Radiant Ice: Andy Tauer's Noontide Petals

Watching Noontide Petals evolve over the last year or so has been a real highlight, during a period of time which was often dark and at times felt unendurable. It's hard, inhaling Noontide, to even think dark thoughts, and in some ways, when I've worn it, I've felt I'm under the protection of some kind of doubt-thwarting amulet of light. It's been a powerful corrective, a compass point. All of Andy Tauer's fragrances remind me in some way what happiness should or could feel like - they show the way - but Noontide is unique among them, due in part to  its unequivocal presence at the apex of sheer beatitude.

It's funny to start reading the breaking reviews, after having had what felt like a private relationship with the scent for a time. How can we understand a fragrance when we've barely gotten acquainted with it? We still barely understand it after living with it through full bottles and who knows how many years. Reading these reviews reinforces for me how difficult it is to speak about perfume in any way that penetrates too deeply beyond superficial, deductive or reductive impressions. That isn't to knock bloggers. It's the language we have, and for a long time I wasn't writing about perfume much at all because that language can feel so inept compared to what it is perfume actually does - the verbiage becoming authoritative where it should be mystical, a little too concise where it should be expansive.

We need that ineptitude, I think, and we need to struggle with it, to keep in touch with how powerful scent is, how above and beyond us. Fragrance is one of the last frontiers of the ineffable in my life, at a time where everything feels over explained, over exposed - over in general, before it's properly begun. As much as I poke fun at the self proclaimed last-word authorities in the fragrance-writing community, who participate in this aspect of the zeitgeist, I know we need them too, because nothing reminds you how powerless you are to the sacred inexplicable like a sudden breach with your sense of smug certainty, and all smug certainty is eventually dealt this mortal blow. Give it time. Noontide is so personal to me, and so lived in at this point, so bound up in my memories already, that to hear it described as, essentially, simply a fragrance, with its constituent qualities dissected, feels like wrapping up the events of a year in a single phrase - but I know this is how we do it, if only because we haven't figured out  another way.

I first smelled Noontide Petals in the biting January cold of New York City, back when the fragrance had a different name, a working title. I have to remind myself it isn't still called that - won't ever be called that again. I was making a lot of plans that winter, most of them to do with the Woman's Picture film series and the Tableau de Parfums fragrance line, interlocking collaborative projects Andy and I had started the year before. I'd finished the first film, and we'd released the first related Tableau fragrance. I'd been writing the second film in the series but felt a little stuck. Reconvening with Andy in NYC kicked my mind back into gear, and most of the time we were there I felt like I was on speed. I could barely organize my thoughts; the onslaught was so fast and furious. I only knew I was making a film, and that I'd be making it soon. By April, I was shooting. By May, the shoot had wrapped. It was the biggest film I'd shot to date - the largest cast, the largest crew, the most equipment, the most expensive, the least time.

Noontide informed my year in ways it will probably take me a while to parse, let alone recognize. It walked alongside me in all of that. We all seem to acknowledge that a fragrance lives with you, if you connect with it, eventually encapsulating your past. Sometimes, even if you don't connect with it, it connects with you. I don't think floral, aldehydes, or woodsy base when I think of the fragrance, though I can see those things are all there. Instead, Noontide sets a series of impressionistic memories into motion for me, a sort of hanging, moving Calder sculpture made up of moments in time. I think of renewed energy; the rush of a fruitful collaboration; the boost of a likeminded, ongoing conversation; wind so forceful and cold it sends your face burrowing down into the collar of your jacket, nearly pinning you to the nearest wall. I think of the distant past bearing down with that kind of force as well, I suppose because Noontide instantly reminded me of the fragrances I'd snuck into my grandmothers' rooms to smell as a child. Like few other fragrances, Noontide captured what I remember of those exhilarating, clandestine sniffs.

If I could pinpoint what Noontide does for me intellectually, it would have to do with creating links between the past and the present this way, not just personally but culturally. It isn't just that Noontide Petals is inspired by older fragrances or a period in time. It isn't just that it evokes or recalls - my years or someone else's. Like Miriam, the first fragrance from Tableau, Noontide represents a perfumer paying attention to the past, valuing it, immersing himself in whatever feelings and impressions that process conjures for him. Noontide, for me, speaks somehow to the conscious act of paying attention to where we are by acknowledging where we've been - not an attempt to recreate the past but to try to understand, appreciate, and respect it.  The aldehydic floral, as we knew it, is "a thing of the past" as they say. However out of date, it's also a repository of cultural information. Breathing new life into it feels like a political act to me - the kind only an artist can execute and only creative independence can allow, and it's a way of saying that the past is never out of date really; it keeps spinning back around into view. We're all living in that flux of memory, that constant whir of fugitive moments. Noontide finds that space and casts a gorgeous light on it, preserving it under ice.

A Tauer Drawing to Celebrate the Launch of Loretta

 
On Friday, October 19, perfumer Andy Tauer and I will be at Scent Bar in LA to launch Loretta, the second fragrance in the Tableau de Parfums line. Loretta is inspired by the short of the same name in the Woman's Picture film series. Miriam, released last year, was a nod to the classic floral aldehydes of the past. Loretta goes in a different direction, contrasting earthy elements with white flowers and dark fruits. Miriam explored themes of nostalgia and memory. Loretta, to me, explores the gatekeeper to fantasy fragrance can become, and how fantasies can combine light and dark elements in unique ways.

To celebrate the launch, we're conducting a drawing on Evelyn Avenue, the home site for Tableau de Parfums and Woman's Picture. Three winners will be announced on Monday, October 21. To qualify for the drawing, we ask that you leave a comment on our most recent Evelyn Avenue blog post about three perfume spots we created for Loretta.

The post talks a little about cynicism in perfumery. With so many things being thrown at perfume lovers, how do we maintain a certain level of optimism? I look at the phenomenon of cynicism from a different point of view now than I might have several years ago, before starting this collaboration between perfume and film with Andy. Over the past year we've asked ourselves what it means to address that fatigue among people who love perfume, and whether we can make some kind of difference in that trend. Is it enough that we're excited about what we do? What makes our excitement any different than anyone else's? How do we make sure that we present our collaboration with some kind of integrity where the norm is too often over-priced and over-hyped? It's an interesting vantage point for me - somewhere between consumer and producer - and the questions have percolated over the last year in our minds as we toured with and talked about Miriam and our intentions.

Winners of the drawing will receive a full bottle of choice from the extended Tauer range (including Tableau de Parfums), a DVD of the first three shorts in the Woman's Picture series, and a vintage-inspired poster designed for Loretta's packaging (pictured above).

Space Oddity: Vero Kern's Onda Eau de Parfum

 I was excited, in 2010, when Swiss perfumer Vero Kern released eau de parfum concentrations of the three fragrances in her line, Vero Profumo. I'm not much of an extrait wearer, and the cost of Onda, Kiki, and Rubj were steep. I'd smelled them all at Luckyscent in Los Angeles, and thought that Onda was just about the most fantastic thing I'd ever laid hands on. It was smoky and mysterious, a meditation on the darker edges of the olfactory palette. I loved Kiki and Rubj, but for me Onda was one of those fragrances you come across and realize you've been waiting for without knowing it.

Early reports indicated significant differences between these new eau de parfum versions and their extrait counterparts. By introducing a passion fruit note to all three, Kern essentially remixed the scents the way a musician revisits a beloved song with slightly different instrumentation. While passion fruit was said to add something odd to the already profoundly odd Onda, I was skeptical. What I thought I liked best about the extrait was its deep, dark, near-incantatory properties. Onda extrait was some kind of pitch black spell wrought through scent instead of words. Kern stated that the passion fruit added a "sensual and erotic lightness" to the composition. While the original style of the extrait was said to remain intact, the mission of the eau de parfum versions was to render the scents "easier to wear".

I'm no more a fan of the phrase easier to wear than I am extraits, and the idea of these new formulas made me think of David Bowie re recording LOW with Muzak accompaniment. I was worried, and the worry kept me from buying Onda. It didn't help that for a while Luckyscent didn't have tester bottles of the EDPs at Scent Bar. I was so skeptical that I wouldn't even shell out the seven or so bucks for a sample. I knew that, like Bowie, Kern had a sort of bedrock integrity when it came to artistic vision, and that probably anything she did would be at the very least fascinating. Then again, I'd never been a huge fan of Bowie's "Let's Dance" period, and couldn't forget that embarrassing duet with Jagger, which had only been fascinating the way a car crash in reverse might be. Backwards or forwards, a car crash is a mess.

When Andy Tauer and I visited Scent Bar for the release of Tableau de Parfum's Miriam last October, I finally got a smell of Onda EDP, and I didn't know what to think. It was quite different, and I'd built it up or knocked it down in my head for so long that all kinds of mental adjustments were required to even properly apprehend, let alone appreciate, it. We were there about a week, and I kept coming back to it. Ultimately I bought it, and wore it out in the desert a lot when we traveled to Joshua Tree.

Onda EDP was the perfect scent-track for the trip. While there, we talked a lot about the attitudes and emotional effects of the desert landscape, its peculiar, powerful state of mind. It's a bigger than life place - too big and strange to take in all at once, if ever. Ultimately you surrender to it. The dry heat has an insidious effect and after a day in the sun you can easily feel exhaustion, precipitating that surrender with a sudden, out of the blue, immediacy.

Onda is indeed lighter than the extrait, and also, for me, more colorful. I would say...radiantly purplish. That's a horribly inept way to describe a fragrance, but like the desert Onda EDP is next to impossible to put into words. The extrait draws you in to some pitch dark, loamy underworld. It's buried deep in some unconscious territory and feels very gothic. The EDP concentration explodes that soil, sending all its particles airborne. Light from the sun heats and illuminates them, opening it all up without reassembling the constituent parts. The scent remains wonderfully expansive. I could tell you I smell passion fruit. I could say, Hey, there's the vetiver. But you experience this scent all at once, and it's that inability to put it into words, to narrow it down, that matches the extrait's qualities of strangeness, a relation that is more conceptual and philosophic than literal. There's something uncanny about Onda EDP, something at once overwhelming and intimate. I would agree it's sensual. And at this point, having spent a year with it, I would say it isn't just a desert island fragrance for me but the desert island itself.

The addition of a tropical fruit to Onda is no simple happy medium, nor does it produce standard, commercial impressions of the "tropics", with all the attendant coconut and shea butter stereotypes that typically implies. Here passion fruit is a study in what I guess I'd call vibrant decay. In other words, light and dark qualities existing in a tricky dual relationship where the one is viewed through the other no matter how you approach the sum total. Vibrant decay will be as much a turn off to some as easier to wear is to me, but for those who appreciate uncanny exuberance and a certain kind of jolie laide, Onda EDP will feel like a spectral visitation shrouded in ambient light, emerging from a portal no one and nothing else could possibly fit through.

Wrapped in Fantasy: Andy Tauer's Loretta

When I first smelled Loretta, a little less than a year ago now, I wasn't prepared for it. Andy Tauer and I had been discussing Miriam, the first fragrance in the Tableau de Parfums line, for some time by then, and I'd had some time to get my mind around that one. Loretta was a sucker punch, and seemed to come out of left field.

Miriam, as some of you maybe know by now, was inspired by the character in a film series Andy and I have been doing together, Woman's Picture, and it speaks directly to the character of the same name played by Ann Magnuson.

Miriam, the woman, is heavily influenced by the past. Gripped by it, really. Her life is at a crisis point and she looks back to the past for comfort, maybe in a distorted way, certainly nostalgically; like a lot of us she looks back and selectively chooses to remember the good parts. She filters out the things she'd rather not carry forward with her pretty aggressively. The fragrance associated with her character is an interesting dichotomy and speaks to these conflicted feelings, paying homage to classical perfumery from a distinctly modern vantage point. Full of grand gestures, accented by sweet, bright moments, Miriam walks into an old, dim room where the past is all around, and throws open the windows to let the sunlight in.

All of the characters in Woman's Picture thus far are pretty complicated. That's a central premise of the series for us, I think: women, people, are much more complex than our impressions or accounts of them would lead us to believe. It can be difficult to see them as they are, watching so closely only for things we can handle and recognize. Loretta, played by Amy LaVere, is maybe the most perplexing woman of all in this series. Part femme fatale, part guileless child, her motivations are opaque, and reading her can be a bit bewildering. It's unclear why she does what she does. There are no concrete signals with her. Her face, and her persona, are totally inscrutable.

I couldn't imagine how Andy would translate her world into a scent. I might have been doubtful that he could - that anyone, even a talented, perceptive perfumer, could. Without giving me advance notice, Andy sent me a sample of the Loretta fragrance in progress. We were in the midst of trying to find words for Miriam, making our decisions about what that fragrance meant, how it might relate to its namesake character, how we might communicate all that. My mind was consumed by those issues and challenges, and when Loretta arrived in the mail I was in deep in Miriam's "voice".

I opened the package in my car and spritzed some on my hand, and was blown away. I'm not sure how he did it, but Andy translated all of Loretta's tricky, deceptive complications into a scent. It was the first time in a while I'd been surprised like that by a fragrance, left without words to describe what I was smelling, and yet the fragrance was so emphatic that it seemed like it couldn't have been anything else, however unexpected. Immediately I was frustrated. How would I manage to refrain from talking about it for months to come, until its release in September of 2012? Asking someone who loves perfume not to talk about something so fantastic seemed pretty unrealistic to me.



To say that Loretta is a tuberose fragrance is to me like calling Notre Dame a building. It isn't that it's a large fragrance particularly. In some ways, it's quite soft. I wouldn't say it's grand in the way, say, Miriam might be. Like Cinnabar, for instance, Loretta has a smoldering, fuzzy warmth to it. The tuberose is laid out on a bed of woods and spices, and has a dreamy, moody quality. Like Loretta the character, it's wrapped up in its own fantasies. Andy has called Loretta sensual, and it is that. I would say voluptuous. It has some of Loretta the character's sweetness and childlike qualities - a bit of fruitiness throughout. But the sensuous aspects make it feel very adult and mysterious, and the plum note feels decidedly forbidden.

I'm a fan of tuberose, but this is no Fracas or Carnal Flower. Those scents, for me, are principally bright, however creamy the former, however rich and complex the latter. Loretta is a different kind of sensuality and a different kind of tuberose, like nothing I've smelled before. It's the first tuberose I've smelled that truly takes things in the direction of dark mystery. I'm hopelessly biased when it comes to Andy, of course, but can tell you this is not only a different tuberose but a different Tauer. It's one of my top five fragrances of all time, for reasons I'm probably just as hopelessly unable to describe.

I was excited when Andy offered to make the fragrance available for our kickstarter campaign for ONLY CHILD, the second feature length film in the Woman's Picture series. We begin shooting the film in April, if we can meet out kickstarter goal by the deadline on March 29th. Excited because for those interested in smelling the fragrance a little early, it can be shared, and I might have people to talk about it with. Excited more than anything because it's one of my favorite fragrances and I think it will surprise others as much as it has me.

The fragrance won't be available to the general public until September. There are 16 days left in our campaign to get a sneak sniff. The help and support of perfume lovers is most important to us, as we make these films for you really. Your encouragement and support is invaluable to us, and we've tried to come up with incentives in the kickstarter campaign that will work hard to repay you in advance for your support of our efforts.

If you haven't visited the page lately, please check it out here.

We've added Loretta and several other fragrant items (two more soaps by Andy, as well as the opportunity to get a full bottle of any fragrance in the extended Tauer range at a discount).

Notes: ripe dark fruit, a velvet rose, spicy tuberose, orange blossom, pathcouli, woody notes, ambergris, leather, sweetened orris.

Above is a clip from Woman's Picture showing Loretta immersed in her complex fantasy world.

Dark Passage: A Limited Edition Fragrance by Andy Tauer

For the next 25 days, Dark Passage, a limited edition fragrance by Andy Tauer made exclusively for the Woman's Picture series, will be available here.

Dark Passage is a film noir fragrance, and is presented as part of a new series in the Tableau de Parfum/Woman's Picture project called "Snapshots".

Packaged in 7ml enamel atomizers and available in limited edition quanities, the Tableau Snapshots are smaller in scale, providing Tauer the opportunity to experiment with new ideas. The snapshot fragrances are hand held, and seek to preserve fleeting moments in time.

Dark Passage is being presented for only the next several weeks as part of the kickstarter campaign for ONLY CHILD, a mother/daughter noir in the tradition of Mildred Pierce and Now, Voyager starring Grace Zabriskie (Big Love, Twin Peaks) as a mother searching for her vanished daughter. ONLY CHILD is the second feature film in the Woman's Picture series. We start shooting it in April.

I was always resistant to do a kickstarter fundraising campaign in the past, but this time I wanted to do one, as long as I could do one well. When I say well I mean a campaign that includes true incentives, rather than well-intentioned "thank you's" alone. When I started looking at kickstarter campaigns before building our own for ONLY CHILD, I was surprised to see that people didn't offer more for donations. After all, you're asking people for help. If you're making a film, you're creative, nine times out of ten. Why not pull together all your creative resources and come up with something that really thanks them?

Andy and I came up with a lot of incentives for your average person who can do without perfume but loves film. But we wanted to do something extra special for people like us who love fragrance. I was so happy when I first smelled Dark Passage, because in a sea of mass marketed banality I knew it would feel special, smell special, be special, and few things feel that way anymore. We would be forever grateful if you helped us out with this film. Like Woman's Picture it deals thematically with perfume. I make these films for you. I really do. If you like them I know I did good. But in addition to our gratitude and making a good film we want to offer you something else in return.

Dark Passage contains patchouli, cacao, birch tar, and iris, among other things.

Inspiration:

Noir films are typically black and white. Dark Passage isn't quite so polarized, but it contains equally bold contrasts. The wonderfully rich, refined patchouli used by Andy in the fragrance is something to behold, at once earthy and clean shaven. Birch tar and cacao move this patchouli theme in interesting directions, evoking the open road and the small town diner, steaming cups of coffee on a formika countertop, bright sun coming in parallel lines through window blinds, crisscrossing a dim room with their highly keyed stripes. DARK PASSAGE is both femme fatale and private eye, a happy union between feminine and masculine.  It speaks in Lauren Bacall's smoky baritone and regards you with Bogart's level gaze.

Andy Tauer has made the fragrance available this one time and this one time only in an effort to help raise the kickstarter goal for ONLY CHILD and help get the film made. After the campaign, Dark Passage, like a fugitive character out of noir, will never show its face again.  Please check out the kickstarter page to see what other things are available for your donation (hint: an exclusive soap built around tuberose) and comment on the page if the mood hits you. With any donation above 15 dollars you'll get an online link to Woman's Picture, our first film.

Note: surprises are coming there in the next week or two, including a sneak peak sniff opportunity or two.

Factice on Film: A Short Starring Voodoo, the "Perfume"

Here's another short in the Woman's Picture series, a snapshot companion piece to a longer segment which will come out next October based on the character of Ingrid, who appears in name only here but is an intensely felt presence.

At the time of the Ingrid movie's release online at Evelyn Avenue, Tableau de Parfums, perfumer Andy Tauer's ongoing collaboration with the project, will release its third fragrance, named after the character.  I haven't smelled Ingrid yet so I have nothing to tell you about it, other than to say I have smelled the first two, Miriam (release date: Oct. 2011) and Loretta (release date: March 2012) and can tell you they're wonderful.

All of the Woman's Picture material weaves perfume into its story lines in some way.  Here, Mackie, a recurring character, shops in a vintage clothing store, trying to find wardrobe for a silent film he wants to make about Ingrid, who seems to have left him for some reason.  Instead, he finds a factice, as poor a substitute for her as it is for a real perfume.

I guess I'm lucky I can't afford to collect these dummies because I don't have the space for them, but "Silent Movie" let me indulge the fantasy.  Apparently, the perfume I thought was fictitious, Voodoo (the fragrance featured in this short), actually existed.  But it's as rare a find as Mackie's factice is.  I'm told Coty made Voodoo at one time.  It wasn't very popular and was discontinued.

Mackie and his sister Meredith are a little like me and my sister and probably like a lot of siblings.  They're living in the present and the past at the same time.  Mackie wants to forget; Meredith wants to rehash and work through things somehow.  I think maybe Mackie spends more time in the past than he wants to acknowledge.  Why else would a rare factice of Voodoo be such a find?  Why else would he obsess over his ex the way he does?  The difference between Mackie and Meredith is that she wants to talk about it and he doesn't, or can't, or whatever.

My sister remembers the address of every house we ever lived in, and we moved around quite a lot as kids.  She remembers every phone number, every neighbor's name, every last little thing I did and choose to banish from my own memory.  Sometimes I can't believe the things she recalls really happened.  They seem so make believe to me, and I wonder why she can remember and I can't.  I can feel a little hunted sometimes in our conversations, because I've carefully selected what I want to bring along with me into the present, and her onslaught of biographical detail can be overwhelming and contradictory to my view of the past.

Like Mackie, I remember weird details, like the smell of a perfume someone wore.  I don't want their address, or to remember too clearly the problems or conflicts we had.  I want to remember their effect, and fragrance is like a ghost that way, carrying all that stuff in a tangle of feeling and thoughts I don't have to pick apart and break down.

Slightly Stinky Cologne: A Snapshot from Woman's Picture

Woman's Picture: Snapshot 3 - Slightly Stinky from brian pera on Vimeo.


Woman's Picture is a film series I started this year, the episodes of which for the most part focus on women characters and their relationships with each other, with men, and with perfume.  The first full length episode comes out in September, on evelynavenue.com, luckyscent.com, and a few other sites online, coinciding with the release of the first fragrance in Andy Tauer's new line of perfumes, Tableau de Parfums.  The Tableau fragrances relate to the shorts in the Woman's Picture series.

The first three episodes we filmed for Woman's Picture are playing at festivals over the next year or so as a sort of movie triptych, starting on July 11 at Outfest in Los Angeles.  You can check the Outfest.org website for showtimes.  Woman's Picture is a ten year series and will broadcast online, at festivals, and in theaters, and each episode will be released on DVD.

Ingrid, featured in this "snapshot", a shorter short from the series, loves perfume, but Mackie, her male friend, loves it even more.  He's one of the only guys in the series so far to really represent my fascination with fragrance and he embodies certain fearless, even confrontational attitudes I wish I could pull off myself.

In this short, Mackie and Ingrid have stopped at a cafe before a visit to Ingrid's mother.  Ingrid hasn't seen her mother--or been back to her home town--in ten years, so she's nervous, and wants Mackie to behave, even though she probably secretly cherishes his need to shock and agitate social conventions.  I imagine he has enough perfume on to sink a small ocean liner.  I imagine he thinks of it as a special kind of armor to keep boring people and the restrictions they might try to impose on him at bay.

It was fun playing Mackie.  It gave me a chance to be a lot more bold than I tend to be in person, in my own life.  I'm always so quiet when I shop for perfume, for instance.  I play it safe with all the sales associates.  I sometimes pretend I'm buying perfume for a girlfriend, though I'm buying it for myself nine times out of seven.  Mackie is a great alter ego to slip into on film because he just doesn't care.  Like me he might say outlandish or highly opinionated things, but he doesn't worry too much about the consequences, or what people think.  I trouble over every little thing I say, wanting ultimately to be understood and liked.  I think Mackie knows who his friends are, knows who is worth worrying about - like Ingrid, for instance.  The rest he doesn't spend too much time considering.

I always want to be Mackie when I walk into a perfume store.  Instead I end up a very pale imitation.  I try to be nice and patient and I feign ignorance so as not to make anyone feel I think I know more.  I fumble through interactions with sales associates a little bit.  I'm still scared to spray perfume on, unless it's something in the men's section.  It seems bizarre to me that at my age and after all this time loving perfume I'm still so nervous and worried out among people.  Mackie is the friend I always wanted to have - the kind of guy who would go with you and give you the balls to douse yourself in Poison, right out for the world to see.  I pretend he's with me when I hit Sephora at the mall.

Valentine to Perfume: Woman's Picture and Tableau de Parfums

Woman's Picture Trailer from brian pera on Vimeo.


Here's the trailer to a film about three women called Woman's Picture.  The film premieres in Los Angeles this July (details to follow).  The film, and the website I've created for it, Evelyn Avenue, has a lot to do with perfume.  Each of the women's stories in Woman's Picture revolves around the influence of a fragrance, in a way that gives perfume something approaching magical properties.  Ismellthereforeiam tends to cut videos in half, and can make loading the site a long term endeavor, so feel free to watch the trailer full screen through vimeo for the full effect, or watch it on Evelyn Avenue.


Woman's Picture is a tribute to the women I grew up with and the perfumes they loved.  As some of you who read the blog know, I spent a lot of time as a kid sneaking into my sister's/mother's/grandmother's perfume collections, sniffing myself into my own private fantasy world.  Woman's Picture puts some of those fantasies on film.  These three women's stories are the first in an ongoing series dedicated to cinematic first-person portraiture.  Each portrait is thirty minutes, and the gallery of portraits will broadcast on Evelyn Avenue starting in October.  Until then, you can catch the first three, in feature film form, at a film festival near you.  We'll keep you posted on dates.  I created Woman's Picture not just as a tribute to the women who've influenced me directly but as an homage to the old women's films from the 30s, 40s and 50s, many of which I love.  The biggest ambition behind the series, though, was to make movies that involve perfume directly and integrally, rather than as something that appears in the background, out of focus, on a character's dresser.

Andy Tauer is collaborating with this ten year project by creating a line of perfumes called Tableau de Parfums.  Visit Evelyn Avenue for more information on that, as well.  These perfumes are inspired by the characters of Woman's Picture.  The first three perfumes are "Miriam", "Ingrid", and "Loretta".  The launch date for the line is October of this year.

The film is on facebook under facebook.com/womanspicture, if you "like".