publisher where all the editors are professional designers. And it definitely shows. From the photographs to the layout to that airtight, neo-Bauhaus, Leger-esque cover, this whole book is a barbituate-drip to the visiopathic ocd cultural consumer. 

What's even better -- it's not about visual design at all; it's about the wide-open world of olfactory indulgence!

I'll let the press department take over from here:

About the Book

The empire of scent: explore the realm of perfumes, smells, and aromatic incense to reveal the enduring allure of fragrance. Scent is a hugely under-studied sense, compared with the other senses, both neurologically and psychologically.

Scents are linked with our most cherished memories of life without the ability to smell is unimaginable. The Essence: Discovering the World of Scent, Perfume & Fragrance contains meticulous research on the mystery of scents, profiles of those pushing the envelope of science and fantasy, and the history of a royal pursuit that have shaped the perfume industry into what it is today. From the lavender fields of Provence and the laboratories where perfumes are created, to incense producers in India.

Meet the trailblazers shaping the future of perfumery as The Essence explores the vital role that technology and scented products will play in the 21st century. A study in 2014 by researchers at the University of Lyon found that aging human stress levels were reduced and moods improved by manipulating the environment with a pleasant odor. There will be a revolution in the health and wellness industries, where a renewed focus on the conscious and subconscious power of scent has gained traction in recent years.

According to Olivia Jezler, the founder of design and fragrance innovation consultancy, Future of Smell, "Scents will be used to enhance cognition, to retain and recall information and even to control the way we feel and experience the world."

What to Expect

All you wish and need to know about the perfume and fragrance industry. Where are the scents from? Why are they so important for us? Who are they designed for and by whom? Investigates fragrance families, raw materials from different regions of the world, the chemistry of smelling, the interaction between smelling and memory.

Featuring designers, start-ups, creative artisans, and manufactories, from young independent perfumers experimenting with genuinely natural fragrances to brands developing artificial scents for their products.

Including a guide to the best perfume meccas worldwide. With essays, interviews, stories, infographics and stunning photography.

“Smell is the deepest sense, it is rooted in our limbic system. It is the old, animal part of our brain, the center where emotions rise and where memories are located."
-Wolfgang Georgsdorf, artist and founder of the Osmodrama festival in Berlin

***

The Essence: Discovering the World of Scent, Perfume & Fragrance, edited by Robert Klanten, founder and CEO of gestalten as well as Carla Seipp, fragrance writer, is the first publication by gestalten recognizing the world of scent and the figures who shape the field.

Find the book here on gestalten’s page, under New Releases.

On the Designer's Coffeetable

I am very excited to announce a new book about scent coming out on November 26 in the EU. (February 11 in the US.)

It's called The Essence: Discovering the World of Scent, Perfume & Fragrance, and it's being published by Die Gestalten Verlag, who is known for their 600 books on art, architecture, design, photography and typography.

It's filled with interviews, stories and encyclopedic information from some of the most interesting and important people in the world of smell. I was also lucky enough to contribute a couple essays on the neuromechanics of smell and the smell of the human body.

Having spent the majority of my career instructing on the principles and elements of visual design, I must say, this book is a visual powerhouse.

Gestalten is perhaps the only publisher where all the editors are professional designers. And it definitely shows. From the photographs to the layout to that airtight, neo-Bauhaus, Leger-esque cover, this whole book is a barbituate-drip to the visiopathic ocd cultural consumer.

What's even better -- it's not about visual design at all; it's about the wide-open world of olfactory indulgence!

I'll let the press department take over from here:

About the Book

The empire of scent: explore the realm of perfumes, smells, and aromatic incense to reveal the enduring allure of fragrance. Scent is a hugely under-studied sense, compared with the other senses, both neurologically and psychologically.

Scents are linked with our most cherished memories of life without the ability to smell is unimaginable. The Essence: Discovering the World of Scent, Perfume & Fragrance contains meticulous research on the mystery of scents, profiles of those pushing the envelope of science and fantasy, and the history of a royal pursuit that have shaped the perfume industry into what it is today. From the lavender fields of Provence and the laboratories where perfumes are created, to incense producers in India.

Meet the trailblazers shaping the future of perfumery as The Essence explores the vital role that technology and scented products will play in the 21st century. A study in 2014 by researchers at the University of Lyon found that aging human stress levels were reduced and moods improved by manipulating the environment with a pleasant odor. There will be a revolution in the health and wellness industries, where a renewed focus on the conscious and subconscious power of scent has gained traction in recent years.

According to Olivia Jezler, the founder of design and fragrance innovation consultancy, Future of Smell, "Scents will be used to enhance cognition, to retain and recall information and even to control the way we feel and experience the world."

What to Expect

All you wish and need to know about the perfume and fragrance industry. Where are the scents from? Why are they so important for us? Who are they designed for and by whom? Investigates fragrance families, raw materials from different regions of the world, the chemistry of smelling, the interaction between smelling and memory.

Featuring designers, start-ups, creative artisans, and manufactories, from young independent perfumers experimenting with genuinely natural fragrances to brands developing artificial scents for their products.

Including a guide to the best perfume meccas worldwide. With essays, interviews, stories, infographics and stunning photography.

“Smell is the deepest sense, it is rooted in our limbic system. It is the old, animal part of our brain, the center where emotions rise and where memories are located."
-Wolfgang Georgsdorf, artist and founder of the Osmodrama festival in Berlin

***

The Essence: Discovering the World of Scent, Perfume & Fragrance, edited by Robert Klanten, founder and CEO of gestalten as well as Carla Seipp, fragrance writer, is the first publication by gestalten recognizing the world of scent and the figures who shape the field.

Find the book here on gestalten’s page, under New Releases.

Secrets of Flavor

In Hidden Scents, I downplayed the clandestine nature of the flavor and fragrance industry, but it is a big part of the language of smell. This was actually one of the things that motivated me to write the book. Not only is smell (and flavor) inherently evasive to language, but the industries that work with these senses are required to keep their work under wraps.

Well, I guess they aren’t required to keep it secret, but they do, and because of the way this particular industry works. Food, as well as fashion, is not protected by copyright law. If you want to make a song, you can be sure that your hard work will pay off, because your song will be protected by copyright, which means that nobody else can say it’s theirs, and only you can reap the benefits. In flavor, fragrance, and fashion, that is not the case. You can’t copyright the Bernardo sandal (surely, they would have). So how else do you protect your hard work? You keep it a secret.

On a side note, I was in the Firmenich flavor plant in Newark, NJ, and our tour guide says that they have research facilities all over the place (primarily NJ, since this is the artificial flavor capital of the world), but that nobody knows where they are, and that you wouldn’t even notice if they were right next door, and in fact even he doesn’t know where they are.

So in short, these experts are expected to be secretive about their work; they have to. Still, it is one of the main obstacles in learning about the language we use to describe these flavors and fragrances – if we can’t even know what it is, how can we describe it? And as I’ve pointed out before, there are public arts funds for visual art and for music, but none for flavor/fragrance.* This guarantees that our public knowledge and public discourse about these topics are mediated by the commercial industry and not by our own personal, social experiences with them.

Flavorists, Experts in the Field of Natural and Artificial Flavoring, Work in Top Secret New Jersey Labs

March 2017, njmonthly  

“It’s a pretty secretive industry,” says Steve Ruocco, president of the Society of Flavor Chemists and a master flavorist at Maryland-based McCormick, the spice company. “You can’t disclose who your customers are,” because secret flavor formulas are often the bread and butter of the food and beverage manufacturers that hire flavor houses to innovate or improve their products. The formulas are what separate Hunt’s ketchup from Heinz and Skippy peanut butter from Jif.

*I would never neglect the only exception to this, the Institute for Art and Olfaction, based in Los Angeles. Started by the inimitable Saskia Wilson-Brown, the institute experiments and educates with scent to allow the public access to a world that is completely taken over by consumerism, and thus off-limits to those without the money to participate.

POST SCRIPT

Can’t talk about this topic of artificial flavors without mentioning Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, 2001. Great way to get inside the hi-tech flavor game (I say hi-tech, knowing the book is almost 20 years old; I’m sure there’ve been lots of developments since).

POST POST SCRIPT

The Bernardo sandal? Yes, this thing which I assume everyone takes for granted as having been a part of “fashion” for as long as people had two feet, is actually credited to Bernard Rudofsky and Berta Rudofsky. He was an architect and wrote the book, Are Clothes Modern, after curating a show at the MoMA by the same name. She was a teacher at the Black Mountain College, a school focused on the arts, and one known for producing influential people (Buckminster Fuller was a big name) in the art world and beyond, despite its short life. One summer they came up with this sandal, and it has completely taken over the world of open-toe footwear ever since. Perhaps, like Jonas Salk with his penicillin discovery, they may have given it away for free, as in, “how do you patent the sun?” But who knows. Bottom line, they couldn’t do it if they wanted, because you can’t copyright fashion.

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