Warning: a post not about graphic design.
I'm in Newcastle right now for the Thinking Digital conference, which we're speaking at on Friday. Right after Hans Rosling. No pressure.
Anyway. Last night there was a dinner for speakers. This was billed as a 'Perfume Dinner'. Whatever that means. I'm familiar with the film and the book Perfume (Grenouille and all that) so I was interested to find out if we were all going to be horrifically murdered.
No one was murdered.
Hosted by Chandler Burr who's the perfume critic at the New York Times (I'm not making this up) it was a fascinating evening with a lot of science. In a good way. It's basically a 7 course meal interrupted by scent. Each course of the dinner was preceded by the corresponding smell. For example we smelt some carrots before this lovely carrot soup.
We smelt synthetic scents and natural scents, we found out which popular scents are in which perfumes. How the big perfume houses operate (clue: there's lots of money in it). A perfume 101, if you like. A fabulous, interesting evening.
Chandler would get us to smell something which no-one could quite place and then as soon as he revealed the source we were all taken straight there.
I'm not really getting across how powerful it was. But we all know how a certain smell can take you right back to a particular memory instantly.
Right at the end we smelled, individually, lime, vanilla, cinnamon and clove. We were getting good at guessing the smells by this point, so most people got these. Chandler asked us what all these scents together would make. We had no idea.
Then we placed all four sticks together took a sniff - Coca Cola. Pretty amazing.
I learned a lot. You can't say that for most speakers dinners.
The coke thing must be the perfumiers party trick, I saw one of the 'noses' from P&G do a similar thing at a presentation.
Posted by: pristyles | May 14, 2009 at 13:55
Yeah I think so too.
Still cool though.
Posted by: Ben | May 15, 2009 at 15:26
Not graphic design, but still design. Sounds like an interesting time.
Posted by: Justin | May 17, 2009 at 20:22
Is that Katerina?
Posted by: Jason | May 19, 2009 at 17:50