The Diary of a Nose

THE DIARY OF A NOSE

Perfume: The Alchemy of Scent

Smell is a word, perfume is literature
.

Paris, Thursday 19 October 2009

Pleasure

I don’t feel comfortable talking about pleasure; I find it easier to talk about desire. Since I started composing perfumes I’ve learned, I’ve invented ‘catchphrase-smells,’ like the first sentence, the first notes of a piece of music, the initial images that are reworked at length to capture a reader’s, a listener’s, a spectator’s attention. So that he or she wants to carry on, in order to pursue the pleasure. In a society where speed is everything, perfumes are judged in a couple of seconds, as if at a glance. The hastiness of these assessments upsets me: a perfume can only truly tell its story when it is smelled and worn.

I like pleasures when they are shared, that is my definition of luxury. I transpose this ideal on to the perfumes I create, which are mostly meant to be shared by men and women. If I compose a ‘men’s’ fragrance for a wide audience, I never fail to slip in some women’s ciphers, and vice versa for a so-called ‘women’s’ perfume. Fashion’s codes were invented to be transgressed, to be played on; so I don’t believe perfumes should be for women, for men, mixed or unisex. It is the people who wear them who give them their gender. In India, men have been wearing Yves Saint Laurent’s
Opium
, Guerlain’s
Shalimar
and Dior’s
J’adore
since they were launched. I avoid pigeonholing, putting things in boxes, I would rather give people the freedom to choose, to appropriate each of my creations for themselves.

Pleasures, small pleasures: I like the pleasures we pilfer from
everyday life, they brighten the day. They are mundane, they feel repetitive, they reassure. If we overlook them we deprive ourselves of the joys that make life bearable.

I take pleasure in composing, but some mornings the pleasure just isn’t there in that little bottle. Physically, chemically, the draft of the perfume is the same – same temperature, same combination of raw materials, of molecules – but smelling it affords me no pleasure at all. This fills me with feelings of despair and loneliness, and I have to suppress them. Sharing these misgivings with anyone else would mean condemning the work I’ve been doing for weeks, so when this happens, I put the bottle down and forget about it for a few days. I know that the initial pleasure, the idea I was pursuing, will come back to me.

On the plane, Saturday 31 October 2009

Giono

I’m on the shuttle, heading for Nice. My laboratory is in Cabris. My only luggage, one bag and one book: Giono’s
Les trois arbres de Palzem
, a collection of the chronicles that were not included in the Pléiade edition of his
Récits et essais
. When I feel ‘lost,’ I read Giono to set me back on track. He works his way inside me, acts as a point of reference. Funny, the French for ‘of reference’ – ‘de repère’ – sounds like ‘d’heureux père,’ ‘of happy father;’ yes, he acts as a happy father to me. When I read his work, I mouth each word silently to myself. I need to hear the music of his words in my head, the rhythm of his sentences, the silences.

I like his writing, his inventiveness, his sensuality; and, when he talks about smells, I admire him. His passages about literature resonate with the way that I ‘write’ perfumes. I think that smells are signs, and that a perfume enthusiast interprets these signs as the perfume develops on his skin or on the fine sliver of a test blotter. He smells it, pursues it, abandons it, comes back to it; I can’t say whether it is the perfume or the enthusiast who is beholden to the other.

As a perfumer, when I want to evoke a smell, I use signs that – taken separately – have no connection with the thing I’m expressing: there has never been any tea in Bulgari’s
Eau parfumée au thé vert
, mango in
Un Jardin sur le Nil
by Hermès, or flint in
Terre d’Hermès
, yet the public ‘feels’ they are there. To cite Jean Giono,
‘all the work of expression takes place in the reader’s mind; from that he derives his pleasure and the satisfaction, gratification and joy it gives him.’
¹
Although perfumers are traditionally compared to musical composers, I have always felt like a writer of smells.

Cabris, Monday 2 November 2009

The workshop

I was back in the workshop this morning. An architect’s house, it was built in the late 1960s in the spirit of concrete architecture, which strives to link buildings with their natural environment. Here, the outside is inside, and the inside extends outside, each conditioning the other. The house clings to grey rocks and is surrounded by a wild garden planted with Salzmann’s pines. It could feel austere, yet is anything but. The sun filtering through the pine trees floods the workshop with soothing light. Time passes more slowly here, the seasons more noticeably. I love this place. I feel in tune with it.

A visitor looking at my desk would find it littered with dozens of tightly sealed little bottles, test-blotter-holders shaped like windmills, a worn file filled with a hundred formulae, a pot of coloring pencils, boxes of junk, a photo frame. Still, it can’t be called a mess so long as I know where to find the formula for the draft I stopped working on a few months back, the grey crayon that I need, the box with the worn pencil eraser and the paper clips, not to mention my glasses – the ones for reading and the ones for distances. For me this ‘mess’ is connected to memory. When everything is organized, I forget.

Behind the desk – a varnished beechwood table from Ikea – is a chair that I use the way the travel agent does his in Jacques Tati’s
Playtime
: everything is within reach by shuffling a few steps. From there, I can look out to the Mediterranean. Actually, when
I’m lost in smells and formulae, I don’t see anything, but I know the sea is there. I just have to stop smelling, stop writing and look up for a moment to appreciate it.

Cabris, Friday 6 November 2009

Pears

I emerge exhausted after creating a perfume. The decision is made at last. An international launch is planned for next April. There were a substantial number of trials and drafts – several hundred – which is an indication of how difficult it is to find a guiding line, a form that expresses the concept. The project is bold and demanding; the bottle a technical feat. Then comes the fear that it won’t find an audience. Each new olfactory story is a gamble.

Obviously, I have other projects on the go, but the work feels bland, it lacks breadth, presence and identity. I’m glum. I decide to take the afternoon off. I call my wife and suggest spending a bit of time in Italy (which is only an hour’s drive away), sharing a plate of pasta and stocking up on groceries at the market in Ventimiglia. The market there is an institution. It operates every Friday and sells produce that is not only in season but in that very day, such as snails and mushrooms (provided it rained the previous Tuesday or Wednesday), not to mention Italian delicacies that can’t be found anywhere else. We particularly like the great variety of dried mushrooms, the sundried, sun-blush and preserved tomatoes, and, most of all, a Parmesan cheese more than seven years old. This week several stalls are selling winter pears, small crimson-colored pears whose fragrance reigns over the market. I bury my nose into a fruit display, taking the salesman by surprise, and he says:
‘Signore, guardate ma non toccate’
(Sir,
you can look but don’t touch). I tell him I’m just smelling. The smell is huge and obvious, and I’m suddenly startlingly aware that it could be useful to me. I experience such happiness, stealing the smell like this, that I note down how I feel, the names of raw materials, impressions, the beginnings of a formula. My memory will fill in the details I haven’t written. The olfactory portrait I draw up in the laboratory later won’t be a reproduction of what I smell here, but the image of that smell committed to memory. These ‘olfactory encounters’ that I turn to my advantage give me such a boost that I forget how tired I am and instantly feel light and free.

Cabris, Saturday 7 November 2009

Le Monde

I have a subscription to
Le Monde
, like at least two other people in the village of Spéracèdes where my family have their home and which has a population of almost a thousand voters. I know about these other subscribers because the postman has already wrongly delivered the newspaper twice, which gave me the opportunity for a brief chat with him about his round.

The painter Soulages made the headlines in
Le Monde
on Friday 16 October when a major retrospective of his work opened at the Pompidou Centre. In his interview, Soulages mentioned painters in the 1950s who tried to express their emotions and give their canvases meaning, a concept he doesn’t understand. ‘You can’t possibly give them a definitive meaning: meaning comes together then comes undone,’ he explains. He also explores the question of time, the inexplicable fact that a work several centuries old can bowl viewers over even though it surely no longer expresses the painter’s intentions in his own era or in the place where it was created.

I remember having a similar experience, not to do with time but with meaning. In the early 1980s I ended up in China, commissioned to assess the production facilities of a Chinese perfumery factory for the company who employed me, who wanted to set up a partnership. A ‘joint venture’ was the precise term – which amused me, because I actually felt I was setting off on an
adventure
in a country I found intriguing, fascinating, and which
I knew only from tourist guides. Twenty-six years later I’m still fascinated by China. At the time, Shanghai was like a colonial city. Millions of black bicycles travelled along wide avenues lined with plane trees, amid a deafening clamor of shrill bells mingled with the piercing chirp of cicadas. Only officials travelled by car, their vehicles invariably black with smoked glass windows.

The apartment we had been allocated by the Ministry of Industry had plain 1930s furniture; the floor was covered by a thick silk carpet with a colorful pattern. Calligraphies in simple frames hung on the walls. I was especially taken with one of them, so much so that my eyes clouded with emotion. Although I couldn’t hope to understand its meaning, given that I couldn’t read the symbols, I was drawn to its blackness, to the upstrokes and downstrokes, to the sequence of shapes, but also to their rhythmic patterns. The experience is still vivid. Over time, I allowed myself to believe that my emotion derived from an intuitive feel for how the hand had worked, the choreography of gestures, which was an extension of the body and of thought.

I don’t think I’ve ever truly managed to break away from meaning. Perhaps I don’t want to if ‘abstraction’ implies a wish to be completely free of representative signs. Yet I like abstract painting and certainly don’t idolize reality – far preferring the imaginary, illusion, delusion (in the playful sense of ‘inventive’ rather than ‘deceptive’). For years I’ve kept a diary of olfactory notes, the result of silent solitary experiments, a quick guide to smells, lists of two to five components that I juxtapose to create
olfactory illusions to be used as and when I need them. Using this technique, I have reduced smells from everyday life and the world around us to the smallest olfactory expression. Nature is complex – there are five hundred molecules in the smell of a rose, more for the taste of chocolate, fewer for garlic. I have engaged in this game to free myself from natural representation, using it to establish what amounts to olfactory semantics so that I can combine these signifiers in complex smells, in perfumes. I am conscious of the fact that the work on which I build my ‘olfactory suggestions’ doesn’t bear the reassuring seal of recognition or approval.