From PR to Prime Time, Dave Lackie’s career has taken him around the world in search of the best beauty products. I caught up with him before he headed to Mexico, and Nina Ricci’s L’Air du Temps retrospective, to find out the perfume secrets of the Canadian King of Beauty during another “Stephan’s Six”.
A company’s first fragrance can be a make or break release. It’s the perfume that customers will often associate the brand with long after it first appears, and so you want it to be a good one. If number one goes to plan then the next challenge is the follow up, and this is sometimes where things can go horribly wrong. In a quest for novelty this successor can often go off on a tangent, but thankfully that didn’t happen with Leighton Denny and the LIGHT & DARK range. With his fourth perfume launching tomorrow, let’s take a quick recap of the previous three releases before we look at the new LIGHT & DARK DELIGHTFUL.
If your father owned one of the most luxurious perfume brands then it seems inevitable that you would end up sharing his passion, but for Victoria Christian it was a performing career which first interested her. After studying Ballet and Theatre Studies at Urdang Academy, and performing in London’s West End, she eventually chose to give up the stage and has become the Brand Ambassador for Clive Christian Perfumes. So, what secrets would we discover during “Stephan’s Six”?
The advantage of being a small, independent perfumery is that you can sometimes make a fragrance "just for fun" and in small quantities. After all, the ingredients are already on the shelves and you have a stack of empty bottles. Well, this is exactly what Sarah McCartney has done with her latest, semi-secret, Rosa Ribes. In essence it's a sort of "crowd funded" fragrance, but in actual fact you are buying something far more personal. With an initial run of just five litres there is not much to go around. So with that in mind, read on, get your credit card ready and discover something truly special from 4160 Tuesdays.
You never know the route that people take when it comes to perfume creation, but being a doctor first is definitely a new one on me. Kim McGovern lived in Singapore and Australia before coming to England at the age of six. It was here that she studied Medicine at Imperial College London before working as a Doctor. In 2011 she opened a perfume boutique specialising in miniatures and discontinued fragrances before Amygdala Beauty was launched in 2016. Described as a “celebration of creativity and fragrance”, Amygdala produce single note solid perfumes that can be mixed and blended. So, what would we learn about her inspirations during “Stephan’s Six”?
"The scent of summer" is a phrase that you're going to be reading a lot in the coming weeks, with each perfume company claiming that their fragrance is the true interpretation. The problem is that everyones idea of what makes up the scent of a summer holiday is usually pretty different. Some people envisage scorching sunshine, some imagine a sea-crashing surfers paradise, while some concentrate on that sugar rich candyfloss and ice cream concoction. So, with this in mind, I thought it would be fun to look at two of the most requested aromas and see where they fit into our childhood memories.
When Ruth Mastenbroek took part in “Stephan’s Six” back in April 2016 her wonderful answers were unfortunately too long to use in their complete form, so I had to edit them down. However, when I was looking through some old files last week I came across her original interview and realised that what had been removed actually provided a great insight into her creative inspirations. Since launching her own brand, Ruth Mastenbroek has released three fragrances, Signature, Amorosa and Oxford. So, with Ruth’s kind permission, let’s finally read the answers that escaped last time … we'll call it the “lost interview”.
Every couple of weeks you see the same topic raise its weary head again. I say "weary" because you always get the same points presented by both sides and neither will budge in their dogmatic opinion. They each try to win an argument that is fundamentally based on the misconception that natural is always good and synthetic is always bad. I've lost count of the number of times that I've heard "everything smells synthetic these days". So, for the final time, naturals and synthetics each have their own place and when used in combination can create truly mind-blowing fragrances. Still don't believe me?
A career which included Coty, Helena Rubinstein, Guerlain and Jacques Bogart surely explains why Hanuš Wolf eventually ended up running his own perfume store. Burgins of York is an Aladdin's cave of fragrance, with the shelves literally groaning under the weight of bottles. Hanuš always had a dream to have his own business, so when he was offered to chance to buy Burgins in 2011 he accepted. Five years on I thought it was time to see what gems we could uncover when I asked him "Stephan's Six".
