The Diary of a Nose (2 page)

A few examples of my ‘delusions’:

Phenyl ethyl alcohol and helional alone can produce the smell of early-season white lilac. For the flowers in full bloom you need indole, and purple lilac needs traces of clove.

Or, more simply, starting with the essence of sweet oranges:

Cabris, Monday 9 November 2009

A preface

Among my current commissions is the preface to a book devoted to hands, vines and wine. I like this sort of work, which forces me to focus on a subject I don’t know and, sometimes, to establish links with my profession. I accepted the commission in memory of a trip through the Bordeaux region during which I renewed acquaintance with a talented photographer. I am receptive, as a craftsman and artist, to anything to do with hands and, as a man, to the trust people put in me, the homage they pay me: in short, I don’t want to disappoint. But for three weeks now I’ve been sitting at my computer going round in circles. I’m looking for a way in, an angle, a point of view that resonates with the purpose of the book. I swivel in my desk chair and catch sight of a book I particularly like on the mantelpiece: François Jullien’s
Conférence sur l’efficacité
. I open it at random at page 55. Jullien is discussing action and transformation. The Western world favors action while the East prefers transformation. I read a few lines. I’ve got my angle: the art of transformation. Hands at work are hands involved in every form of transformation.

Paris, Tuesday 10 November 2009

Movement

I’ve been invited by a debating society called the Friends of the Paris School of Management to the 48
^th
session of their seminar on ‘Creation’ to share my experiences as an artist and craftsman. The time is set for 8.45 a.m. on the dot at one of the top engineering schools in France, the Mines de Paris. I’m impressed by the venue and intimidated by the twenty-five people there. The only qualification I have is a school certificate I was awarded at thirteen, and I’ll be speaking to men and women who went to the prestigious and highly competitive grandes écoles. My ‘conference’ revisits the major themes of a layman’s guide to perfume I’ve written. There is a screening of a short film about my experience of creating
Un Jardin après la Mousson
for Hermès. After the presentation people ask me a lot of questions.

I like questions about my profession; they mean I have to understand my own thought processes in order to reply, and they take me to another level. One particular comment really struck me and still probes me long after the conversation:

‘You’ve told us about how you structure your thoughts, about the form a perfume takes, about time and composing perfume, but you haven’t said anything about movement.’

I was not able to tackle the subject of movement; I had very little time left and I have to admit that I didn’t have a clear answer to the question. This diary is an opportunity to make up
for that. Movement is defined by the form a perfume takes and its longevity. So a more baroque perfume is all about complexity, power and performance. Its complexity follows its evolution, enhancing each new phase. Perfumes like this are seen as elaborate, structured, rich, full and perhaps overbearing. Conversely, a cologne-type structure favors simplicity, vigor and lightness of touch – although not all colognes are simple; the rapid succession of notes within them makes us think they don’t stay on the skin for long. This sort of easily accessible perfume requires a very particular attention because its discretion keeps such lovely surprises in store.

Cabris, Wednesday 25 November 2009

A visit

As a person, I take pleasure in receiving and sharing. As a perfumer, I like showing and convincing; the only problem is that I make myself play a role. I’m both the same and not entirely the same individual. The need to please, to seduce, sometimes makes me alter work in progress and tend more towards fulfilling a demand – a decision which is satisfying at the time but will start niggling at me the very next day.

Although in everyday life I’m drawn to exchanges of ideas and enjoy confrontation, in my work I need solitude.

I don’t create using comparisons. Often, I don’t evaluate the new draft by comparing it to the previous one. I only want to see whether the overall olfactory result corresponds to the idea I have in mind. The painter Turner explained that he painted dozens of watercolors of the same subject at the same time, all from memory, and in the end kept only one, destroying the others. My approach is similar. For me it’s not a case of changing a few elements in a perfume’s formula in a linear progression towards a known goal, as a practiced craftsman might when perfecting a piece, but of striving for something that doesn’t yet exist. So, after a while, I stop and smell all the drafts, keeping only two or three (each of them with its own form of expression and not the result of the one before), and discarding the other trials. That is how I open up new territory. In fact, I’m quite simply
following the trajectory of an artist, someone who seeks and, sometimes, finds.

Messina, Tuesday 1 December 2009

Quality

I have a meeting with the R family, who own the company Simone Gatto, which specializes in producing essences of citrus fruits; their essences of Sicilian lemon and mandarin orange are bewitching, as is their essence of Calabrian bergamot.

Sandro R and I are talking about quality. He’s telling me about meeting Lanvin’s perfumer André Fayasse in the 1950s, to make a presentation for an essence of bergamot obtained using a new process. The perfumer smelled the sample and announced that he had to turn it down, saying that the smell of this new essence didn’t correspond at all with the one he usually used. Intrigued by this rejection, the young Sandro made some inquiries and discovered that the essence of bergamot produced for Lanvin was obtained by packing parings of zest into a knotted muslin which was hung up by a rope so that the force of gravity made the essence drip down into a varnished terracotta vase below. The parings fermented overnight, giving a ‘distinctive’ note that the perfumer saw as a sign of quality, while the new process avoided such fermentation or oxidation. We laughed together over this story, which illustrates perfectly how difficult it is to change our reference points and our habits.

Obviously the quality of materials used in perfumery is essential. Quality is a commitment; it should be sought after, for it is an integral part of perfume, but it cannot in any circumstances
be considered to drive creativity. The most beautiful raw materials do not the most beautiful perfumes make.

Essence of bergamot made in October is of different quality to essences produced in the months of November, December, January and February. Production is carried out for five months of the year and actually results in essences that start off with intense, fresh, green notes and continue with floral and gustatory notes. October essence has the highest content of linalool, a constituent with a floral smell, and February essence has very little linalool but contains fresh-smelling linalyl acetate. Thanks to tiny quantities of cis-5 hexenol, however, October essence is perceived as fresh. In February essence, molecules of cis-5 hexenol and linalool diminish in favor of linalyl acetate. Nature plays with our sense of smell, because it is only when it is used in compositions that the floral aspect of October essence versus the fresh aspect of February essence can be identified.

Messina, Wednesday 2 December 2009

Standardization

Up until the 1980s I used products that few perfumers would dare use in their perfumes now, such as last residue forms of methyl ionone, hydroxycitronellal or lilial, all manufacturing by-products whose smells are difficult to reproduce identically. I used reproductions of natural musk, composed of disparate ingredients whose quality could not be assured with certainty, making the production of perfumes unreliable. Since then, products have been standardized, and there is less hapless tinkering taking place. Oddly, this standardization, which should be a rationalizing process, led to a degree of ‘waste’: even though they are not toxic, these by-products have now been eliminated because they cannot be standardized for production on an industrial scale.

Messina, Friday 4 December 2009

The unrefined smell

We left early this morning to catch the ferry across the Strait of Messina to Villa San Giovanni in Calabria. We have a meeting with a farmer who produces unrefined essence of bergamot in the village of Condofuri. M. P. meets us in the courtyard of his home-cum-factory. To the left, the family home – which houses his children, their wives and his grandchildren – rises up over three stories. To the right, the factory, a building of the same height. Vilfredo R. has asked me, out of courtesy for his employees, to take photographs of outside the factory only. He is a short man with a square head, a tanned face dotted with liver spots, thick grey hair and direct, piercing black eyes. He is wearing worn, dark trousers of indeterminate color, and a navy blue quilted jacket of indeterminate age.

M. P. greets us in his own language. I only understand one word in three. He proffers his hand, the firm hand of someone familiar with the land, then leaves us to go and talk to our guide. Long rambling discussions ensue several feet away. After quarter of an hour of negotiations, we are invited to see his machines and to smell the essence he produces. The smell manages to smother the impressive racket of the machines; it bowls me over, floods through me. In my work, I usually try to establish some distance from smells, the better to grasp them, to understand them, to smell ‘behind’ them, but here it penetrates me, I can’t get away from it, I let it wrap itself around me, let myself be
clothed by it. It feels like the olfactory equivalent of a monochrome image. The pleasure of this unrefined smell is well and truly a physical experience, an experience in which thought is eclipsed.

In the afternoon we visit the
giardini di bergamotti
, the bergamot orchard – in southern Italy orchards where citrus plants are grown are called
giardini
(gardens) – which gives me an opportunity for a whole new experience: smelling the fragrance given off by bergamot plants in December, a smell of fruit zest rather than flowers, as with orange trees. In the course of conversation, I learn the names of the different varieties of bergamot:
Femminello, Fantastico
and
Castagnaro
. A scant knowledge of the language suggests these names refer, respectively, to women, the spectacular and chestnuts; you need only look at the fruit to understand the names. I also learn that misshapen fruit is called
meraviglia
, marvel. This name delights me, particularly as these mistakes of nature are given pride of place on tables and sideboards because they are thought to have magical properties.

Cabris, Monday 7 December 2009

A pear, or the outline of a perfume

I have returned to the workshop and my beloved phials. While I was away, I left experimental formulae on the theme of pears to be weighed up later. The young green top notes are very appealing. To the pear theme, I’ve added floral notes but without the heavy, narcotic characteristics typical of white flowers, and a chypre accord, a composition of patchouli with woody and labdanum notes, which should play like background music as the perfume develops. As I write these few words to describe the perfume, I realize I’m the only person who can conjure its smell mentally. In this diary I could easily reveal various elements that composers of perfumes would be able to decipher. Even so, giving away the composition of the outline I have in mind would not make readers any the wiser about where I’m going with it. My ideas are evolving constantly. I don’t know in advance what might be corrected by experiences from the past, nor what those of the future have in store for me.

To the uninitiated, discovering a perfume from a list of its raw materials is like reading the ingredients for a cooking recipe with all the frustration of not being able to imagine what the dish would taste like; images seem to create more of an echo in us and speak more fully to our senses. Marketing people understand this perfectly. Seeing advertisements has never meant
being able to smell the perfume; at the very best it elicits a
desire
to smell it: such are the strengths and limitations of the exercise.

Paris, Friday 18 December 2009

The Pygmalion myth

I have been invited by one of the foremost producers of fine perfumes to gain an insight into market trends. Although I never try to analyze the market, drawing information from the street and the Métro as to which perfumes are worn, I am curious to see this study. The presentation about trends is based around a classification of perfumes. Images of the bottles are projected on to a screen while test blotters impregnated with each perfume are passed beneath our noses. I’m shocked, saddened and disgusted. Too many perfumes are alike, merely variations of models that sell well.

The choice of perfumes depends on marketing directors; they make a selection that is then tested on consumers alongside one or two perfumes already on the market. These act as benchmarks, and facilitate a comparative analysis of preferences.

This sort of procedure dates back to the 1970s when the commercialization of perfumes ceased to be governed by a company chairman’s choice and was entrusted to a marketing team, who first assessed ‘market needs.’ Today product managers or project managers not only advise perfumers about what to make, they also want to choose the people who will execute their concepts. By choosing young perfumers with whom they can identify, they turn themselves into Pygmalions. Convinced they have ‘good noses’ while paradoxically relying on market trials, they exhaust the abilities of these young creators by asking
for more and more daily samples and not respecting the time needed for evaluation and reflection.