Denyse Beaulieu, over at Grain de Musc, alerted me to the new Narciso Rodriguez release, Essence -- not because either of us cares about the fragrance (department store fruity musk), but because the bottle is so gosh darn cool!
Let me quote from Denyse: "Have you ever heard me rave about bottles? No you haven't. My template is the Chanel flacon: simple and functional. But somehow, Ross Lovegrove's design really gets to me - it's like a molten lab bottle filled with quicksilver. Its blurred contours suggest it's about to morph or is in the midst of teleporting. Lovegrove's flowing organic lines appeal to my inner geek: if this is the future, I want in."
Take a number, pal, and get in line.
With so many new perfume releases -- if not new perfume brands, lines, companies, etc. -- still pouring into the market (Denyse writes about that here, as well), I find myself turning into a packaging freak if only to differentiate among the madding crowd.
I've so far focused on niche perfumery because it gave me what I thought was an easy way to drown out half the olfactory static right there, but the number of non-mainstream + artisanal perfume brands has exploded in the last five years, and when one of them has a hit, say, with Iris or incense, then everyone else quickly follows suit and there's suddenly a flood of limited edition iris and incense fragrances and please dear god make it stop I can't hear myself think.
So I figure it's time to add a second level of static elimination, and I'm going to go for packaging on this one. I figure, if a brand is going to trumpet its wares, parade through the market and charge me for the privilege, then I'm definitely in the mood to see the emperor go to the effort of dressing things up a bit.
The Rodriguez Essence went to a lot of trouble getting dressed, and I applaud it for the effort. Saks Fifth Avenue ruined the presentation by putting scotch tape all over the box and leaving dirty fingerprints everywhere, but that just means I won't be doing any further fragrance ordering from their direction (and they wonder why their stock is plummeting). The bottle is, however, an aesthetic pleasure.
Just a little info about Lovegrove, the designer: "Winner of numerous international awards, his work has been extensively published and exhibited internationally, including the museum of modern art in new york, the guggenheim museum new york, axis centre japan, pompidou centre, paris and the design museum london -- where in 1993 he curated the first permanent collection. Lovegrove was awarded the world technology award by Time Magazine and CNN in november 2005."
The bottle is a sculpted glass sheath over a mirrored core, topped by a clear resin cap that looks a bit like an airplane propellor (and spins around like one, too, if you give it a snap). Even the BF said, "Oh, that's a cool bottle!" when he walked past the table this morning -- where I was hunched over in an attempt to get a decent photograph without also capturing my own reflection in the photo. Blasted mirrored bottles.
The PR copy states that "its elemental shape alludes to a woman's
contours to form an exquisite object of art." Okay, whatever. The bottle is curvy and organic and haute in a SoHo art gallery kind of way. It also picks up the colors of whatever environment you place it in, then bends and twists them as you walk past so that it presents an impression of constant motion even when it's sitting still.
Photos below:
Here's another blog post from Anton Steeman about the bottle design, but it goes into a little further detail about the cap:
"The bottle cap is moulded using Surlyn PC 2000 . . . Surlyn is a commercial thermoplastic ionomer resin that was introduced by DuPont in the early 1960's ... Moulded goods made with Surlyn are virtually unbreakable, and offer unusual design freedom, combining toughness, clarity and chemical resistance. It is one of the materials most favoured by designers, for complicated and bold designs. Thanks to a direct removal of this fully massive, isomorphic, and smooth piece from the mould, no mould parting line is visible, leaving the transparency of the cap perfect."
All of which makes me wonder what molten Surlyn PC 2000 smells like . . . ?
UPDATE (05/26/09):
Just to give you an idea of what dealing with a mirrored bottle is like, I present to you, "Portrait of the Photographer in a Perfume Bottle":
Egad!
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