Scent Trail, The

A unique travel memoir, The Scent Trail, follows one woman's journey across the world as she explores the magic and history behind the ingredients of her own bespoke perfume.

When Celia Lyttleton visits a bespoke perfumers, one of only a handful in London, she enters the heady and exotic world of scent. From a London backstreet she is transported to a world made up of thousands of oils, unguents and balms, all hidden away in an old Chinese medicine chest. And so begins a remarkable quest to discover the origin, history and culture of the many ingredients that make up Celia’s unique, custom-made perfume. It is a quest that will take her from Tuscany to Morocco, from Sri Lanka to Tibet, from the peasants and farmers growing their own crops and the traders who sell to the perfume houses, to the ‘noses’ who create the scents and the marketing kings involved in this billion dollar industry. As Celia explores the mythology, history and culture behind ingredients such as Jasmine, Nutmeg, Musk and Ambergris, she paints a vivid portrait of this mysterious, sensual world, conjuring up the people she has met and the places she has visited on her Scent Trail.

Author Profile

Celia Lyttleton is an artist and journalist. She has written numerous articles for magazines such as Vogue, Tatler, Vanity Fair, World of Interiors, The Sunday Times and Harpers & Queen. Her career as a writer has enabled her to travel all over the world – and her experiences resulted in the idea behind The Scent Trail.

Reviews

When Celia Lyttelton set out to have a scent created solely for her, she found herself propelled into an adventure that would take her across the world, investigating the origins, history and culture of wonderfully exotic ingredients…The Scent Trail tells her story,A fantastic book about perfume and our sense of smell…,The intriguing relationship between scent, memory and place is the underlying note in Lyttelton’s journey through the history, creation and business of perfume. We are whisked to traditional perfumers’ workshops, with their phial-filled antique cases, to the spice souks of Marrakech, Ottoman houses in Turkey adorned with necklaces of peppers and chillies, iris farms in Italy, and the mossy-floored cedar forests of Azrou.,Have you ever had that overwhelming surge of emotion when even a faint smell transports you back to another place and time? This is exactly the type of feeling Celia Lyttelton sets off to explain as she embarks on a journey of discovery…This book offers an insight into the foreign origins of the perfumes lining chemist shelves, while taking us on a sensory adventure around the globe.,Artist and journalist Celia Lyttelton has travelled the world to discover the people behind perfume, from the peasants to the ‘noses’,A travel memoir and vividly-drawn portrait of today’s exotic world of perfume…