Opensky, a social shopping network offering beauty advice from various experts, has added scent critic Chandler Burr to its lineup. Two week ago, Burr, a former New York Times perfume critic and director and curator of Olfactory Art at the Museum of Art and Design, sold 100 units of fragrance in two days, which he intends to do every first of the month. Burr sent out 50-ml. lab samples stripped of all original packaging, including the brand and the name. “Traditional fragrance marketing is all about everything that’s not the perfume,” said Burr. “It’s the bottle, the packaging, the boy and the girl and the name and the designers. It’s about a dream, walking at midnight in some Japanese garden. I believe this is very effective for the majority of people who are going to buy their first bottle of perfume. [But] it is extremely ineffective in terms of consumers buying the second bottle. The second bottle is the juice.”
When describing the scent, Burr eliminates the individual notes that make up the fragrance. “I completely reject them as I think it’s idiotically reductive and useless,” said Burr. He describes the fragrance as an experience. On Opensky, he wrote, “The beauty in this scent lies, in part, in the fact that it is designed to function while making virtually no noise at all. Wearing it makes you feel like you’ve walked away to a distant point and sat down in a cloud bank; it lends you the purity of purpose and the luxury of self-imposed isolation.”
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Earlier today, Burr revealed the Untitled scent to be Infusion d’Iris by the artist Daniela Andrier working with her patron Miuccia Prada.