CHRISTOPHER BROSIUS ODE TO PERFUME
Perfume is a luxury. Perfume is a journey. Perfume is a veil that reveals the soul. Perfume is … the list is endless. Christopher Brosious, a Brooklyn-based award-winning perfumer and founder of CB I Hate Perfume, could talk about it for hours. With every creative step being as important as the result, Brosious formulates some of the most unusual scents. Behind the curious names such as Seven Billion Hearts, At the beach 1966, In the Library, I am a dandelion – my personal favorite – lies a complex chemistry of unusual mixtures and rare ingredients.
When I met Christopher Brosious, he just moved his business to a new location in Bushwick and decided to turn his shop into a full-fledged perfume gallery, focusing on his clients and the experience of choosing luxurious scents, rather than just selling perfume. “I have to say I thought I was going to miss the old place, but the longer I’m here, the better I like it. We have twice as
much space as we did before, which makes everybody’s life a lot easier. The shop is no longer located right on the street and is largely open by appointment, which means we can really work with our private clients to give them the level of assistance they ought to have without any distractions.” Quite a few of Brosious’ clients travel from afar to come to the gallery, so ensuring that his customers have an unparalleled experience is a top priority.
“I wanted to make sure that my clients can have a really gracious experience at the gallery. Because perfume is a luxury, it’s something that’s totally unnecessary. Perfume is designed to make life better, even though you don’t need it. So just as an experience of the perfume is a luxury, I think the experience of choosing the perfume needs to be a luxury as well.
And it doesn’t mean that it’s an exclusionist thing intended to make people feel insignificant, or inadequate. It really is something that’s created to make you feel good and to make life much more real. That’s truly what we can focus on now.”
What makes CB perfumes stand apart from the rest, is not only the chemical make-up of the product, but the selection process of the materials and their unique quality as well. “I use two major groups of materials when I’m making perfume. I do use a lot of strictly natural materials, a wide range of them being very simple things like citrus oils or lavender, and extraordinarily rare and very expensive things like the narcissus absolute or real agar wood. Along with natural ingredients, I also use a lot of synthetic components.
But when it comes to synthetic aroma chemicals, I am very particular about using things that do not cause me to have the reaction that generated my original statement ‘I hate perfume.’ So I will never use something that’s going to make another person feel physically ill. That means certain things are not allowed in my formulations, and other chemicals are only allowed up to a certain percentage and never beyond.” Brosius is also very particular when it comes to new introductions of aroma chemicals. “I tend to never use things that are described by their manufacturers as ‘a molecule never before found in nature’. Human beings are designed to process nature in a very specific way. If we have no format for dealing with something that’s never been found in its natural form, than we can only imagine it’s going to create problems on some level.” Continue Reading Christopher Brosious Ode To Perfume....