odourofdevonviolet.com
The Scent That Captures That "1930s Moment"!
All material copyrighted to odourofdevonviolet.com © 2014
or to the various credited sources © 2014
XXXI
Soon the self-emulsifying polyol stearates caught on in Blighty
And GOSNELL’S & CO. erected an olfactory causeway between
Paris and London, a Franco-Anglo odopoly, and the products
Were distilled, bottled and marketed thick and fast as olfactory
Fashion demanded –
GOSNELL’S lotion “SUBLIME” – London Paris
GOSNELL’S floral lotion “Society”
GOSNELL’S Lavender Water
GOSNELL’S Cherry Blossom soap tablet – “a charm to existence”
ESSENCE OF VIOLET – “England’s sweetest flower” extracted by
JOHN GOSNELL & CO. LTD., Perfumers by appointment of Her Late
Majesty the Queen – London & Paris
GOSNELL’S DEVON VIOLET Sabonetes (soaps, pink)
GOSNELL’S Eau De Cologne
GOSNELL’S Heliotrope
GOSNELL’S DEVON VIOLET perfume bottle, milkglass, with Shakespeare’s House painting on it
GOSNELL’S DEVON VIOLET Water
GOSNELL’S DEVON VIOLET Bottle Atomiser (with glass bulb
and egg-shaped palm-sized pump on other end)
And GOSNELL’S is still going, is in vogue again in these nasally
Straitened times when more and more citizens seeks cheaper
Scents and perfumes to fumigate the fœtor of profligates…
“We can provide all strengths from Eau de Toilette and Eau de
Parfum to Parfum as well as Body Spritzes, Dry Oils and Mists.
We work with a variety of perfume houses to create exclusive scents –
Just as property speculators sub-let damp flats for inflated rents”
Tumpty-tum
...And O those DEVON VIOLET ATOMISERS are making
Their mark more than ever before, bringing in dividends,
Not just for GOSNELL’S, but for governments: simply press
The pump in the palm and spray away, it always pays
To atomise one’s day, for this is the age of atomisation,
The age of Making Work Pay… in ever-decreasing stigmatisations
The more one’s zero hours increase, and the less one claims –
O atomisers are back in fashion, the fiscal pump and spray,
O atomisers are back in fashion, the must-have of Austerity,
The affordable perfume apparatus for the acquisitive today,
Choicest accoutrements, chic decanters of effervescent scents…
XXXII
Yes, DEVON VIOLET’s in vogue again –accosts us like an
Olfactory hallucination, but a collective phantosmia,
For many of us smell that strange, extravagant fragrance, Equivocal violet, scent of uncertainty, individuality,
Artificiality, vanity –all those questionable traits made so Nationally respectable since that brash materialistic
Ascendancy in the antiseptic-scented, gel-greased Eighties,
But which, during Austerity, needs-must be further
Consolidated, concentrated into fashionable consumer Complacency (and Customer Compliance) –equivocal Violet,
As a colour, has no clear identity on the spectrum (forever
At the edge of sight, perennial peripheral pigment of perception
That has always been there, since the ancients remember,
At the verges of vision, barely perceptible at times unless
Captured in a certain type of light), but is symbolic as an
Accidental synthesis of others, a magpie pigment, hue
Of emperors and royalty, juice of the rubus, sap of the bilberry
Used by the Romans to dye the clothes of their slaves as Pliny
The Elder noted; the colour, taste and scent sourced from
The Viola plant, or, Parma Violet trees of Italy,
Lavender-flowered, sterile shrubs and yet they flourished,
Much stock put by their reproduction through cuttings;
First distilled to a chemical scent as a serendipitous
Residue from experiments by Perkin to manufacture
Quinine: the result was a synthetic dye, named mauviene…
