'Read my scent': The Library of Fragrance (aka Demeter Fragrance Library) gets a UK boost in Boots

That perfume looks decidedly fresher than my knob of ginger

I first encountered the New York-based perfumery, Demeter Fragrance Library, under (by any yardstick) very odd circumstances. It was during my visit to fellow blogger Bloody Frida's home town in the Mid-West, in March 2011. The full story of our extremely full-on weekend is recounted here, but the bit about the two perfumes from the Demeter line that I discovered back then bears repeating - to set the scene (and the requisite oddball tone) for this latest post about the line.

"As the night wore on, and my two bottles of beer somehow managed to be chased down (note the careful use of the passive voice) by a vodka martini that had been abandoned by one of our party (rude not to drink it, really), I started to feel a bit merry. Indeed I was probably not far off the state to which I refer in my 1984 diary rather more bluntly as 'pissed'. The rest of the evening is a fabulous blur, but we ended up back at the house of the Yorkshireman and his wife (friends of Bloody Frida we had bumped into earlier that evening), who live in a warehouse conversion tastefully decorated with a surreal assortment of art works in every conceivable medium, vintage 50s furniture, and reclaimed industrial materials repurposed as quirky ornaments - in short, a stunningly strange collection of artefacts that had been lovingly curated over many decades. We sat cross legged on the floor knocking back - and partly also, OVER - rather too many glasses of red wine, crunching wholegrain crackers with the gusto of people who hadn't eaten for a week, not just a few hours earlier, and spraying the entire length of our hostess's arms with the assortment of perfumes we had had the foresight to bring with us in case just such a consultancy opportunity should arise. We also got to try the only two perfumes she currently owned: Demeter Snow and Fireplace, and empathised over a lost chypre scent she had once loved."

Source: oberlinedu.com

That is rather a long preamble, I know, but I will forever associate the Demeter brand with the extraordinary house of the quirky artist whose perfume collection was so sparse by comparison, comprising just this duo of Snow and Fireplace. I remember Snow as being a cold, watery, slightly other worldly and faintly spring floral scent, that did a good job of conjuring up the sensation and smell of burying one's head in the white stuff. Fireplace I can't recall, but I think it might have been a woody spicy number.

In the intervening three and a half years I can frankly say I haven't given the Demeter range a single thought, mostly because it hasn't really been available over here - or only in fits and starts in places like Liberty's, say. But the brand popped back into my mind this week, when I received an email out of the blue from the MD of a distribution company called House of Blend, who is charged with launching the brand in the UK under the name 'The Library of Fragrance'.

As it happens, I have been doing some thinking lately about the various approaches I receive from what I shall loosely and collectively term as 'PR people'.  I alluded briefly to this topic in my recent Papillon Perfumery post, because exchanges with Liz Moores are a shining exception to the bland, impersonal, automaton-like communications I often receive from such quarters. Clare Rees, the MD of House of Blend, has a similarly down to earth manner. Hence I was immediately 'engaged' by her email (there goes another quid in the 'orrible business speak equivalent of a swear box...), also by the fact that she addressed me by name (a small thing you might think, but by no means a given!). Moreover she had clearly read my blog, and not just pretended to have done so in some glib throwaway reference. So the 'real sounding' and personalised nature of her overture immediately warmed me further to this offbeat brand I dimly recalled from that drunken night in Ohio...

Source: pinterest.com

In a press release accompanying Clare's email, I learnt that a 'capsule collection' of 28 'best selling' scents from the Library of Fragrance will be launching on 9th September in 400 Boots branches nationwide. Hmm, not sure why 'best selling' should be in inverted commas - unless there are some interpretation issues with the sales figures - but there you go. The rest of the range (there are a staggering 101 scents overall!) will be available to buy online from the Library of Fragrance's UK website. The price will be a snip at £15 for a 30ml bottle, and there will additionally be a '2 for £25' promotion at Boots, possibly as an indefinite basis.

For anyone not familiar with The Library of Fragrance, the brand is founded on the principle of creating perfumes that smell of everyday things.

"Rather than trying to capture the ‘essence’of an aspirational ideal or glossy advertising image, The Library of Fragrance presents scents that are ‘real’ and ‘familiar’ and can be chosen to reflect the preferences of the wearer, instead of those dictated by a perfumer or designer. Selecting a scent to wear becomes as easy as asking yourself, ‘what sort of things do I like?’"

Gin & Tonic the perfume cosying up to Aldi's finest

Well, I have nothing in principle against perfumes that reflect the preferences of a perfumer or designer - I just accept that I may or may not like their compositions, just as I may or may not like some of the everyday things The Library of Fragrance supposes I might care to smell. It is certainly refreshing, however, to get away for a while from that 'wafty, soft focus, chiffon-clad Keira Knightley / Scarlett Johansson' style of perfume marketing implicitly referenced in the quote above. And interestingly, this more prosaic approach to perfumery is exactly the kind embraced by my friend Clare - whom I recently featured in my 'perfumista protege progress report' series - in answer to the question about how her feelings towards perfume had changed since I started introducing her to more niche scents.

"I think that as a result of owning more bottles and trying more 'stuff' I have understood more about what I really like. I describe this as a perfume that smells of a thing. Something organic, not something perfumey."

Well, the Library of Fragrance concept looks right up her street...;)

The other aspect that will be promoted by the brand is layering. With such a humungous range to explore - even the shortlist of 28 available in-store is pretty darn extensive - I can't see me experimenting with layering any time soon. I suppose though that it is a logical extension of the philosophy of a person enjoying 'smelling of things'. You can basically mix and match your favourite smells to create more complex scented settings / scenarios. As the press release goes on to explain:

"The most basic rule of thumb is that if things smell good together in real life, they will smell good on you. For example, ‘Grass’ + ‘Sunshine’ + ‘Vanilla Ice Cream’ smell incredible worn together, perfectly conjuring a summer day’s stroll in the park, whilst ‘Gingerbread’ + ‘Marshmallow’ is a comforting duo that gourmand fragrance fans will fall for."

So in Clare's case, as a diehard fig lover and the anchorwoman of Cake Club, she could perhaps combine Fig Leaf with Vanilla Cake Batter, say. To fully meet her tastes, however, the range has a glaring omission in the shape of Wet Dog.

Hypothetical Wet Dog & Snow layering idea? ~ Source: Clare Chick

As I say, I don't feel ready to layer yet, and am not a big fan of layering generally, for even with the relatively small Jo Malone range, which also sets store by the notion, the infinite permutations used to blow my mind and increase the anxiety levels I was already feeling from having so many perfume options to choose from in my collection as a whole. So I will just toss the idea out there for the moment in case any readers are more inclined that way.

Having piqued their curiosity about the upcoming launch, I am meeting with Clare and two other male friends - who are both delightfully eccentric and generally drawn to 'weird stuff' - down the pub shortly. Here I plan to hold an utterly unscientific mini-focus group about the Library of Fragrance line. I thought my mate David would be a good test subject, as he is an artist in the realist tradition and loves nothing more than to paint juxtapositions of food and flowers with other random objects. The other chap, Jim, actually suggested that on her recent sodden charity bike ride, Clare could equally well have worn the Demeter Rain perfume in place of her choice of Bradley Wiggins-inspired Time to Draw the Raffle Numbers. At the time he had merely found a link to it in Google, but now - thanks to the generosity of House of Blend - we have a 'starter kit' of scents representing various points along the 'orthodox to well wacky' spectrum for our focus group, including the very weathers with which Clare contended on that day, ie Rain and Thunderstorm! Then in my invitation, I initially wrote 'mini-ficus group' by mistake, which of course would only work for the Fig Leaf one.

David's take on things figgy

I am actually wearing eight Library of Fragrance scents at once as I write, and my initial thoughts are that each perfume faithfully smells of the thing it purports to represent, however abstract or concrete that thing may be. They are verily the Ronseal of the perfume world. Which prompted Jim to pipe up: 'There's one that smells of creosote? Oh good!" For the moment I have had to disappoint him, but who knows what line extensions may yet come down the pipe?

So I will report back with their - and more of my own - feedback in due course. I confidently predict that the comments from that trio will be as 'off the wall' as the perfumes themselves.

UPDATE - We have had the focus group now, and the predictably bonkers post about it is now up!

Oh, and the 28 scents that will shortly be available in-store at Boots may be found on their website here.

Back From The Bonkers Fly Drive Trip – Part 4: The Scented Bit (Bloody Fridaville, Ohio)

Right, so I know what you are thinking about the title of this latest instalment in the Bonkers Fly Drive trip report: why refer to Chicago and Cleveland by name, but invent a fictitious place to describe where Bloody Frida lives? Well, I figured that Chicago and Cleveland were both big enough cities to protect the privacy of ScentScelf and Beth respectively, who live somewhere in that metropolitan area. Ohio, however, felt too broad a descriptor (after all, Cleveland is also in Ohio, so we run into some Venn diagram-type problematics there), while the small college town in which Bloody Frida lives in Ohio - is, well, simply too small.

Put it this way, if you compared the act of randomly walking the streets of downtown Chicago or Cleveland keeping an eye out for ScentScelf and Beth to looking for a needle in a haystack, the equivalent search for Bloody Frida in her town is more akin to fleetingly fingering two blades of grass. To illustrate this point, in the course of my weekend there, we bumped into Frida's friend Steve crossing the road (I think I can confidently name him, on the basis that even a town as sparsely populated as BFV is likely to have at least two Steves), no fewer than three times at the exact same spot.

So all things considered, Bloody Fridaville it will be...

Backtracking slightly, after my meeting with Beth I drove out to BFV and checked into my hotel, which had a stripey awning that ran the entire length of the building, of the kind more commonly associated with barbers and butchers. Shortly after I had unloaded my bags, Frida rang to say she was in the lobby. I was happy it was her, and not the front desk asking me if everything was all right with my room, which I had not had time to fully assess. Later I did in fact flag up a missing plug, only to find it later, lurking in a fold of the shower curtain.

Frida - unmistakable from her avatar, and sporting one of her many eclectic knitted hats - had arrived bearing a bunch of flowers, so after a warm exchange of greetings we set off in search of a vase, or other receptacle that could serve as an approximation for one. Within no time, we scored a large plastic pitcher from the hotel bar, and having installed the flowers in my room (which for all I know may have received a courtesy call after we went out, inquiring whether everything was all right with their jug), we adjourned to Aladdin's for a late lunch. This popular eatery has a vaguely alternative menu and specialises in Middle Eastern cuisine, despite having the decor and ambience of a National Milk Bar.

At this point, my and Frida's accounts of the weekend coincide: she mentions the great soups - they were indeed hearty to the point of virtually solid (this is good), and chock full of "particulates" ie bits of - in my case - blackened chicken, blackened no doubt all the better to match the sludgy shade of Puy lentils. We ordered smoothies to wash the soup down (smoothies not being noted for their Middle Eastern antecedents, but delicious nonetheless), and spent a disproportionate amount of time - in the waitress's eyes at least - messing about with our perfume samples, with which the table was by this stage liberally strewn. I suspect there was a direct correlation between the waitress's proactive proffering of the bill and the perceived oddball nature of our impromptu sniffing session.

After lunch and a stroll round the major arteries of Bloody Fridaville ("arteries" being the operative word - "operative" being another operative word!), I returned to my hotel to catch up on work emails and have a little rest, before our big Friday night out on the town. Now you may think I am being ironic here, given the diminutive nature of BFV and its likely dearth of night spots / flesh pots...but you would be wrong. I had the biggest night out in years... and quite possibly ever!

7.30pm saw us ensconced at a window table upstairs at The Feve bar, as Frida mentions in her account. I met her husband, the MOTH (another woolly hat aficionado), and was introduced to a steady procession of her lively and interesting friends, who turned up at staggered intervals over the course of the evening. Indeed, staggering was also involved in people's departures, along with wobbly bike manoeuvres and the odd collision with lamp posts, but I am running ahead of myself, plus I was planning to draw a veil over most of our late night antics.

So anyway, I met Frida's friends in this jumping but rather noisy bar, with its relaxed wooden furniture and stylishly backlit optics. One friend turned out to be from Yorkshire originally, so I tugged the fabric of my sweater in his general direction, and exclaimed: "Look - my jumper's from Whitby!" It may be a small town, but random weird stuff like this, or the multiple bumpings into Steve, can clearly happen at any moment.

As the night wore on, and my two bottles of beer somehow managed to be chased down (note the careful use of the passive voice) by a vodka martini that had been abandoned by one of our party (rude not to drink it, really), I started to feel a bit merry. Indeed I was probably not far off the state to which I refer in my 1984 diary rather more bluntly as "pissed". The rest of the evening is a fabulous blur, but we ended up back at the house of the Yorkshireman and his wife, who lived in a warehouse conversion tastefully decorated with a surreal assortment of art works in every conceivable medium, vintage 50s furniture, and reclaimed industrial materials repurposed as quirky ornaments - in short, a stunningly strange collection of artefacts that had been lovingly curated over many decades. We sat cross legged on the floor knocking back - and partly also, over - rather too many glasses of red wine, munching whole grain crackers with the gusto of people who hadn't eaten for a week, not just a few hours earlier, and spraying the entire length of our hostess's arms with the assortment of perfumes we had had the foresight to bring with us in case just such a consultancy opportunity should arise. We also got to try the only two perfumes she currently owned: Demeter Snow and Fireplace, and empathised over a lost chypre scent she had once loved.

Fast forward to Saturday morning and a mumbled phone conversation between me and Frida, which quickly established that we both felt a trifle delicate - me more than Frida, I sense - as I had mixed my drinks rather more flagrantly. Our planned meeting time of 11am was promptly put back to 3pm, when Frida picked me up and took me on a sightseeing tour of the town in her car. We poked around a fine specimen of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture, and I also photographed a curious house nearby that looked like a scrumpled up tissue.

Next up, I was craving tea, so Frida had the bright idea of dropping in on her friends Nick and Elizabeth, who could be relied upon to have my preferred beverage in stock, not least because Nick turned out to be another fellow Brit, from Chichester no less. This time I couldn't muster an item of clothing from that part of the world, but I could raise him an aunt who sewed hassocks for the cathedral and a deceased uncle who had collected the offering plates.

It was only 5pm by now, but I was flagging fast, the excesses of the previous night by now catching up with me. So I returned to my hotel and we agreed that I would go over in the morning, giving me a chance to see Frida's house, her menagerie of pets, and the all-important nerve centre of Bloody Frida operations!

Refreshed after 12 hours' sleep, I was packed, checked out and ravenously hungry by 10.30am on Sunday, and went over to Frida's for a delicious brunch of blueberry smoothies and scrambled eggs from their very own hens on home baked bread, fresh from the oven, all rustled up by the MOTH without batting an eyelid - or a wing. I had two mugs of tea (Frida had seen me coming and swung by the supermarket on Saturday night!), and felt fortified for the journey ahead: a flight to Chicago, followed by a 250 mile drive to Iowa.

Not before I had had a good old nosey round the house, mind: I played with Frida's very fetching bottle collection, which lives on her bedroom dresser and includes several dainty Annick Goutals. She was wearing La Chasse aux Papillons that day, her girly perfume "exception". I laid eyes on Bloody Frida's computer (small, glossy black, perched on a shelf in the spare room, dangerously encroached by books and crafting materials). We also rifled through some jumbled tupperwares of decants and bottles (I spotted the mini of Lauren I sent her!), and of course no tour would be complete without being comprehensively jumped up on by the bouncy and ebullient Sephora. The canine equivalent of an eager and importunate sales assistant, but without the free samples!

I was very sorry to leave Bloody Frida and her namesake town after such an eventful weekend, and lingered on the front lawn for a few moments, taking exterior shots of her handsome Victorian house. But the working week beckoned, so we exchanged parting hugs and I went on my way, armed with a clutch of new decants (including Murray & Lanman's Florida Water, BBW Sandalwood Rose & Creed Fleurs de Bulgarie, to name but three), and some great memories. I would just lose the hangover, perhaps.




Photo of awnings from igg.org.uk, photo of Aladdin's from yelp.com, photo of The Feve from flickr, photo of Demeter snow from kaboodle.com, photo of La Chasse aux Papillons from evilmonito.com, other photos my own