clipped from: themoment.blogs.nytimes.com   

Scent Notes | Guaiac by Red Flower

The case against organic perfumes is vast and twofold. The first objection involves art. Perfume as an art form (and as a commercial concern) is built on synthetic raw materials. Of course, so are architecture (wood and adobe are nice, but Renzo Piano’s work, for example, relies on advanced polymers and metal alloys), painting (most pigments these days are born in the laboratory, and colors that are unnatural, in all senses, are crucial to painting today), and music (the electronic manipulation of voices etc).

If Guaiac is a universe away from the rich, plush, Frenchly elaborated pre-war Guerlains, it is just as far from the early 21st century minimalist intellectual art scents of Frédéric Malle and Le Labo. Both those schools produce brilliant perfumes. This is something else. One feels about this perfume as one would a tiny blossom, impossibly lovely, ridiculously fragile, evanescent.