EYES CLOSED
What happens when you shut off one sensorial experience? Imagination takes flight, other sensibilities become razor-sharp and you discover a new way of seeing. Eyes Closed configures a world where love eclipses all difference and division. Intangible, yet steadfast.Souls that intertwine, an unexpected coupling of patchouli and papyrus enters into delicious collusion with orris butter, ginger and carrot. Candied spices of cinnamon and cardamom invoke infinite warmth and tenderness, the soothing balm of a kindred spirit.Eyes closed, falling into each other — this is an olfactory experience that emotes connection. For when we endure love in separation, spirits attune, transcendent over time and vast, incredible landscapes. Love is love, and it sees no limits.
Top: Cinnamon, Cardamom
Middle: Carrot, Orris Butter, Ginger
Base: Patchouli, Papyrus
Eyes Closed
“Distance and separation have been recurring themes over the past few years; I wanted to capture a scent that supersedes this fragmentation. Pulling away from screens that imitate closeness, we might be more in tune with each other if we simply close our eyes and shut out the physical world.”
– Ben Gorham, Founder & Creative Director, Byredo
Eyes Closed: Going beyond the purely visual to the emotional, heartfelt, instinctive and sincere. ‘Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,’ for Shakespeare or ‘You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips,’ observe the Righteous Brothers. Eyes open or eyes closed can make a world of difference: between being in love or not; feeling or faking; between everything and nothing.
“Closed eyes is a motif in my photography. I’ve always liked it – there’s a vulnerability to it. Sleep, ecstasy, laughter, death… All the clichés, but it does evoke all sorts of emotions; some things that are left unsaid only felt, both for the person in the picture and for the one looking.”
– Alasdair McLellan, Photographer
For the photographer Alasdair McLellan, eyes closed disrupts the primacy of the visual and opens up a different world of imagination and emotion in his pictures. Inspired by a particular photograph of a couple kissing in McLellan’s shoot, The Perfect Kiss, Ben Gorham evokes that world of imagination and emotion through scent. The two together for Eyes Closed embrace the peculiar synaesthesia of the perfume world: of how you might see fragrance and scent emotion.
An olfactory experience
An olfactory experience that emotes connection yet still confounds expectations, Eyes Closed echoes an idea of both the ancient world and the contemporary one in its construction. Top notes of cinnamon and cardamom, two of the most antique of fragrances, have a primal immediacy redolent of close comfort and warm skin for both men and women. While carrot, orris butter and ginger at once complement the top, yet freshly cut through any notion of cloying – at its heart, this is a modern relationship of equals. A mysterious matching of papyrus and patchouli is at the base, similarly ancient and yet unexpected and modern in their complexity. Anchoring all with a gravitas, both compelling and cocooning.