For many people, fragrance is one part of a personal signature. You’ve got to love a company that eschews mass adulation and says, “[This] is not a scent for the masses.”
Produced by the Berlin-based Biehl Parfumkunstwerke, PC02 is French perfumer Patricia Choux’s homage to the circus, with its seductive fragrances of cotton candy and Turkish delight, all ingested with a handful of honeyed almonds. Right from the opening note, you feel as giddy as Fern atop the Ferris wheel in Charlotte’s Web. You want to lick yourself like a vanilla custard cone.
© Biehl Parfumkunstwerke
Biehl Parfumkunstwerke (which translates to “perfume artworks”) considers itself an “olfactory gallery.” Founded by the son of renowned perfumer Henning Biehl, the perfumery offers space for perfume artists to create fragrances without reliance upon market research, marketing, or profit margins.
What matters to Biehl Parfumkunstwerke is the quality and the purity of the end result – without any excessive packaging and without fragrance names, apart from a number and the creator’s initials, hence PC02 for Choux’s second fragrance for the house. All of the house’s fragrances are available in limited editions. As Biehl Parfumkunstwerke’s tagline states, these creations are “Artworks for the nose,” which awaken the senses and open the mind.
© Biehl Parfumkunstwerke
Choux describes herself as “bullheaded,” contending that even as a child, she saw her future as a perfumer. Choux mixes traditional perfumery with innovative ideas. With PC02, for example, she’s created something along the lines of a marshmallow milk shake with a shot of praline pecans. Imagine something that Lana Turner might have been sipping at the soda counter, swathed in her tight white sweater while awaiting discovery.
Not unlike the playfulness of a spun sugar dessert confection at the end of a meal, PC02 makes you smile like it’s summer on the boardwalk. It’s a fragrance of carefree confidence, evoking the giddy dreams that created Luna Park and Dreamland and Million Dollar Pier with all their sweet smells of success. You and Fern atop the Ferris wheel in a sugar cloud of happiness.
