Exploring ERIS PARFUMS with Founder & Creative Director Barbara Herman

Please join Barbara Herman, founder and creative director of New York based niche perfume brand ERIS PARFUMS and Brooke Belldon, founder of the niche fragrance website Sainte Cellier, for an evening exploring the stories and smelling the ingredients that comprise ERIS's seven fragrances, all composed by master perfumer Antoine Lie.

Barbara started out as a blogger for Yesterday's Perfume (2008 - 2012), writing her impressions of the vintage fragrances that she started collecting in 2008. This exploration turned into a book, Scent and Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume (Lyons Press: 2013), which looked at the cultural, political, and aesthetic history of 20th century perfume, with an original focus on its queer, subversive nature and how it upended conventions around gender, gentility, and even our sense of smell as the lowest in the hierarchy of the senses.

After interviewing Antoine Lie for the "Scent Visionaries" section of her book, she asked him to compose fragrances for her new brand, ERIS, named after the Greek goddess of chaos and troublemaking. Launched in 2016, ERIS is inspired by muses — divine, human, and fragrant — that exemplify unconventional beauty and subversive glamour.

Barbara is flying over from the States and will be bringing ingredients from each of the fragrances — including natural ambergris, hyraceum, seaweed, cacao, tuberose, and more — for everyone who attends to experience alongside the finished scents, all of which will be available for purchase with the £25 ticket cost discounted from the price. Copies of Scent and Subversion and ERIS Discovery Sets will also be available for purchase.

Barbara’s talk will begin at 7pm in the October Gallery’s Club Room, but for those who want to meet and mingle an hour before, we’ve booked the upstairs room at the Queen’s Larder pub, which is just up the road at 1 Queen’s Square. We’ll have drinks there at 6pm before making our way down to the October Gallery. There will be nibbles and non-alcoholic refreshments available in the Club Room as well.