Class hours: 20
Level of unit: beginners: open to all ages/levels and to non-students (18+)
Length: 3 days

From the day Gabrielle Chanel launched her iconic N°5 in 1921, perfume has been part of fashion's DNA.  Like fashion, it is an art, as well as a billion-dollar industry. And like fashion, it's got trends, trailblazers spawning a thousand imitations, experimental houses and commercial behemoths; the olfactory equivalent of the little black dress and the shoulder-padded sequined gowns, of the sleek pantsuit and the New Look silhouette.

But unlike fashion, perfume is particularly hard to decode, partly because the perfume industry has always jealously guarded its secrets, but mostly because it is immaterial, non-visual and almost non-verbal. Very little is done to impart the culture of fragrance, its aesthetics and history.

But there's a whole world of words beyond "This smells nice" and "This stinks". And London College of Fashion's Perfume 'Primer' intensive course is designed to help you get past those purely emotional reactions to scents. You won't learn to compose a fragrance (that takes years), but you'll jumpstart your nose into deciphering what the perfume critic Luca Turin calls "chemical poems".

The course, designed and given by the Paris-based fragrance writer Denyse Beaulieu, will be a direct, hands-on, sensory initiation to perfume appreciation through games, visuals, discussions and of course smell, smell, smell...

Discover raw materials, both synthetic and natural, and how they're used in fragrance composition. Experience the greatest perfumes in history and the way they echo the social and sartorial trends of the 20th century. Explore the cutting-edge scents of the 21st century, with the development of auteur perfumery and experimental compositions.

And above all, learn to connect smells to words and images. Your world will never smell the same.

By the end of this course, you will have:

• Acquired a wide descriptive vocabulary for smells and fragrances
• Learned to analyze the facets of aromatic materials
• Experimented with the principles of fragrance composition in
  hands-on exercises
• Reviewed rare historical fragrances from Ms. Beaulieu's
  personal collection
• Studied the style of cutting-edge contemporary perfumers
  

Denyse Beaulieu is the author of the perfume blog Grain de Musc and is currently writing a perfume guide with a twist. She is represented by the AP Watt Agency in London.