Angela Ciampagna: Esxence'16 Exhibition News

by: Evgeniya Chudakova

A tiny Italian perfume brand, named after its founder, owner and main creative unit  -Angela Ciampagna - appeared in Atri, a small town situated in the heart of Italy. All the brand's fragrances are produced there by Angela and Enrico in their laboratory, and their bottles are made literally by the neighbor-artisan on the next street. Now, this brand, which honors the historical and traditional art of perfumery, is ready to present two new fragrances that I was able to ask some questions about during Angela's recent visit to Moscow.

Evgeniya: Hello Angela! Can you tell me a bit about your new collection, which you are planning to launch at Esxence?

Angela: We will present our second collection during the next Esxence fair in Milan, at the end of March 2016. The name of the collection is Cineres, from the ancient Latin word for ashes. The mood of the collection can be summed up as “fire under the ashes”. Partly, the meaning of this sentence is that we are trying to bring back to light a traditional concept of the artistic perfumery, from a time when the signature elements of a perfume house were the extraordinary know-how and the high quality of the perfumes, whereas the appearance was just a detail.

gardenia

Fauni and Ignes will be the names of the two new fragrances. Fauni is a perfume with one of my favorite flowers: gardenia. I like gardenia very much. In Italy, we have a lot of gardenias and it has such a beautiful natural smell! Enrico and I were working on two fronts at the same time: part of Fauni's gardenia scent is a result of an infusion process. The other part of the gardenia scent is built using proper, fine chemicals. But it wasn't our intention to simply make a gardenia perfume, we wanted to put our signature on it. For this reason, we have dressed the beauty of this flower with a “scratched” tone, using both synthetic molecules and natural raw materials.

Evgeniya: But, if I understand you correctly, your main goal was, even with using chemicals, to try to transmit the most natural smell of the gardenia flower?

Angela: Gardenia is just a majestic starting point, a springboard for us. It’s been really exciting handling so many awesome flowers in our workshop. It often led to beautiful working phases, rich in emotion. Nature can be really amazing. But it’s just a starting point, as I said, and it’s the beginning of the real work: to use carefully selected raw materials in order to realize our olfactive idea.

Angela in the lab

Evgeniya: And what about the second perfume of the Cineres collection?

Angela: Ignes will be positioned as a men's fragrance, but of course it can also be worn by women. This fragrance will be the smoky one. For this olfactive project too, our starting point was a stimulating smell: the cortex of the Maritime pine (Pinus pinaster) and its resin. It's partly made with an extract distilled by ourselves, of which we are very proud, because it comes from native pines of the Adriatic coastline. We extracted it via a distillation with steam at low pressure, in order to obtain a herbal distillate (hydrolatum). In fact, we want to bring back to life the traditional use of the herbal distillates and infusions as components of perfumes. Our idea of fine, artisanal perfumery is working very concretely with raw materials and selecting each optimal manufacturing process, bringing back to life some procedures that proved so successful in the ancient Italian workshops. It’s been wonderful researching this and, over the years, we have been so glad to have met expert aromatieri and specialists. We are very grateful to them, for they shared with us their experience, knowledge and research.

Pines on the Adriatic coast

Evgeniya: What about the new design?

Angela: Cineres is a rusty collection… Rusty, because it adopts a manufacturing process and historical conception of how perfumes were made in the traditional Italian workshops, at the beginning of the Twentieth century: that’s why the look is rusted. Even the rose-window on the top of the cap (the sign of the brand Angela Ciampagna) will be rusted, and the sprayer too. The gardenia and tobacco in our perfumes will be rusted too. But that doesn’t mean you will smell the odor of rusty metal; you will feel the “allure” of the past.

Antique apparatus for distillation

Evgeniya: Are you planning to continue this line maybe with other flowers or is it planned as some kind of special edition?

Angela: At the moment, I don’t know. We are ahead of our time but we take it one step at a time. We have a strong passion for making perfumes and this is the lifebloodof our perfume house. I only can say that our perfume house will live as long as we will live, beyond the trend of the moment in the niche perfumery industry. And we are fully convinced that the only fire that remains alive under the ashes is the fire of well-made perfumes.

Evgeniya: Thank you Angela! Hope to see you soon in Milan and to be able to try these new fragrances.

Unfortunately, for the moment Angela still can't share the full pyramids of her new fragrances, but she promised that Fragrantica readers will be the first ones to know!