THE ARTIST IS PRESENT
In this section I would like to share with you my roseoverdosed collaborations with different people from the creative world.
Not all collaborations are created equal! Most of them are in a category of their own - friends and family teaming up, business-oriented pairings, and all kinds of strange activities.
GUEST PERFUMER
Rose Retreat 2024
Marina Barcenilla, the Rosa Damascena Chair at Academia del Perfume
Meet the guest perfumer for Rose Retreat 2024 - Marina Barcenilla!
She leads a double life... but this is not a secret. She’s an Independent Perfumer and fragrance educator, and also an Astrobiology Doctoral Researcher at the University of Westminster and Natural History Museum in London.
In fragrance, she’s an entirely self-taught perfumer with over two decades of experience as a perfumer and fragrance educator, the founder of her perfume brands, Marina Barcenilla Parfums and AromAtom, and the fragrance creator for other British brands. She’s passionate about natural fragrance and the role of olfaction in education and health, and a pioneer of natural perfumery in the UK. Her perfumes have won several perfume awards, including two Fragrance Foundation awards and several Natural Beauty, Green Parent and Beauty Shortlist awards.
Marina also founded her own School of Creative Perfumery that teaches in English and Spanish, and she’s an Academician at the Spanish Academia del Perfume, where she has an active role in bringing the world of fragrance closer to the general public via webinars, press and media appearances.
In science, Marina has a First Class Honours degree in Planetary Science and Astronomy, and she’s in the last few months of a PhD in Molecular Biology, Biochemistry and Biophysics.
She’s also an active science communicator with her project “AromAtom: Discover the Smell of Space ” which she founded in 2017 and that integrates space with olfaction. Since its inception, she has been invited to deliver science talks and outreach activities in schools, science museums, science festivals, NASA conferences, and the Royal Society.
ART COLLAB
2023/2024
Limited editions illustrated by a Bulgarian Artist
We love art and enjoy working with Bulgarian Artists for our limited edition series.
The 2023/2024 collaboration presents to you KALOYAN ILIEV-KOKIMOTO
Meet Kokimoto, a contemporary Bulgarian artist born in the vibrant city of Varna, Bulgaria, in 1979. He doesn't just create art; he crafts his fantastical reality! Through graphics, drawings, collages, photographs, and installations, Kokimoto paints unusual and dreamy worlds, drawing from his memories and boundless creativity.
Kokimoto's art delves into thought-provoking themes, exploring the evolving world order, redefining the importance of modern icons, and even shedding light on our relationships with animals.
Kokimoto has received 15 awards for graphics, ex libris, drawing and painting. His works are in 19 collections in Bulgaria, Turkey, Serbia, Romania, Italy, Spain, Poland, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Uruguay, Thailand, Japan and China.
We were captivated by Kokimoto's talent and his madly artistic worlds. We asked him to create a wild and fun interpretation of a rose to fit our rose water-based products. His otherworldly illustrations genuinely resonate with the spirit of our brand.
The first units decorated with Kokimoto’s drawings will be available to purchase as of this weekend.
guest perfumer
Rose Retreat 2023
Meet British perfumer Sarah McCartney founder of the seriously exciting niche perfume brand 4160 Tuesdays, who also happens to be our guest perfumer for Rose Retreat 2023!
Born within the sound of the North Sea crashing on Saltburn beach. 75% Teesside, 25% Cockney. Boro supporter, yoga teacher, clarinettist, and writer of books, Sarah’s guilty pleasures are playing on the swings at the park, red lipstick, cosy crime novels, craft beer, and Eurostar.
For 14 years she was the head writer for cosmetic powerhouse Lush while the company grew from four shops - one in Poole and three in London - to 700 worldwide. She was writing 50,000 words every three months for the Lush Times, aiming to encapsulate the products' scents in their descriptions. During that time, she bought and read 200 books on essential oils and herbalism.
She left to write a novel about a perfumer, but the novel turned into real life and she started making the fragrances she had described in the book!
Sarah is an entirely self-taught perfumer with a background in Maths & Sciences! She has been hand-making adventurous scents since 2011 in her artisan studio based in Hammersmith, West London. 4160 Tuesdays stands out from other niche fragrance brands simply because it’s British, creative, witty and pioneering.
It’s no coincidence we are announcing our guest perfumer exactly on Tuesday. We were inspired by the story behind the name of her brand. According to Sarah, in an 80-year-old lifespan, we have 4160 Tuesdays and better use them to do something different, creative and memorable. Here is our suggestion for today, the 24th of January 2023: simply sign up for our Rose Retreat, and we have you covered for this Tuesday!
The Rose Retreat is an annual event focused on diverse olfactive experiences inspired by the two Bulgarian oil- yielding roses Rosa Damascena and Rosa Alba. Click here to discover more.
Art COLLAB
2020/2021
Limited editions illustrated by a Bulgarian Artist
We love art and enjoy working with Bulgarian Artist for our limited edition series.
The 2020/2021 collaboration presents to you Dimitar Tassev
Born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1937, Dimitar Tassev is and will remain a symbol of the strongest period of Bulgarian Poster Art.
Posters celebrate the leaders we follow, the causes we support, and the rock stars we idolize. They look forward to future events and memorialize the past. They are both works of art and printed artifacts of their age. They are visual messengers that inform, amuse and provoke.
According to Dimitar Tassev, the most important thing about a poster is the joke, and let’s face it, nobody likes banal ones. In his work, he is always looking for the surprise, the novelty, and the wittiness. Poster Art to him is beyond the ordinary imagination, it needs cultural awareness, intelligence, talent, and professionalism.
As a young adult, he studied Poster Art at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia, and right after that, he began his career at the National Theater of Youth.
From 1966 onward he took part in all national exhibitions of applied arts and made a series of solo exhibitions in Bulgaria and in Germany. Tassev participated in group appearances of applied graphic artists in Rome, New York, Oslo, and Budapest. He also designed the Bulgarian national expositions in Leipzig, Berlin, Poznan, Vienna, Brussels, Moscow, Stockholm, and Milan. His works were published in specialized magazines for design & advertising such as Graphis, Neue Werbung, and NOVUM Gbrauhsgraphic and his posters are part of museum collections in Poland and in the USA. In 1994 he became a professor at the National Academy of Arts.
Among his wide-ranging work in visual arts, from logos (the logo of “Golden Orpheus”) to projects related to space design, posters remain the core of his creative career. Tassev’s posters are visual messengers that inform, amuse and provoke and we simply love them. That’s why we invited him to collaborate with us for the yearly limited-edition collection that includes a rosewater face mist, rosewater flavor drops, and a T-shirt.
GUEST CHEF
Rose Retreat 2019
Eat like you love yourself!
Meet Miami-raised, Swiss-based Chef Jhon Lookyan who attended our Rose Retreat last year. The exciting news is that this year he returns as a Guest Chef for our seasonal Rose Dinner.
Jhon started his culinary adventure in the kitchens of Cesar Ritz College before working at the Ritz in Paris and with José Andrés at the Minibar, Washington.
Can’t wait to share the kitchen with him and explore together the fragrances & flavors of Bulgaria.
GUEST PERFUMER
Rose Retreat 2019
EXCITING NEWS for Rose Retreat’19! I am happy to announce that we have a special guest perfumer for the Rose Accords Workshop this year – Victoria Frolova, the author of the Bois de Jasmin perfume blog. Victoria is a well-known journalist and a fragrance specialist who had the opportunity to learn the art of perfumery at its heart – at the International Flavors & Fragrances, where she worked before she started her independent career.
The Rose Accords Workshop is a chance to explore, smell and work with several perfume materials that comprise a rose accord. The participants get to know the three different oil-yielding roses – Rosa Damascena, Rosa Centifolia & Rosa Alba and examine the subtleties in their odor profiles.
Victoria will present some of the most iconic rose perfumes in their original formulations and the participants will practice creating their own accords 🧪🧫
Learning perfumery is a lifelong pursuit, but together with Victoria and me, anyone can become an expert on roses and learn a variety of professional techniques ⚗️🌹
For more details on the perfume-making workshops available in the months to come, check out our Scent Club page and our Shop.
art collab
2018/2019
Limited editions illustrated by a Bulgarian Artist
We love art and enjoy working with Bulgarian Artist for our limited editions series.
The 2018/2019 artistic collaboration presents to you Ilona Yonkova
This year, for the first time, our products are available to order online. To honor my family and their thorny garden life, for the first artistic collaboration of the limited edition series, I decided to invite my sister Ilona Yonkova. She just graduated from the Bulgarian Academy of Arts and is now being accepted at the Jewellery Design Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. The fine illustrations evoke an immediate association with the way rosewater infuses our daily beauty and flavor rituals. Her illustrations will enliven our products and social media platforms during the entire period of 2018-2019. Ilona drew inspiration from our daily grooming routines and the little experimental moments we have with our food and drinks.
2018/2019 LIMITED EDITION © Illustrated by Ilona Yonkova.
The collection contains Rosewater face mist, Rosewater flavour drops and T-shirt “Rose Addicts”.