On our way home from school we would call in to my father’s printing works. The smell of paper and ink is an intoxicating cocktail and every time I open a new book the smell brings me right back. If you like books, you can now smell like one Paper Passion is one of the next perfumes to come to your local heaving perfume counter. ‘Paper Passion is different’. This advertising speak is probably true as Paper Passion was developed by Geza Schoen who is already famous for his single ingredient perfume “Molocule” (available in Samui, Cork and which I blogged about already ‘Don’t wash – home in 3 days’). This time there appears to be three people involved. Karl Largerfeld, Geza Schoen and printer and publisher Gerhard Steidl. Now there’s a TROIKE!
This open magazine shown here is Wallpaper*s August 2011 “Handmade Edition” which does a 6 page spread on Paper Passion. On the right, Schoen holds an early prototype of the packaging. My question is – will the perfume smell as good as the packaging?
As far as I can make out – book lover Largerfeld, with a personal library of over 300,000 books, owns a book shop in Paris and is about to open one in New York, he loves the smell of books so much he’s decided to launch a perfume that smells like a book. To do this he has hired Berlin based Geza Schoen a genius when it comes to scent and he created Paper Passion with just 3 or 4 ingredients (most perfumes have up to a 100 ingredients). So to get this scent Largerfeld invited Schoen to Gerhard Steidl‘s printing works to experience the ‘intoxication cocktail’, where they sampled lots of different papers and lots of different inks and finally came up with Paper Passion. The packaging, designed by Largerfeld himself is a hollowed out hardback book to hold the perfume bottle, just adds to the intrigue.
Like everything else in life this has been done before, but with this “TROIKE” they will do it better. Here is what the creator of ‘In The Library’ cosmetics range has to say on stylefrizz.com
“There are few things more wonderful than the smell of a much-loved book. Newly printed books certainly smell very different from older ones. Their ink is so crisp though the odor of their paper is so faint. Older books smell riper and often sweeter. Illustrated books have a very different odor from those with straight text and this smell often speaks of their quality. I’ve also noticed that books from different countries and different periods have very individual scents too. These speak not only of their origin, but of their history to this moment. I can distinguish books that were well cared for from those that were neglected.”