Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder as well as The Nose.
Fragrance houses are experimenting more and more with eye-catching bottle designs. Here are some of the best.
Where is the best place to put perfume? On your pulse points? Or, in a more prominent place? They are works of art. Whether they are the iconic busts of Jean-Paul Gaultier or by Lalique. They are hard to throw away when they are empty. Designers like Fabien Baron, responsible for Calvin Klein One, and Thierry De Baschmakoff, who created Bvlgari’s “L’eau perfume” and has worked for Cartier and Hermes, are pushing the envelope in perfume bottle design.
“It’s the first form of communication and the first form of contact that people have with the scent,” says De Baschmakoff. ” Packaging plays an essential role. It serves to shape the DNA and the history of the brand.”
In 2014, Viktor & Rolf’s Bonbon was enclosed in bow-candy-shaped perfume bottles. The fragrance itself is inspired by luxury desserts. Midnight Rain by La Prairie is presented in a dazzling black flacon with glittering nuances, formed into the shape of a giant teardrop. Designs like “Alien” and “Angel” by Thierry Mugler give the impression that the designers are inspiring the perfume-makers. Jeremy Scott’s Moschino Couture Fresh and Amazement and the handcuffed bottle of Convict by Akron and Mark Jacobs are striking, intriguing, memorable, humorous, and instantly recognizable.
In 2012, the brand created Marc Jacobs Dot, with petals and polka dot ladybugs. Its Daisy Blush has an outsized glass petal stopper evoking a vase of flowers. Decadence comes in a handbag. “J’adore, Dior”, launched in 1999, is, of course, another classic brand-defining design. As are Valentino and Diesel.
Paco Rabanne launched a diamond shape for its feminine fragrance and an ingot for the masculine one. Baptiste Bouygues, who launched Ormaie, worked with Jade Lombard to design the bottle, cut from recycled glass with 12 facets to represent the hours on a watch, and a hand-carved topper sculpted from sustainable beechwood. Architect and industrial designer Chafik Gasm, who has created sculptural pieces for Baccarat, Kenzo, and Bulgari, crafted one of the world’s slimmest perfume bottles for Lancôme.
Venezuelan “Carolina A. Herrera came up with her smoky midnight blue glass, “Good Girl” stiletto with a gold-tone heel. “I designed my bottles to encourage touch,” says Veronique Gabai. The inspiration for Paco Rabanne’s Pa collection and its soft, unbreakable bottles came from the freeze-dried meal pouches that NASA sends into space. Laura Yeh, who engineered Glossier You, the digital beauty company’s first fragrance, comments: “The goal was to create a sculptural object that you can engage and interact with. That’s how we landed on the idea for the hand-carved finger notch. The red cap is a call to action, directing you to remove it. The scent itself is composed of base notes that come alive when you use it, and I think the same is true of the bottle.”
Comme des Garçons is well-known for its signature bottle shapes and textures. Each bottle of “Concrete” is indeed hand-dipped in concrete. It’s cat head-topped ‘Grace by Grace Coddington’, a tribute by Adrian Joffe and Fabien Baron to the fashion stylist who a fond of cats. Adrian Joffe and Fabien Baron. ‘Galop d’Hermès’, based on a horse’s stirrup, was inspired by archival bottles that were given out at the opening of the first Hermes store in New York in 1930.
There’s more to perfume than what meets the nose.
