On a trip to Doha, Qatar organized by the Qatar America Institute for Culture, a group of delegates visited the Perfume Museum in Doha, started by collector Reem Abu Issa. In this post, Saskia Wilson-Brown shares some of her favorite exhibits from the museum.
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March, 2023 – Doha
At the Institute for Art and Olfaction, we manage an open and evolving map of perfume resources around the world. It’s an expansive map, but to be perfectly honest, keeping it up to date is a constant challenge. We miss resources all the time, and one of the resources we missed was the impressive and well-tended Perfume Museum in Doha. This has now changed, thanks to a very thoughtfully planned itinerary on a recent trip to Qatar, which we visited as part of a delegation planned by Qatar America Institute for Culture.
The Perfume Museum opened in 2021 after years of development. It’s spacious and well-appointed space, encircling an atrium and overlooking a specialty perfume shop called Secret Notes that is the only shop in Doha that places its focus on niche brands (think Nasomatto, Lorenzo Villoresi, etc).
The brainchild of Reem Abu Issa, the museum is a family affair. Born into a family of perfume importers, Reem and her brother Ashraf Abu Issa are both in the business of scents: Ashraf owns the shop below, Reem runs the museum above, assisted by one of her daughters who oversees social media and public communications.
Reem’s road to collecting began with a love for tiny bottles – the miniature versions of the “real thing” that perfume brands would produce for promotional or sampling purposes. Her brother Ashraf would collect them for her on his travels, and she would keep an eye out for them on hers. As she explained during our visit, after years of collecting, she noticed that these once rare small bottles began to be sold by the multi-pack in stores around the world. They felt less special, and her interests shifted. She began to focus her collection on a very specific era, the moment when perfumes started being branded, roughly from the 1880s. Spanning roughly 70 years of bottles, her collection ends in the 1950’s, the moment – as she explained – when the perfume companies became more corporate and the artistry suffered.
Another intention of the museum is to highlight the impact that the SWANA region has made on the development of modern perfumery. To that end, the museum takes pains to highlight influences from the Arabic-speaking world, while gently juxtaposing the work of Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian and other SWANA-born perfumers with early 20th century cultural appropriation from Europe. She uses a light touch, but to the modern eye, the contrast is hard to miss.
In this post, I share some elements from the collection that I enjoyed the most. Needless to say, there is much more to it than what’s here, so please take the time to visit their website here and follow them on social media here.
Pictured: Reem Abu Issa and her daughter pose at the entrance to the museum.
Activations
Designed carefully for newcomers to perfumery, the museum supports its collection with educational games that test knowledge and expand appreciation for the materials of perfume.
One game that captured the attention of my group asked us to rank six animals according to their sense of smell. Options included a human, a dog, a bird, an elephant, a shark and a snake. Our group hemmed and hawed for a bit: a dog had a better sense of smell than a human, but what about a bird? A snake? I insisted that the snake should be at the top of the pile (it makes no sense in retrospect) but I was outvoted by the rest of the delegates. We finally – and diplomatically – eked out a best guess.
The answer, if you want it. From best to worst olfactory ability, the ranking is: Shark, Dog, Elephant, Snake, Human, Bird. Voila. Keep away from those sharks.
Another game (pictured here) asked us to identify smells and then guess their geographical provenance. A series of small black cloches were displayed, each containing an unnamed aromatic. You were asked to identify the materials and then to place them next to the appropriate name on a purpose-built table. The second part of the game had you identify the material’s provenance by pairing it with a small plastic cut-out of the country from whence it came. Vanilla, for instance, we correctly guessed as being from Madagascar. Sandalwood from Australia, Lavender from France, Castoreum from Canada and etc. It was really fun.
Harun Al Rashid’s Perfume
Displayed in a tall glass bottle with a cork cap, The Perfume Museum devotes a small section to a historic perfume – a scent created for Caliph Harun Al Rashid.
Harun Al Rashid served as he fifth Abbasid caliph, reigning in a location we now know as Baghdad from 786 CE until his death in 809CE. His reign is associated with the beginning of the Islamic Golden Age, and his luxurious lifestyle was in part memorialized in the Thousand and One Nights. We know about his perfume because the formula was recorded by none other than the great philosopher-scientist Al Kindi, himself. He was quite an important man, that Caliph Al Rashid.
Historic recreations are often fanciful – a thing more of imagination than precision. Often times materials have changed due to different extraction methods, and, then, sometimes meaning, quantities, and processes are lost in translation. However, given the semi-mythical status of Harun Al Rashid, I’m not one to begrudge the effort.
This composition contained oud, pine, musk, orris, clove, sandalwood, and more. Smelling it, it was a deep and complex floral-spicy, and – more importantly – with a gentle reminder to suspend disbelief, it helped make the past come alive, for a fleeting moment.
Ahmed Soliman
Our next stop was a small exhibit that placed careful attention on a perfumer from Cairo in the early 20th century. Ahmed Soliman was successful, prolific, and – at least in Europe and the US – remains largely unknown. Here is some information pulled from the didactic panel (with thanks to Reem Abu Issa, who wrote it):
Ahmed Soliman El Mowardi (1906-1956) was apprenticed in 1919 to a small perfume shop called “Khan Abu Takia” (The Shop of the Man with thin Skullcap) to learn the ancient technique of blending scents without the use of Alcohol. In 1925 he established a laboratory among the many perfume Shops in Khan El Khalili bazaar [and] in 1928 he moved into premises vacated by a century old perfumery and believing that providence had blessed him with the name of history’s great patron of fragrance ‘King Solomon’ he called himself “Ahmed Soliman Cairo’s Perfume King”.
Because fashionable Egyptian women chose to wear only French perfumes, Soliman appealed almost strictly to the faithful American and European tourists. […] Soliman’s early fragrances were sold in glass stoppered, Bohemian made “lavender oil” bottles. These long, square formed, 19th century bottles were enameled with Egyptian figures posed in three quarter and frontal views (positions not seen in ancient pharaonic art). Soliman’s fragrances included […] Jasmine, Sandalwood, Banana; as well as more elaborately blended scents such as Secret of the Desert. […] In his shop, “The Palace”, he proudly displayed a perfume fountain representing the Pharaoh Ramses. […] An unfortunate partnership ruined Soliman’s business by the mid 1950’s.
Early 20th Century European Perfume Bottles
Not far from the Ahmed Soliman display, the group arrived at the bulk of the collection: a series of long glass cases containing historic perfume bottles from the collection amassed by Ms. Abu Issa over the course of the last twenty or so years.
A theme I noted, and an interesting one given the context, was her careful collection of bottles from Europe that made use of imagery from what at the time would have been classed as “The East”. Writ large, her collection contains example of interpretations of Chinese, Japanese, Egyptian, Indian and other cultures — all packaged with a French and sometimes British lens.
One shelf, for instance, featured a collection of Egyptian-themed bottles made for French companies like Lubin and L.T. Piver from the 1920’s. This was a moment in European culture when Egyptian themes were popular, so it would follow that the French houses enthusiastically adopted the trend. Nevertheless, it strikes a different note vis-à-vis the work by Ahmed Soliman. Soliman was drawing from the same visual references, of course, and also marketing his perfumes to an American and European clientele. However, he was drawing from a culture and history that was his to mine. While equally simplistic, the cultural pastiche done by Soliman in some ways feels more sincere.
And then there was the work done by Bichara Malhame. Bichara, as he was known, was a Lebanese-born, Paris-based perfumer who started his cosmetics line in 1896, and a line of perfumes shortly thereafter. His cosmetics were labeled with an illustration of Bichara himself pulling the long red hair of a female figure who was meant to symbolize fortune. His perfumes, for their part, were often sold in Egyptian-themed bottles. It’s no surprise: Bichara – according to the museum didactic – supplied the Royal Egyptian Court.
Another interesting success story of the era is that of a woman called Henriette Gabilla. She was Syrian-born, and she was a pioneer in perfumery, marketing herself as the “Only Woman Perfumer in Paris”. According to the museum didactic, Gabilla commissioned over 30 bottles from Baccarat and several from Lalique, and released 12 light floral extracts that “remained popular for decades”.
By the time her perfume house shuttered in the late 50’s, Gabilla has trademarked over 100 perfume names. I sadly didn’t get any photos of her bottles from the museum, but here’s an image of a bottle for a perfume called Mon Talisman, which was designed for Gabilla by Baccarat and released in 1926.
Schiaparelli
By and large, one of the most fanciful collections in the museum was a group of bottles by Schiaparelli, for the perfume Shocking.
Bizarre, funny, and still very modern in feel, the bottle design was a collaboration between Schiaparelli and surrealist Argentinian artist Leonor Fini. Fun fact: the bottle shape for Shocking was allegedly inspired by the body proportions of Mae West, for whom Schiaparelli had designed clothing.
The perfume, for its part, was made by the French perfumer Jean Carles, who many may know for his Jean Carles method – a perfume composition teaching structure that is still in use today.
Schiaparelli was an impressive woman, with a developed sense of irony. In 1935, just one year before she launched Shocking, Schiaparelli asked designer Jean-Michel Frank to create a large gilded cage within her Parisian boutique. She used this cage to display the perfumes.
The Schiaparelli collection at the museum was topped off by some funny bottles shaped like pipes and telephone dials. But nothing comes close to the star of the collection: the epic bottle for Le Roy Soleil, which was designed by none other than the genius (and pompous) master of Surrealism Salvador Dali.
Design Stunners
Other delights I encountered in the collection included a beautiful display of different sized bottles for My Sin by Lanvin, a bottle designed to resemble a lamppost, some visually reduced and graphic bottles for Lucien Lelong by Lalique, a 19th century chateleine containing a tiny perfume vial along with other practical needs for the Victorian lady, a collection of starry boxes and bottles for Evening in Paris by Bourjois, and so many more.
And then, I came across what, by far, was my favorite piece in the collection. A modern, reduced, and totally glamorous design for Vol de Nuit by Guerlain, complete with its Zebra-print box. Released in 1933, this design, to my eye, maintains its modernity, almost a century later.
For more information about the Perfume Museum please visit their website and follow them on social media.
This blog post is one of a series of posts written by Saskia Wilson-Brown during a delegation to Qatar organized by the Qatar America Institute for Culture. You can learn more about QAIC on their Instagram page or on their website. The delegation included Jawad Khawaja and Micah Anderson (Oudimentary), Razwan Ul-Haq (calligrapher / artist), Regina Mamou (artist), Rubia Chaudri (independent perfumer / tech consultant), and Saskia Wilson-Brown (founder of the IAO). The delegation was led by Fatima Aldosari and Laila Jadallah, from QAIC.
