nightlife

Taking perfumes to nightlife

0:57

The ephemeral materiality of scent deeply impacts on how a perfumer can balance life and work. The perfumer’s body is a resource as well as a constraint.

Moving from paper testing strips to the skin can drastically change the overall experience of a perfume. What might be banal everyday knowledge has far reaching consequences for a professional perfumer. The skin of a perfumer is a constraint in the process because there are hardly more than three spots on each arm to spray. Once sprayed on the arm the scent will stay until it has completely evaporated. How long this takes is a matter of the scent’s molecular structure. Hence, a scent does not comply with an organization’s time regime. Instead, the involvement of the perfumer’s body makes the perfumer take his work home, or in this case, to the bar. In this clip, set in a bar late at night, Christophe notices a few molecules on his arm, and casually evaluates the set of recent creations. The undisciplined nature of scent blurs the boundaries of work and non-work.