The CM2 Project: Inspired by Street Art
Disrupt expectations. From its ability to distort perceptions or transform the ambiance of any environment, to its all-too temporary embrace with our skin – not to mention our many varied public displays of olfactive ‘expressionism’ – the world of scent shares some very interesting parallels with the world of pens, pastes, and paints.
Street art can make you think just by interrupting a day’s mundanity. In this underground world, anyone and anything can be a canvas. It disrupts expectations, overlapping disharmonious layers —paint, stickers, words—with existing structures, to create unexpected new harmonies. Its messages range from the political to the poetic, the selfless to the narcissistic. It can easily evoke a sense of the familiar, before twisting that familiarity on its head. Then, in an instant, it’s gone. Street art’s eventual disintegration is but a beautiful inevitability.
So I asked myself, “What would a street art piece look like if it came from a bottle?”.
CM2 is what happens when a graffiti artist’s spray cans are replaced with the perfumer’s organ of ingredients and applied to our skin. The fragrance borrows some of the masterful techniques used by underground street artists (e.g. choices in process, planning, and materials), and uses them to explore the beauty of olfactive distortion. It is designed to defy preconceptions about an everyday material in perfumery – specifically the rose – and disrupt expectations of its natural order of progression. In other words, this is definitely not your grandmother’s rose. It is a love letter to the street: a roughed up flower that’s been twisted on its head, and nailed to the wall for your olfactive pleasure.
CM2 Pre-Orders, Limited Editions, and Indiegogo
In anticipation of the upcoming launch of CM2, Charenton Macerations has organized a campaign on Indiegogo as a first chance for you to experience and pre-order the fragrance. Also up for grabs are a few interesting limited edition items, including stickers, isolated fragrance accords, and olfactive walking tours; a way for all of us here at CM to say thank you for helping to get the CM2 launch off the ground. There is even an option to join the CM creative team as we research and build our third fragrance: a rare opportunity to go behind the curtain of the CM creative process. Find all the details on how you can help support the CM2 Project here, or by cutting and pasting this link (http://igg.me/at/cm2fragrance). The entire CM2 team is eternally grateful for any support you can give to help make this olfactive dream a reality.
45 Days of “What’s in a Rose?” (#roseshards)
Rose attar. Rose water. Rose Nylund. Our connections to rose are vast and varied. Throughout the CM2 Indiegogo campaign, become more intimately acquainted with some of the more interesting aspects of rose usage and history as each day I unravel the petals and thorns of rose’s gender-bending past. Follow CM on Instagram and Twitter (#roseshards) for an ongoing discussion on everything from rose cultivation and history, to some of its more iconic pop cultural moments, all with a street art twist. At the same time, learn more about how and why these ‘rose fragments’ were isolated and reappropriated olfactively in the final CM2 fragrance composition. You can also tag us with some of your own favorite #roseshards (photos, blog posts, links…), and they might just find themselves as part of an ongoing street art multimedia project. It’s 45 days dedicated to the multifaceted beauty that is the rose… dragged out into the streets piece by piece.
More information about The CM2 Fragrance Project Indiegogo Campaign
Follow Charenton Macerations’ #Roseshards Story on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
