Galway-based perfumer Cloon Keen has been quietly producing world-class fragrance for two decades. This is no small feat – the world of fragrance is dominated by huge corporate names with endless budgets and when you reduce the business down to its bones, what a perfume house is really selling you is metaphysics. A concept. A feeling – an evocation of sentiment and memory.
That is far harder to market than something more corporeal like a bullet of red lipstick. It has none of the visual power of a glowing highlighter, or even the before-and-after promise of a retinol serum. Fragrance is an invitation from maker to wearer to participate in a shared experience; it requires you to step outside the physical and engage in a sort of thought experiment.
You cannot choose a fragrance passively – to value and desire it, you must consider what it means to you. Think about what it evokes for you. We build meaning around the scents we wear and use in our homes. In an industry and a world which is spurred by a mentality of measurable results in the here and now, fragrance stands wildly apart. You can’t grasp it or kick it or measure it. It is something else entirely.
Cloon Keen has always been different. With its roster of personal and home fragrances, each with a uniquely Irish story, painstakingly considered formulation and decadent, beautiful scent, it should really be a bigger deal on the fragrance world stage. But the brand is Irish. A candle or perfume with an Irish language name is less likely to capture a global audience than a local one. The stories it tells through scent are intrinsically tied to Irish history, Irish culture and the Irish landscape. With every new launch, it produces a scent which has universal appeal but is designed to be understood through a lens of Irishness.
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While the fragrances are exceptional, it is its line of scented candles that stands out most powerfully for me. Its new launch, Aesthetic Lily (€45 at cloonkeen.com), is something special. Inspired by Oscar Wilde and Aestheticism’s notion that art is best understood through beauty and the human capacity to experience it, Aesthetic Lily beautifully captures the artistic decadence of Wilde’s philosophy in juxtaposition with the prim Victorian moralism of his era.
You’ll forgive me for marching into the conceptual world of fragrance-speak, but for the duration of this column and while we are thinking about fragrance, we’re all metaphysicians. Without the ideas we attach to a scent, it is nothing at all. As Wilde might have suggested, it is through our consumption and perception of fragrance (for it is an art form) that it becomes meaningful and truly exists.
So, imagine a lacquered mahogany table on a balmy summer afternoon. A shaft of bright sunlight hits the table, warming the book-filled room it sits in, making the air heavy and resinous, almost as if someone is burning incense somewhere. A lavish bouquet of sprawling alabaster Easter lilies sits in an ornate vase on the table’s surface, pumping out their robust, silky fragrance. It’s creamy and complex, with a slight bite of ginger and a velvety touch of jasmine. You stop by the table, run your fingers over its smooth lacquer, and savour the warm, fragrant air. Everything stops just for an instant, and it’s beautiful.
This is what great fragrance does. It transports us. Stops time. Restores us, even just for a moment. Yes – the world of fragrance can be overcomplicated and overintellectualised, but when you experience it, great fragrance is just you, interacting with a piece of art and constructing a world of ideas to remember, or escape to. Making something beautiful.
