HISTOIRES DE PARFUMS

A library rather than a collection. Since 2000, Gérald Ghislain has shelved his perfumes the way one shelves books: each bottle sleeps inside a volume-shaped case that slides onto a shelf, spine out, notes printed on the back. The first ones carry a date — the birth year of a figure who unsettled their century: 1740 for Sade, 1889 for the Moulin Rouge, 1899 for Hemingway, 1969 for a year that cannot be told without blushing. Others carry the name of a raw material, Ambre 114 for its hundred and fourteen components, Encens Roi for frankincense. Since 2015, the This is not a blue bottle series has borrowed Magritte's refusal to name, and hands its blue bottles to other noses. Everything is composed and bottled in France, in two sizes only — 60 and 120 ml — like two editions of the same book.

HISTOIRES DE PARFUMS — 1899 bottle on a Parisian café table at night, in front of the lit Eiffel Tower, with black berries, cinnamon sticks and dried roots