Galway perfumer Cloon Keen’s new candle is a masterclass in aesthetics – The Irish Times

Galway-based perfumer Cloon Keen has been quietly producing world-class perfume for 20 years. This is no small feat – the world of perfume is dominated by big company names with limitless budgets and whenever you scale back the enterprise all the way down to its bones, what a fragrance home is actually promoting you is metaphysics. An idea. A sense – an evocation of sentiment and reminiscence.That is far tougher to market than one thing extra corporeal like a bullet of purple lipstick. It has not one of the visible energy of a glowing highlighter, and even the before-and-after promise of a retinol serum. Fragrance is an invite from maker to wearer to take part in a shared expertise; it requires you to step outdoors the bodily and interact in a kind of thought experiment.You can’t select a perfume passively – to worth and need it, it’s essential to think about what it means to you. Think about what it evokes for you. We construct that means across the scents we put on and use in our houses. In an trade and a world which is spurred by a mentality of measurable outcomes in the right here and now, perfume stands wildly aside. You can’t grasp it or kick it or measure it. It is one thing else completely.Cloon Keen has all the time been totally different. With its roster of non-public and residential fragrances, every with a uniquely Irish story, painstakingly thought-about formulation and decadent, lovely scent, it ought to actually be a greater deal on the perfume world stage. But the model is Irish. A candle or fragrance with an Irish language title is much less prone to seize a world viewers than a native one. The tales it tells by way of scent are intrinsically tied to Irish historical past, Irish tradition and the Irish panorama. With each new launch, it produces a scent which has common attraction however is designed to be understood by way of a lens of Irishness.While the fragrances are distinctive, it is its line of scented candles that stands out most powerfully for me. Its new launch, Aesthetic Lily (€45 at cloonkeen.com), is one thing particular. Inspired by Oscar Wilde and Aestheticism’s notion that artwork is finest understood by way of magnificence and the human capability to expertise it, Aesthetic Lily fantastically captures the creative decadence of Wilde’s philosophy in juxtaposition with the prim Victorian moralism of his period.Cloon Keen’s Aesthetic Lily Candle (€45 at cloonkeen.com) You’ll forgive me for marching into the conceptual world of fragrance-speak, however throughout this column and whereas we’re occupied with perfume, we’re all metaphysicians. Without the concepts we connect to a scent, it is nothing in any respect. As Wilde may need urged, it is by way of our consumption and notion of perfume (for it is an artwork type) that it turns into significant and really exists.So, think about a lacquered mahogany desk on a balmy summer season afternoon. A shaft of shiny daylight hits the desk, warming the book-filled room it sits in, making the air heavy and resinous, virtually as if somebody is burning incense someplace. A lavish bouquet of sprawling alabaster Easter lilies sits in an ornate vase on the desk’s floor, pumping out their strong, silky perfume. It’s creamy and complicated, with a slight chew of ginger and a velvety contact of jasmine. You cease by the desk, run your fingers over its easy lacquer, and savour the nice and cozy, aromatic air. Everything stops only for an instantaneous, and it’s lovely.This is what nice perfume does. It transports us. Stops time. Restores us, even only for a second. Yes – the world of perfume may be overcomplicated and overintellectualised, however whenever you expertise it, nice perfume is simply you, interacting with a piece of artwork and establishing a world of concepts to recollect, or escape to. Making one thing lovely.

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/trend/2023/03/31/galway-perfumer-cloon-keens-new-candle-is-a-masterclass-in-aesthetics/