All

Perfume is soul, soul is perfume.  

 In One Thousand and One Nights, there is this wonderful expression for addressing a loved one: to say “soul of my soul,” signifying the emptiness of living without one's love.

   I remember Aladdin's warm voice - crackling out of a record player on a 45 rpm - speaking to Badroulboudour.  He calls her "my princess, soul of my soul." I was 7 years old at the time, and I asked my mother for the meaning of soul.

  She replied, "There is no single definition. It is an invisible presence that links us to the divine, a little like the Vanilla trail of the perfume that you want to follow. The soul travels to infinity in space and time and connects us to the whole. It is a fragment of that which is beautiful and perfect in each of us, that returns us to heaven and remains on earth when we disappear. Perfume continues the presence of this fragment, and the soul proceeds in the same way."

A few years later, through the sustained reading of One Thousand and One Nights, I learned that the relationship to the body is nothing without a relationship to the soul, though for some, sensuality seemed to be an excellent substitute for the soul. To embrace each other could be an innovative way of instilling in each other a drop of the white and cosmic soul that flowed into the primordial ocean before the world came into being.

  We have here a perfume that speaks of the fire-god of Persia and the gods of India, the worship of offerings, Mesopotamia, milk and clarified butter to honor the gods. And to remember, by a wake in the air, the foaming whiteness of the soul that comes from everything. Here, perfume is soul, soul is perfume. A creamy explosion, where musk intermingles with iris butter and transmits the powerful balm of vanilla, followed by the friction of Tonka against benzoin.

By the musk I remain.

From the bottom of the matter, rise up. 

MERGER OF THE MATTER, BIRTH OF THE SPIRIT.

It is a night of pale moonlight, a night toward the end of the 20th century, a night when the old world is ending and the new one is beginning. It is a night when one trembles to boldly lower the sacred cross against the heart, to aid in the passage to fatherhood.
So, as a crucifix, that night I pick up Hyperion, a novel by Dan Simmons. This is a masterful science fiction saga that celebrates the infinite legend of the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was a 20th-century researcher, paleontologist, theologian and philosopher.
And I read, pacified, until the reflections of the dawn, until the first golden rays of the East. I read the future of man, the celebration of transhumanism and the qualitative leap of humanity enhanced by machine. I have rarely loved a book this much, I have rarely loved a thinker this much.

I read that night what a man thought he saw in the tombs of time.

I am a lover of words in the service of materials when they come together to make poetry in the bottom of our bottles; thus, a few years ago, I bring up the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to one of the last living vestiges of the triumphant 20th century, and I ask him: - "Then Teilhard de Chardin, precursor of genius?" A look, a silence and for the answer four unexpected words, four words whispered by my father: "GHOST IN THE SHELL".
This is the act of birth that makes the spirit of perfume. The rest is poetry to live on the skin.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin died in 1955, but his spirit continues to travel. This fragrance extends it through an alliance with the Japanese artist Shirow Masamune to transcend the spirit of Earth.

By mixing biotech and natural materials, this perfume silently celebrates the wake of the future and also whispers of a day to come, by providence or chance, when humanity is reunited and organized. A day when all consciousness is summoned by the infosphere to constitute a superior being and pass from the inert to the living. As the molecules assemble to make the living, we will then make a qualitative leap that becomes the starting point and arrival of transhumanism.

This perfume is the future. It comes to us from the 20th century.

The Ghost in the Shell, a perfume that speaks of the human phenomenon and its paradox, a perfume to wear on oneself ab libitum, at one’s pleasure. A perfume as a propagation towards the other, that makes you the axis and the arrow of evolution; modern, indeed! From the bottom of the matter, rise up.

Etienne de Swardt