APOCALYPSE, revelation of a bottle

published on 2024-01-15

“Write therefore what you have seen, what is, and what must happen next” (Apocalypse chapter 1, verse 19)

A NAME

APOCALYPSE is the name that Pierre Bénard Ségu gave, knowing its real meaning, to the bottle he designed for the OZPARFUM brand.

Etymologically, the word is the transcription of the ancient Greek term ἀποκάλυψις (apokálupsis) which is the action of discovering.

Borrowed from Latin, this term means a laying bare, the removal of a veil: a revelation.

A DANCE

Connected to cultures and beliefs, this bottle is inspired by Samā’, a sacred gyrating dance of whirling dervishes listed as the intangible cultural heritage of humanity adopted by UNESCO since 2008.

AN OBJECT

Fragile, it is also a source of fascination, which evokes the shape of a top, a playful art object that you just have to come across to arouse the irrepressible desire to grab it…

With a capacity of 100ml (3.5 fl.oz), this design is manufactured by a company which benefits from the Geographical Indication of Limoges Porcelain.

A FLOWER BOX

The bottle is placed in a “Hana” flower case.

The flower box contains 4 photographic mysteries to tell you about the bottle, the perfume, the perfumer & the brand.

A SONG

For this bottle Pierre Bénard created music in which Veronica Granatiero, a Bel Canto soprano, participated with her vocals.

“When I asked Veronica to do me the honor of singing on my musical creation, I imagined her voice as a perfume which, carried by the air, escapes from a bottle that is opened”

The sounds of this music were textured and mixed by Victor Pézet, the sound engineer of Studio du Frigo.

TESTIMONIALS

A polyphonic tuberose

Pierre Bénard Ségu, perfumer and a real expert in natural ingredients sourcing, sensory control, and R&D, with decades of experience working at independent fragrance and flavor companies, as well as academic years as a professor at ISIPCA, has freshly come up what he calls his first personal perfume — «Lilith».

Initially a crowdfunded project, «Lilith» as an art piece aims to combine what Mr. Bénard Ségu cherishes the most: colors, shapes, shades, nature-forward olfactive perfections, and Japanese-derived attention to detail.

In «Lilith», the author, as he says himself, portrayed not only a flower, but a piece of him: “Tuberose is my emblem. I fell madly in love with it. For the perfumer that I am, she represents all flowers.”

Delivered and presented in a self-designed «Apocalypse»-shaped flacon of biscuit Limoges porcelain covered with matte Japanese musuo acrylic paint (world’s blackest water-based acrylic paint with a light absorption rate of 99.905%) the new owner is supposed to reveal (ancient Greek ἀποκάλυψις (apokálupsis) – to uncover, to reveal) the white, bare fragility of the biscuit by washing off the paint.

To reveal the crispiness and vulnerability, brightness and darkness of the perfume.

With all of this parallelism, complex narratives, and insane aesthetics, Mr. Pierre Bénard Ségu delivered what I would describe as polyphonic tuberose universum: fragile, moving, elusive, and living.

Intoxicating with its animalics and leather/labdanum edge, green with narcissus absolute, icy menthol airy and rose-peachy at the same time, the perfume vibrates and blows with Zürich wind and melts with the scents of later-blooming linden trees to create a story of contrasts—of power and vulnerabilities, tensions and pleasure releases.

Lilith, sombre héroïne, Esprit de Parfum, Flacon n° 16 out of 16. Pierre Bénard Ségu for OzParfum @oz_parfums (March/April 2024).

text by Anton kochetkov (Zurich)