A.P.C. & Air Aroma present Sustain

Jean Touitou, founder of A.P.C., never thought he would create a perfume…until he met essential oil perfumist Haley Alexander Van Oosten in L.A. After trying one of her essential oil blends and liking the idea of a little glass bottle inside a wood container, Touitou decided otherwise.

The end result is Sustain, is a new total-concept perfume inspired by Ray Davies’s song Waterloo Sunset. The composition contains 12 essential oils to allude to the 12 string guitar used to play the song. The wooden packaging is the reproduction of the numerical image of that same song. The name was chosen to refer to the pedal that prolongs a musical accord. Finally, in this intertwining of perfume and music, one of the ideas for the scent was to express “…the perception of the smell of a guitar case –lined in bright velvet– in which rose petals would have been scattered.”

The scent was introduced on September 10, 2009. Only 300 copies have been released worldwide.

To launch Sustain in its stores in Paris, New York and L.A., A.P.C. partnered with Air Aroma to diffuse a derivative version of Sustain through Air Aroma’s stylish Aroslim diffusers. The result is a subtle scent lingering throughout the stores, clearly leaving Touitou’s mark.