The Perfume Lover - A Personal Story of Scent

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Defying childhood allergies and her small, conservative home-town, scent-obsessed Denyse Beaulieu jets off to Paris and becomes a successful perfume writer. There she meets the revered and mysterious master perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour and stirs his olfactory imagination with the story of a sensual night spent in Seville under a blossoming orange tree in the arms of a beautiful young man. This is the story of that perfume.

Beaulieu is a charming and passionate industry insider with seemingly unlimited access to the secretive and utterly fascinating world of perfume creation. She reveals a subculture where intuition, nuance and creativity come up against the brutal commercialism of fashion. Beaulieu recounts the anecdotes and myths behind the world’s most famous scents, effortlessly weaving the evocative history of perfumery into her own personal journey.

Even the smallest molecular details sound sexy when conjured up in Beaulieu’s imaginative and precise prose. It soon becomes very clear that for those in the aromatic underworld of the fragrance industry, perfume is not only a profession, but an intellectual and sensual obsession.

Your world will never smell the same.