{"id":214838,"date":"2025-10-10T17:51:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T17:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/214838\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T17:51:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T17:51:11","slug":"authors-explain-the-rise-in-literary-perfumes-to-bring-stories-to-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/214838\/","title":{"rendered":"Authors Explain the Rise in Literary Perfumes to Bring Stories to Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Estimated5 min read<\/p>\n

Red wine spilled in a Birkin bag. Stale cigarette ash. Whatever that stuff in neon signs is. No, those aren\u2019t lost Charli XCX lyrics: they\u2019re a few of the top notes in Sable Yong\u2019s perfume, Die Hot With a Vengeance. <\/p>\n

When the longtime beauty editor published her book of the same title, she didn\u2019t opt for the now-de rigueur tote-bags-and-bucket-hats merch, like so many of her peers. \u201cSelfishly, I\u2019ve always wanted to make a fragrance, so I felt like this was the occasion,\u201d Yong tells me. \u201cI don\u2019t want to launch a brand per se, but I did want to make a fragrance just for fun.\u201d Not to mention, \u201cI was like, \u2018When am I going to have the cash injection from a book advance to fund it?\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

The love affair between literature and fashion has been documented many times. If you need a refresher: supermodels are slinging Sagan and Despentes in their book clubs<\/a>, Valentino and Proenza Schouler are among the luxury brands who\u2019ve done literary collabs<\/a>, and bygone authors are our new It girls<\/a>. But increasingly, the beauty world is cutting in on the pas de deux. And perfume\u2014more ethereal and arcane than anything you could print on cotton blanks\u2014now feels like the IYKYK Lit Girl accessory. <\/p>\n

Today, Leigh Bardugo, the bestselling author behind Ninth House, shared a video<\/a> about the perfume brand Imaginary Authors and their Abandoned Mansion scent, with a subtle nod to her Yale-set book trilogy. Arabelle Sicardi, whose book The House of Beauty<\/a> is out October 14, is releasing pre-orders of their debut with custom scented bookmarks, and also runs the \u201cexperimental creative container\u201d Perfumed Pages. Bret Easton Ellis has an official American Psycho cologne made with the brand 19-69<\/a>. And Claudia Dey worked with Universal Flowering on a perfume around her book Daughter. (Here is where I need to tap the fourth wall ever-so-slightly and note: I, too, am an author with a scent, in my case, a collaboration with the indie label Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab that promises to bottle the essence of millennial pink<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Yong worked with perfumer of the moment Joey Rosin of Hoax Parfum on her scent, which also includes notes of plum and rhubarb. (\u201cAfter he did my perfume, the next one he did was for Troye Sivan<\/a>. I was like, \u2018Okay, you\u2019re making moves.\u2019\u201d) In the book, she writes about her beauty awakening during the indie sleaze<\/a> era, and so she wanted the scent to capture \u201cthe smeared lipstick, the messiness, just the lived in-ness of beauty.\u201d She designed the bottle herself, inspired by the fla\u00e7ons she coveted in the 2000s. \u201cI liked all of these hottie hot-girl scents back in the day,\u201d Yong laughs, \u201cbecause my perception was, \u2018This is expensive designer perfume, and therefore, it is elegant and aspirational.\u2019 Now, I\u2019m just like, \u2018Yeah, this smells like the mall.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In Leigh Bardugo\u2019s Ninth House, set among secret societies at Yale, one character makes reference to Le Parfum de Th\u00e9r\u00e8se by Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Malle, while another has a fraught relationship with his mother, who wore Caron Poivre. \u201cScent does play a big role in the stories, in the sense that they\u2019re often signifiers of a character, or the character\u2019s background.\u201d <\/p>\n

Fragrance is as visceral for Bardugo as it is for the people in her pages. \u201cThere are things we might be able to get past, like, \u2018Oh, I don\u2019t like the clothes they\u2019re wearing or what they said about my favorite book,\u2019\u201d she says, \u201cbut if you don\u2019t like someone\u2019s scent, forget it. You will be repelled by them.\u201d Her appreciation began growing up, when she would play with her grandmother\u2019s perfumes, which sat on an antique tray on her dressing table. \u201cI was an only child and would create great dramas that occurred between these perfumes. I had my favorite bottles,\u201d like a Chlo\u00e9 scent with a ribbon around its neck, she recalls. <\/p>\n

The Pavlovian nature of perfume and its connection to the physical world have only made it more alluring in our digital era. \u201cNot to get too philosophical,\u201d Bardugo says, \u201cbut this is a time when culture has really flattened and experience is hard to come by. There\u2019s this idea that anything that you can imagine through AI suddenly becomes real, and scent is not like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

She adds, \u201cPeople are so hungry for rituals. I think all of the attention on \u2018this is my 15-step skincare ritual,\u2019 yes, it\u2019s about selling products, but it\u2019s also about the fact that you are paying attention to your body in that moment instead of living outside of it in this bullshit social media world. You are not looking at your phone, you\u2019re washing your face. You\u2019re opening up this bottle of perfume that is taking you someplace that you are making a specific choice about and placing it on your skin. Those small things become more and more important to us and more grounding for us.\u201d Yong concurs: \u201cThe only way you get that effect is in person and through experience, which I think is a very cool thing, because AI can\u2019t touch that.\u201d <\/p>\n

The kind of IRL community that has grown around readings and literary events extends into the world of olfactory enthusiasts. When creating Perfumed Pages, Sicardi says, \u201cI wanted to create a community space and creative ecosystem where people\u2014not necessarily professional writers, but creatives of all kinds, like perfumers, poets, teachers, artists\u2014can enjoy scent culture together without an impulse to girlboss the experience or acquire more products.\u201d (A six-month-long \u201cnose\u201d training recently concluded, which Sicardi says helped the participants understand fragrance as a language all its own.) They also find the sense of community the group cultivates to be a nice respite from the solitary nature of writing. <\/p>\n

Perfume can be a way for an author to find an entirely new audience. (And, with the state of publishing advances today, perhaps some much-needed funds.) \u201cThe Venn diagram of [my] book readers versus the perfume buyers is not a full circle at all, I don\u2019t think,\u201d Yong says. \u201cThe frag-heads are just so excited about independent perfume launches in general. Then, once people start talking about it, that creates intrigue. I\u2019ve been lucky enough that a lot of fragrance content creators have tagged me in videos where they they talk about the scent. Most of them don\u2019t mention reading the book. I don\u2019t know if they have or they haven\u2019t, but they didn\u2019t mention it. It\u2019s almost like it has taken on a life of its own, and it stands alone in its own way.\u201d <\/p>\n

While working on her novel The Familiar, set during the Spanish Inquisition, Bardugo was stuck on something involving the two main characters. \u201cMy husband and I had driven out to the Anza-Borrego Desert to see the wildflowers bloom. We were in this open-air Jeep, and we started driving through an orange grove and were hit by this rich, green scent. Orange blossom is acutely sweet, but this was orange, the smell of the orange skin, the juice, the leaves, the roots, the soil. And I, all of a sudden, knew exactly how I wanted to write these characters. I just said, \u2018Can you pull over? I want to write this down before I forget it.\u2019\u201d The scene stayed with her, she says: \u201cI wrote it into the book.\u201d <\/p>\n

Shop Literary Perfumes and the Books That Inspired Them\"American<\/a>\"<i>American<\/a>American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis\"Die<\/a>Sable Young Die Hot With A Vengeance Eau de Parfum\"<i>Die<\/a>Die Hot with a Vengeance by Sable Young\"Millennial<\/a>Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Millennial Pink\"<i>Dress<\/a>Dress Code by V\u00e9ronique Hyland\"Mona\"<\/a>\"<i>Daughter<\/i><\/a>\"The<\/a>Imaginary Authors The Abandoned MansionCredit: Imaginary Authors\"<i>Ninth<\/a>Ninth House by Leigh BardugoCredit: Bookshop.orgRelated Stories