“We brought the idea to the public sphere very, very slowly and still got a lot of push back,” says El Masri, who was classically trained in France but raised in Dubai by an Egyptian mother and Lebanese father. It also treats the so-called Orient as a monolith, which is geographically and culturally incorrect. Log In Create Free AccountĮarly in the pandemic, Montreal-based perfumer Dana El Masri and a group of like-minded peers circulated a petition calling for the fragrance industry to stop using the terms “oriental” and “floriental” to denote scents of the powdery, vanilla and resinous variety.ĭating back more than a century (think Guerlain’s Shalimar, which debuted as a spicy “oriental” in 1921), such vocabulary was formed through the lens of colonialism when Anglo-Europeans viewed themselves as the centre of the world, while everyone else was othered, exoticized and fetishized.
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