Essences & Art offers an artistic and olfactory journey to the heart of the greatest museums, creating emotional correspondences between works of art and fragrances… But also exchanges with the culinary creations of Trait’Tendance.
Interview with Catherine Werber, founder of Essences & Art.
- Can you tell us a little about the Essence & Art project?
- Essences et Art was born out of a shared passion for art and fragrance, and a meeting with an art historian in 2016, when we decided to give participants a new way of looking at works of art, through sight but also through smell: this synesthesia of sight and smell enables a dialogue between works of art and fragrances through the emotional correspondences we have developed with Essences et Art.
These olfactory museum tours offer a unique, artistic, emotional and historical experience, with the scent of niche perfumes and perfumery raw materials matching masterpieces in the museum!
The enthusiasm of the participants has encouraged us to create several scented itineraries, 6 to date in the museums (Orsay / RODIN / Louvre / Guimet / Pompidou), with a 7th in the pipeline…
After this synesthesia of sight and smell, we wanted to develop the synesthesia of taste and smell, and created a wine and perfume workshop, where participants could taste wine on the nose and in the mouth, discover the main aromas, smell them to associate them with perfuming raw materials and create a perfume corresponding to the tasted wine…
Emotional and sensory, perfume is the epicenter of Essences et Art, enabling us to establish connections with other worlds such as art, oenology, chefs’ cuisine, history… and to create synesthetic journeys that transport us back in time and offer us a new way of looking at the world.
We have also developed specific workshops on how to create your own perfume, as well as workshops to discover the raw materials, their origins and their role in a perfume… so that you can delve deeper into the mysteries of perfume!
- What are the reasons behind your choice of partner museums?
- We work with a wide range of customers:
– Companies in various sectors who wish to organize olfactory conferences for their seminars, organize team buildings (perfume creation workshops / perfumery raw materials…), organize a specific event by integrating us into their workshops in a cocktail format (castle, museum… chosen by the customer).
– Groups wishing to customize and create a specific olfactory itinerary on a precise theme, perfumes from their collections linked to works of art…
– Museums where we can intervene in several ways: commissioned by the museum to build an olfactory itinerary with the curator on an upcoming exhibition of their choice, via a customer who asks us to organize a workshop in a privatized museum, via itineraries that we choose on emblematic museums and representative of a current of art in the capital.
- How do you work with Trait’Tendance to offer your customers a total sensory experience?
- We seek to develop experiences that appeal to the various senses, such as theThe beauty of gesture workshop where we had the pleasure of developing a “mise en nez” with essential oils, infusions to smell to create a correspondence with the “mise en bouche” of dishes by Paul Larson, who proposed a refined dish containing this delicious ingredient…
Likewise, we’d like to develop new workshops around a mixology and fragrance workshop, for this synesthesia of taste and smell that invites sensoriality with sight, taste and fragrance to be smelled in correspondence with the cocktail tasted…
Finally, we’d like to offer our perfume creation workshops, which are very popular in cocktail format, as a different kind of sensory workshop, appealing to everyone’s sense of smell and creativity….
In fact, we’re looking to bring originality and difference to perfume, through these unique, synesthetic and emotional sensory experiences…that participants will remember!
Fragrance is closely linked to the limbic brain – the area of the brain that governs memory and emotions – and the sense of smell is the only sense linked to memory areas!
