The Scents of Colors: CHROMA Collection by DSH Perfumes, Part 1
Fragrance Reviews

The link between fragrance and color comes naturally to prolific perfumer Dawn Spencer Hurwitz. She's a talented artist in both visual and olfactory media—a singular background that informs her frequent collaborations with the Denver Art Museum (DAM). Dawn has given us a series of remarkable and beautiful translations of visual media into scentscapes, such as her BRILLIANT Collection inspired by the museum's exhibit of Cartier jewelry, the Passport to Paris Collection that celebrates the works of Monet and Post-Impressionist painters of the Belle Epoque and the collection of scents she created for the museum's Yves Saint Laurent fashion retrospective, among others.

Archipelago by Dawn Spencer Hurwitz, mixed media on canvas, 2008

In 2007, Dawn was invited by the DAM to create some "Aroma-Color" perfumes for a special exhibit. This was the birth of the CHROMA Collection, one of DSH's longest-running Art Projects. We know of no other perfume house taking such a unique synesthetic approach to artist colors as we've seen with CHROMA. New scents have been added to the collection periodically, with four new fragrances added in 2015. The CHROMA Collection as a whole was selected as a finalist for the 2015 Art and Olfaction Sadakichi Award for Experimental Scent.

Many of us on the Fragrantica staff are devoted fans of DSH. Marlen and Jodi have tried and loved many of Dawn's fragrances over the years. Ida is a fan and also a close personal friend of Dawn, all the way back to Dawn's days as an art student and budding perfumer. We have an artist among us—John—who is also a perfumer and has done an exploration of the link between colors and scents with a series of articles in 2014. We also had a DSH "novice" in Bella, for whom the CHROMA Collection is her first encounter with Dawn's distinctive fragrance style. With 14 "colors" to date, one can choose by hue or choose by notes and there's truly something in the collection for everyone. The five of us have teamed up to present to you some of our favorites from CHROMA.

CELADON

By: Dr. Marlen Elliot Harrison

Celadon, a pale, jade green glaze is perhaps one of the most beautiful and serene hues found in Asian pottery and dates back almost 2000 years. The name is thought to be of 17th century French origin, inspired by a character from a popular novel, while the color itself is the result of the change of iron oxide from ferric to ferrous iron during the porcelain firing process.

Dawn's take on celadon, which she describes as a velvet, soft and green variation on a chypre-fougère theme, was a 2015 Art and Olfaction Awards finalist. Dawn also describes her work here as "A sheer and 'frosted' green tonality expressed in scent form without the conventional sharp edges found in green fragrances." As I am drawn to verdant aromas, Celadon immediately caught my attention and her description above is spot-on. The current composition includes notes of clover leaf, lime peel, cucumber, green grass, liatrix, orris, orris root, balsam fir, hay, narcissus, tonka bean, and violet leaf.

Celadon opens with a familiar, gentle green vegetal aroma of cucumber, clover and cut grass with a perceptible hint of lime zest. For me, this spells summertime and newly mown lawns, and also recalls the transparent quality of the celadon glaze. I'm immediately reminded of Chanel 19 or Fidji but without the galbanum, as well as Gucci Envy, Puredistance Antonia, Diptyque Eau de Lierre and Givenchy Greenergy. As a natural, however, the fragrance takes some interesting turns throughout its first hour and what starts fresh and green becomes a powdery floral aquatic. The top notes disappear as the mid notes of orris root (the rootstock of the iris plant) and a pale narcissus bloom against the airiness of violet leaf and the warmth of hay. I do love this stage although I wish the brightness of the opening lasted longer. By the second hour all of this gives way to a drydown of soft tonka that lingers for another hour and gone is any trace of the pale green that opens the scent. It's a beautiful journey overall, one that I'd happily douse myself in any time I need my green fix.

QUINACRIDONE VIOLET

By: Bella van der Weerd

The DSH CHROMA Collection that we set out to explore for this article was going to be my first acquaintance with DSH Perfumes, even though I felt a certain familiarity with the brand due to the numerous reviews fellow writer Ida Meister contributed to our website. I was intrigued, to say the least, caused by both Dawn Spencer Hurwitz’s reputation as a pioneer of the indie perfumery movement and by the concept of the CHROMA series which explores in an olfactive way distinct “artist colors” (color pigments or paint that an artist would buy for their work). I couldn’t wait for the samples to arrive in the mail. A quick sniff of Quinacridone Violet, even before opening the vial, unexpectedly sent me back in time with a jolt, to the 90s when I fell for Nina Ricci’s Deci Dela one day and developed a hot and cold relationship with it that kept the flacon in my collection for years. My nose detected a similar vibe in this brightly colored work of art.

Quinacridone Violet belongs to Volume 1 of the CHROMA collection, named Cool Hues, scents of “pure, spontaneous emotion; just as pure color is.” And if one word would sum Quinacridone Violet up for me, it would be "spontaneous." The opening right away brings the aroma-color in mind that according to the house is based on an intense, man-made fuchsia-pink-purple artist hue. In the opening of cherry blossom, lime peel, jammy plum and fresh-tart quince there’s optimism, a carpe diem vibe, a boldness that explodes around you. The syrupy sweetness of the plum is dominant, but every time I try to convince myself of that fact by putting my nose close to the skin, I smell less sweetness and more of the citrusy vibrancy that’s brought about by the lime peel and quince. Maybe it’s also the cooked alcohol trace in this first stage, evocative of mulled wine, that helps to keep the plum from being cloyingly sweet. Slightly alcoholic, the prominent plum really is a ripe, deep red veil around you, while the tartness stays close to the skin.

The alcoholic facet doesn’t last, but the plum is not ready to leave the stage; she stays all through the heart of the composition. The flowers come in to lighten the load, and violet combines beautifully with the plum notes, bringing a fresh powdery effect that fits the optimistic, ready-to-seize-the-day mood. By the time the base starts to develop, the initial shock has faded to a fresh, green aroma. Here, there’s no more eye-catching neon, just beautiful cedar wood, slightly spicy incense and musk that stay very close to the skin.

I’m impressed with my first discovery from the house of DSH, Quinacridone Violet, which is a sweet fragrance, but not sweet in the way many of today's scents are. It is lush, complex, rich, juicy and, yes, sweet, founded on layers of wood, incense and musk, with a development that is beautifully crafted and a capacity to put a spring in your step.

HANSA YELLOW

By: John Biebel

Moving along the color wheel, each stop on the path is either cool or warm, but there is one spot that is unlike all others. Hansa Yellow, sometimes referred to as “a true yellow,” is a color of warm gold, holding that fascinating characteristic of being semi-transparent. This quality, which grows as a light beam travels through space, has an increasing luminosity, just as its perfume releases its gradual complexity of equatorial scent.

Oh, the challenge of handling such fickle concepts in perfumery such as air and light—and yet Hansa Yellow leans into this delicate region with tantalizingly delicate fingers…at first. It is a perfume of surprise. What do I smell? Flowers—but not flowers in a vase. These are sun-drenched, sweet and thick flowers swimming in a milky froth of the smoothest sandalwood and Tahitian vanilla. They include ylang-ylang, jasmine blossoms and neroli, and they’re effortlessly combined into a sensuous, heat-laden blossom that radiates a pulse of warm, tropical perfume. It’s a compelling feat, considering that these notes could combine into an overly sweet mush of ice cream and syrup. It’s a well-studied interpretation of what color can mean as scent, and in particular the color from the family of Arylide yellow, which has historic precedent as the color of choice of a number of modernist painters.

Hansa Yellow is a smile, a sweet, fruited, milky smile of perfume that induces the wearer into a warm and pleasant private hideaway. It is like the scent on the wind of a private coast in the morning’s heat before it becomes too oppressive. Yellow can be one of the trickiest colors with which to paint, due mainly to its transparency, and DSH uses this quality of yellow as an inspiration, coaxing the heavy, hazy flowers of intoxication into a caress with gentle rays of warmth and sweetness. It’s wearable for men and women, for anyone who wants to wrap themselves in the comforting bubbles of vanilla and milk, doused liberally with the tropics’ generosity of Hansa yellow-colored blossoms.

VIRIDIAN

By: Ida Meister

"Aloe (accord), Angelica, Artemisia, Australian Sandalwood, Bergamot, Brazilian Vetiver, Celery Seed, Chrysanthemum Absolute, East Indian Patchouli, Fresh, Galbanum, Green, Green Oakmoss, Lovage, Myrrh Gum, Orris Root, Violet Leaf Absolute, Woody.

Organic. Sultry. Enchanted.
Based on a semi-transparent, green-blue-green artist hue (paint). An abstract green scent that speaks of dark woods and deep forest floors.”—DSH Perfumes

The color viridian always feels like a copper patina to me, the way that it straddles that tenuous balance between blue and green. In Viridian from her CHROMA collection, Dawn grants us a glimpse of the Druid forest, that faery land of mists and mirrors.

V is for verdant, where green is queen and all shall proffer due reverence to herbal/sylvan limpidity strewn upon a mossy bed. Grace my spirit with galbanum, celery seed spice; lavish angelica, lashings of lovage, and the otherworldly floral approach-avoidance of chrysanthemum. Intimate the coolness of fluid serenity via an aloe accord, the wet-grassy violet leaf.

As daylight wanes we are drawn further into the forest and the timbre turns ever darker: vetiver, oakmoss, myrrh and sandalwood, patchouli. We find ourselves firmly in classical chypre territory, a beloved and familiar land for those night creatures who live for legend.

Nonetheless, there is a lightness of being about it all; it was but a dream we did dream once upon a midsummer's eve.

The Tempest, Act V, Scene 1:
Ariel sings
“Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.”

I loved Viridian from the first sniff years ago, and it is a privilege to share that affection with you. It is an intricate, arresting perfume which takes you on a journey; olfactory story-telling from one who knows how to tell a tale.

ALBINO (A STUDY IN WHITE)

By: Jodi Battershell

"What began as a fascination with the albino raspberry soon became an exploration from the real to abstraction.

What is it to be without pigment? There seems to be a kind of quality; a luminosity and sense of lightness. So then what? 'White' materials…and a questioning: what does white feel like?

Albino takes an abstract look at white from a synesthetic and textural stance. The textures being crisp, pithy, and creamy; shifting from fruity crispness to pithy to a creamy feel, with blond woods, and musk at the final drydown.

Meet Albino. He’s gorgeously unusual."—DSH Perfumes

For a fragrance borne out of Dawn's fascination with albino raspberries (pale golden in color but with the same flavor as their darker siblings), Albino does a remarkable job of capturing one of THE scents of summer for me, and one that is not often represented in fragrance. It's not the juicy fruits, nor the suntan lotion smells of the beach (see DSH Perfumes' Beach Blanket for that one! Love it!), nor the caramel apples and funnel cakes of the county fair, though all of those aromas are certainly among my favorites and I'm confident DSH has created or could create fragrances that capture them. Instead, Albino is the scent of a vegetable garden on a hot afternoon in high summer: crisp green stems of tomatoes and cucumber plants, fresh-cut herbal notes, beautifully vibrant stalks of rhubarb, and nearby, at the uncultivated edge of the yard, a wild berry bush. It's all the luscious and earthy garden scents that cling to your skin and clothes after an afternoon of pulling weeds and harvesting under the sun, combined with the creaminess and clean white musky scent of the bar of soap used to wash the dirt from your hands after your efforts.

Albino is listed by DSH as a men's scent, and there's a definite "masculine" presence to it, though women who enjoy green (not floral) and aromatic fragrances will enjoy it, too. It opens with crisp citrus and vegetal aromas. The albino raspberry accord doesn't appear for an hour and two, and it is subtle and not overly sweet when it arrives. Patchouli and vetiver add a little dirt and grass to the mix. As the fragrance dries down, all the sharp edges are mown and the fragrance becomes softer, rounder and creamier, though with a lingering herbaceous tone atop the blond woods and musk.

Despite all my references to gardens, herbs and the color green, I think Albino earns its name in the end. The fragrance as a whole embodies the white light of a beautiful summer day, when everything is in focus, crystal clear and illuminated. It's all light and no shadow.

We'll continue our exploration of scents from the CHROMA Collection in Part 2. In the meantime, read more about them here on Fragrantica and visit the DSH Perfumes website to purchase CHROMA Sample packs and individual fragrances.

JLB