EAUX D'ART

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see," said the Impressionist artist Edgar Degas. These perfumes and perfumeries would like to disagree on the "seeing" part.

- JOEY WONG

Freedom. Fantasy. Fetish. The highfalutin syntax pebbled through zealous marketing copy for the fragrance genus often reads like truly appalling poetry. But, then again, in the same vein of quandary as being tasked to use words to describe colour, how does one accurately put scent into locution, when the olfactive journeys thus undertaken can be so immeasurably varied? Perhaps this is, precisely, why accuracy is reserved for mathematics and the sciences and not the arts.

Because the synapses in our brain-matter may very well strike upon being confronted with a single spritz of jasmine absolute. Or bergamot harvested from Sicily. Or ylang-ylang, base-noted with accords of leather. And while a palette of eyeshadow or a simple brushed-tip eyeliner may have much easier affiliations to art, or the medium that facilitates the art-making, it's the evocative journeys prompted by scent - be they an icy plunge through suddenly unearthed childhood memories or, simply, "God, that smells awful" - that precisely do as art does: imply, suggest and, for some olfactive blends more than others, for some noses more than others, force a reckoning.

For some, art is so entirely integral to the process of creation it's a facet entirely woven into the business itself. After all, you'd only have to exit through the Louvre's gift-shop to wander past a series of Officine Universelle Buly perfumes scented in the image of the priceless masterpieces you can only dream of bringing home-with the fragrances, you can.