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 language pebbled through zealous marketing copy for fragrances often reads like truly appalling poetry. But, then again, in the same vein of quandary when using words to describe colour, how does one accurately do the same for scent, when olfactive journeys can be so varied? The synapses in our brain may very well fire wildly when confronted with a single spritz of jasmine absolute. Or bergamot harvested from Sicily. Or ylang-ylang, base-noted with accords of leather. While makeup may have more straightforward affiliations to art, it's the evocative journeys prompted by scents that do as art does: imply, suggest and, for some olfactive blends and 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. “Guerlain and art," says Ann Caroline Prazan, the beauty brand's director of art, culture and heritage, "have enjoyed a unique, almost unbreakable relationship." It was recorded that as early as 1828, Pierre-François Pascal Guerlain had associated himself and his brand with painters like Louise Abbéma, who was entrusted to decorate the boutiques. Later, Jacques Guerlain, a steadfast patron of the arts, especially those of Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro and Claude Monet Monet's The Magpie, which has now found home in the Musée d'Orsay, once hung in the Guerlain workshop despite public opinion at the time, also found his own decorator in artist Jean-Michel Frank.

So, the spirit of artistic revelation has since crept its way into the very fabric of Guerlain's sensorial oeuvre, most patently in the L'Art & La Matière collection, which pairs perfumers with works of art.