Places To Go, Scents To Smell
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Fragrance Week – now through October 22 – is full of free events that allow the public to try samples, meet experts, and find out what scents they can’t live without. On Thursday, Quest International will introduce “Perfumality,” a software program that matches perfume to an individual’s personality. From 4 to 7 p.m. at Barneys New York (660 Madison Ave. at East 60th Street), Quest will have four computers loaded with the software available. Participants are asked their favorite colors, textures, and places, along with how they would describe their ideal fragrance as if it were a woman. The computer then prints out a list of seven fragrances, which participants smell in the store and rate on a scale of 1 to 10. That information is fed back into the computer, and a final list of seven fragrances, all found at Barneys, comes out. The whole process takes about 10 minutes. “You’re learning something about yourself you might not have known before,” Quest’s vice president of marketing, Matthew Frost, said. “It’s great fun.” In an unlikely combination, a perfumer, a chef, and a mixologist from Bacardi will set up shop on Thursday at Williams-Sonoma in the Time Warner Center (59th Street and Columbus Circle). From 6 to 7 p.m., they will discuss how they create their concoctions. On Saturday, the beauty director of Star magazine, Tara Kraft, will conduct one-on-one interviews with actor Alan Cumming, designer Cynthia Rowley, and perfumer Christopher Brosius, among others, in a theater-style setting on the second level of the Time Warner Center. The event, from noon to 5 p.m., will include time for audience members to ask questions, get autographs, and sample fragrances. Throughout the week, an interactive display by International Flavors & Fragrances Incorporated will showcase its perfumers from noon to 3 p.m. every day in the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue and 56th Street. Fragrance experts from Beaute Prestige International will be on hand all week from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the second level of the Time Warner Center, where they will answer questions and explain the history of some of the 1,000 perfumes and colognes currently on the American market. For a list of more events, visit www.fragrance.org.