Thermochromatic flowers on fire

London, 2016:

“Through the Unknown, we’ll find the New”
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

Few can match the thrill of being given a sensual and luxurious bunch of flowers by a lover. For Valentine’s Day, for the first time in history, those flowers could change colour.

Bompas & Parr collaborated with Perrier-Jouët Champagne to create Perrier-Jouët Fleurs des Rêves, an ultra-exotic flower shop in Basement of The London EDITION.

Visitors were able to pick up bouquets of chameleon blooms, savour Perrier-Jouët champagne then join a workshop where they created their own colour-changing flowers.

 

Each of the colour changing flowers was hand-painted with thermochromatic ink. Thermochromatism is the property of substances to change colour due to a fluctuation in temperature and is one of several forms of chromatism.

For this project Bompas & Parr created two forms of colour changing flowers. The first was treated with a liquid crystal dye that changes at 27 degrees Celsius from a deep satin black to Champagne bottle green. Visitors could cup flowers in their hands to effect the transformation, even using the heat of their passionate breath.

The second varietal of colour-changing flowers was treated with a black thermochromatic dye that transformed at 31 degrees Celsius. The bloom was spritzed with a bespoke Bompas & Parr perfumed crystal elixir and ignited. In the heat of the moment, the blossom was ignited, changing colour to reveal the hue of the original pigment.

The ritual of giving flowers became a total sensory onslaught, enhancing the fleeting enchantment of this Valentine’s tradition.

Workshops with added meaning
In addition to picking up single stems and whole bouquets of the flowers at Perrier-Jouët Fleurs des Rêves, guest could participate in workshops learning to arrange their own stems. For Valentine’s Day, we focused on the traditional red rose, the elegant anemone that adorns the bottle of Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque, as well as more carnal ultra-exotics like the orchid. Welcome to paradise…

Decadence and a floral vision quest
Perrier-Jouet Fleurs des Rêves drew inspiration from the fin-de-siècle French Decadence movement, characterized by the search for rarified sensual experiences and acts of arch connoisseurship. Joris-Karl Huysman’s A Rebours (1884) is a crucial text, a book so provocative it featured in the Oscar Wilde’s trial. In one particularly notorious passage the protagonist becomes obsessed with flowers: “He wished to go one step beyond. Instead of artificial flowers imitating real flowers, natural flowers should mimic the artificial ones”

Photography by Bompas & Parr and Daniel Resende.