Barbara Herman, the voice of vintage fragrance, to launch Eris Parfums next month
After years of planning and a crowd-sourced funding campaign on Indiegogo, the Eris Parfums collection of three fragrances is now available for pre-order and will be shipping out in March.
Team work
To develop the collection, Barbara Herman worked with perfumer Antoine Lie. Together they “have reimagined the intensity and eros of perfumes of the past for a contemporary audience,” explains Herman in a press release announcing Eris.
Herman is not only the author or Scent and Subversion. She also often writes and comments about vintage perfumes for business, popular, fashion media. “We wanted to bring back the emotion of animalic perfumes,” she says, adding that “after decades of its virtual extinction, Eris Parfums' first collection 'brings back the beast' in perfume."
Lie has created luxury fragrances for indie and designer brands alike, including Givenchy, Versace, Tom Ford, Nina Ricci, Costume Nationale, and Ermenegildo Zegna.
Three scents
Packaged to recall a time gone by, “the column-like bottle evokes the modernist chic simplicity of the 1930s, while its glossy, patent leather-like label perched on the bottle's edge hints at the daringly erotic contents inside,” as the press release would have it.
The scents take inspiration from the 1946 Jean Cocteau picture La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast).
Belle du Jour comprises notes of orange flower, jasmine and coriander, according to the press release, with base notes of incense, musks, and seaweed. Night Flower notes include cardamom, leather, tuberose, birch tar, cinnamon and more. While Ma Bête promises to call perfumed fur to mind with notes of spice and Tunisian Neroli.
Commercial prospects
Karen Grant, VP and global beauty industry analyst of market research company The NPD Group, announced at this month’s CEW Global Trends Report event that last year for the first time, “the fragrance category outperformed skincare.”
And modern technology means that new and more carefully developed ingredients are making desirable notes and fragrance compositions more nuanced and more dynamic than they could have been decades ago.
So considering the supply side and market trends for fragrance just now, the Eris Parfums launch seems well timed.
