Following the successful launch of our first fragrance, Christopher Street, Charenton Macerations heads back into the city streets, this time blending our disruptive approach to perfumery with the defiant world of street art.

Inspired by street art’s ability to distort perception and transform with time, Asphalt Rainbow is a fragrance that rips apart the rose. It then scatters these fragmented petals and thorns throughout the urban underground. The fragrance is a rose undone.

“I love working in the memory of spaces. Every space in the world keeps a trace of what’s happened before, and when I get to a space, I feel deeply what’s happened there as if I have a supernatural relation to the past.”  – Blek le Rat

Asphalt Rainbow asks the question: what happens when a graffiti artist’s spray cans are replaced with the perfumer’s organ of ingredients and applied to our skin? It borrows some of the masterful techniques used by street artists (e.g. choices in process, planning, and materials) to explore the beauty of olfactive distortion. It is designed to defy preconceptions about everyday materials in perfumery and disrupt expectations of their natural order of progression.

Asphalt Rainbow - The Beauty of Olfactive Distortion

What’s in a rose? Crafting Asphalt Rainbow was a two year process of building olfactive walls, roughing them up, and then tearing them down; of splashing those walls with aromatic pastes, paints, and other potently odiferous outdoor spoils; of calibrating how the composition twisted, changed, and faded over time. The arc of the fragrance mirrors the life of street art tags: a bold interpretation of a rose accord that distorts and morphs over time, presented as a fragmented flower that dances up walls and down alleyways, until, inevitably, fading to background.

Chasing Asphalt Rainbows

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