One Thousand Scents

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Animate Objects

Here's a still from the animated spy spoof "Archer", season 1, episode 4, with a European secret agent in the bathroom of wealthy spy-agency head Mallory Archer preparing to kill it doesn't really matter, does it, because we're here for the perfume bottles:

That's self-evidently Chanel No. 5 there on the marble countertop, and behind it what looks like one of the Guerlain beehive bottles, and what's that tiny squarish black bottle next to them?

Why, it's Nombre Noir,

the legendary and extremely unavailable Shiseido scent that kicked off Serge Lutens' career. You can have a droplet or two for a not insignificant sum of money, if you want,

or you can have a tiny bottle for a whole lot of money, if you're lucky. (And there is only that one bottle available on all of eBay. Compare it to other recent, hard-to-find scents; there are gallons of Le Feu d'Issey and Fendi Theorema and Kingdom by Alexander McQueen, pricey but relatively plentiful still. Nombre Noir isn't the rarest, though: not one single person has any of Clinique's first men's scent, Tailoring, for sale, and The Perfumed Court doesn't, either.)

Nombre Noir is just the kind of thing a woman like Mallory Archer would own, if not actually wear. Whoever was doing the art direction for that scene put a lot of thought into it. Or is just a perfume hound.

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2 Comments:

  • That is truly beautiful.

    By Blogger StyleSpy, at 10:59 AM  

  • Terrific post! They could have used a perfume bottle for the hypodermic needle. That's one way to decant. :)

    By Blogger Taffy, at 1:26 AM  

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