The Perfume Lover: A Personal History of Scent

When a Parisian perfume designer, Bertrand Duchaufour, invited blogger Beaulieu to his lab, one of her memories launched their collaboration on an actual fragrance. Their process provides focus for an intoxicating book that interweaves both perfume's and the author's personal histories. While Duchaufour teaches Beaulieu, she draws upon a perfume fascination founded in her suburban Montreal upbringing and gradually developed via her childhood style-muse neighbor, school and university friendships, travel to France and Spain, and her lifelong relationship history. Beaulieu makes brilliant use of such diverse subtopics as prerevolutionary France, 20th-century fragrance icons, their products, and later-generation fragrances, changing gender ideas and their connection to perfumes, the relationship between perfumes and fragrances in other products, and the contemporary mania for celebrity scents. Agent, Homa Rastegar, A.P. Watt. (Mar.)