The Diary of a Nose (3 page)

I like to think that every perfumer considers his or her work an art, and that a desire to create constitutes the motive for this work, because the perfumer is the first to appreciate the emotional investment he or she has put into the project. Unless freely chosen, collaborations with other perfumers can only do the utmost harm to a project. Even if the exchange itself is beneficial, the accumulation of ideas is an utter negation of any creative process. Dividing up the personal investment in order to lighten the emotional load that goes into a project means misunderstanding the techniques used and developed by a perfumer in response to a commission. This sort of attitude and process cannot fail to engender frustrations which will later become difficult to manage.

Cabris, Tuesday 5 January 2010

Mint

The launch of the 2009 annual theme for the House of Hermès, ‘L’Échappée belle’,
²
took place in April at the Rungis market, the largest fresh-produce market in the world. In the early hours of the morning, as guests emerged from the covered market, they were asked to fill a basket with fruits and vegetables of their choice. I remember putting bunches of fresh mint in my basket. The smell acted effectively as a joyful and soothing energizer. I still remember in great detail this ‘olfactory encounter,’ which I recorded in my moleskin notebook, and have now decided to start work on it.

The theme may be self-evident, but its interpretation is adventurous. There are many essences of mint in perfumery – spearmint, peppermint, pennyroyal, field mint, bergamot mint – which are also used for flavoring sweets, toothpaste, chewing gum and sometimes as fragrance in household products; these different applications depreciate the emotional impact of smelling mint. The same is true of the smell of lemons, which was first used as a fragrance for dishwashing liquid in the United States in 1969 on a product called Joy, and went on to become an olfactory symbol for cleaning products. Since then, lemon has only rarely been used in eaux de toilette. In order to transform
mint into a perfume, I therefore need to find a new setting for this smell, which for me conjures up streams and fountains.

Eaux de toilette on the theme of mint do exist or have existed, for example Jacques Fath’s classic
Green Water
and, more recently, Heeley’s
Menthe Fraîche
in the United States, but none of them corresponds with the idea I have in mind. My trials begin with an accord of iris and spearmint: it is a remarkable and pleasing contrast, but that is its only quality. On the fifth trial I abandon this line of research. I set off again with an accord of tea and spearmint: the harmony works, but it is too reminiscent of herbal teas. Eight, nine, ten, eleven trials; the mint-tea theme will not be followed up.

Paris, Thursday 14 January 2010

Classic

Late in the afternoon, I drop into the FNAC store to buy a few Maigret paperbacks for a handful of euros each – a pleasant evening lies ahead. I take the opportunity to buy a bilingual (Italian–French) version of Collodi’s
Adventures of Pinocchio
, a choice guided by my wish to start learning Italian again. I usually leaf through the books I buy, homing in on sentences at random. Collodi’s book is a classic, as Italo Calvino defined the term: ‘A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.’ This definition is one I adopted as my own a long time ago. It reminds me of a particular incident which must date back – although I cannot place it exactly because I don’t have a chronological recall of the events in my life – to the time when I was starting to earn a little money as a young perfumer. I had treated myself to a watercolor by a young American painter called Betsy N., whose husband was a family friend. The watercolor was a floral composition in a Japanese-inspired style that I found delicate and cheerful. Pleased with my purchase, I had it framed and hung it somewhere that I passed frequently so that it could intoxicate me as often as possible. After a fortnight, the watercolor emptied itself of all content. It no longer spoke to me. Brought back down to earth and nursing my wounded pride, I stopped looking at it. In the end I took it down and forgot about it. How could I have been so utterly seduced and so rapidly tired? How could I ensure my
perfumes weren’t reduced to a single reading like that? At the time, I was starting to use ‘working drawings’ to map out the complexities of my formulae, and I turned repeatedly to Edmond Roudnitska’s
L’Esthétique en question
for inspiration and guidance.

Paris, Sunday 17 January 2010

Dizzying lists

Under the direction of Umberto Eco, the Louvre Museum put on a modest exhibition on the theme of lists – an exhibition which, in relation to the whole museum, was about the size of a cupboard. It was called
Mille e tre
(a thousand and three), in reference to Don Giovanni’s servant Leporello singing of his master’s exploits in Mozart’s opera.

Computers are tremendous prescribers of lists, so much so that they provide lists of lists; having all that knowledge of the world at your fingertips is dizzying. Oddly, though, lists are reassuring. We become aware of this if we scrupulously follow a recipe, which is essentially a list of ingredients and actions; but if we give this ‘list’ too much importance, we leave no room for the imagination. For a perfumer, lists are part of everyday life: lists of usable materials, prices, banned substances, recommendations. The formula for a perfume also appears in the form of a list of raw materials to be weighed out in a specific order; however, unlike with a recipe, once this particular list has been established it tolerates no changes for fear of modifying the perfume. One of the lists that I find disturbing is the list classifying perfumes: the perfumes referred to have a date of birth, but no date of death; they sometimes appear followed by the word ‘obsolete’ – never ‘out of stock,’ which I would prefer.

Written out like this, the list of perfumes – some of which were created a century ago – does have some meaning: it shows
that, out of a hundred or so creations from one perfumer, only three or four perfumes go down in history. It can also be read as a lesson in humility.

Slowness

Two women are queuing to watch Jane Campion’s film
Bright Star
; one turns round and, seeing me in this mainly female crowd, she says: ‘This isn’t a film for men.’

‘Do you think there are different films for men and women?’ I reply.

‘It’s a slow film, men prefer action, results; they can’t take slowness.’

‘You should spend some time with different men.’

‘Tell me, do you think that beautiful stories should be told slowly and silently?’

‘I …’

The crowd starts moving again. This little exchange brings a smile to my face.

Paris, Monday 18 January 2010

Shazam

Shazam is a music recognition app for an iPhone that almost instantly supplies the user with the name of a song or piece of music. It’s an astonishing app but it does have its limitations – although they do nothing to detract from its technical prowess. This evening, while listening to some Brahms on the radio and not managing to name the piece being played, I seize on this app. My request fails. Shazam cannot help with my inquiry because the recording was made in front of an audience and doesn’t feature on any disc. No official track, no recognition. Shazam cannot accommodate approximation. Decoding by approximation is something we all do, all the time. When I walk through Paris, I obviously don’t know every street but I manage to locate where I am by using visual approximation, thanks to a shop, a monument, a distinctive building; or sometimes olfactory approximation, the smell of a
boulangerie
or a grocer’s shop. It is the same with odors that I come across in the street. At a distance, the trail of a smell feels familiar; I identify a form, and the closer I get, the more details I glean. In the end I place it, and sometimes name it. I do sometimes get it wrong if the perfume is ‘in the style of’ or a copy.

‘A wink of the nose’

I am reading
The Nose
, a short story by Nikolai Gogol. In this unusual comic tale, Major Kovalyov ‘finds’ his nose again on the 7
^th
of April, a date which fortuitously happens to be the one on which I was born.

Paris, Saturday 23 January 2010

Show

I only rarely take up the invitations I am sent to go to fashion shows. But I do particularly like the ones put on by my friend Véronique Nichanian. She likes the men she dresses. Her work is a combination of rigor and casualness. I can feel the pleasure she derives from different materials and the subtle interplay of colors. She likes grey, every kind of grey; I can’t think of a more delicate color or one more difficult to work with. Sometimes she plays on contrasts and ventures into audacious combinations with cardigans, shirts and jumpers in cadmium yellow, Prussian blue or poppy red.

Among the audience are a number of journalists who came to the launch of
Voyage d’Hermès
. They have some very flattering things to say about the perfume and find the exact words to describe what I wanted to express. Even though this is all I could wish for, it leaves me amazed. I may be susceptible to compliments, but I know that in the end it’s the general public who choose. For the hundred or so new perfumes launched every year, you have to wait six months after the first sales – the restocking period – to know whether a perfume has some chance of success.
Terre d’Hermès
is the fourth bestselling men’s fragrance in France, a great achievement for a company that does not have the promotional facilities of large cosmetics groups. I can’t explain this success, just as I can’t explain the lack of success of
Un Jardin après la Mousson
, which I believe is one of the
most beautiful floral compositions I have written. The financial rewards of a success are not an explanation, but a statement. As for any desire to find a simple explanation for success or failure, it derives from a wish to be blinded.

Paris, Tuesday 2 February 2010

Mœbius

For the launch of
Voyage d’Hermès
, we asked Jean Giraud, aka Mœbius, to do some drawings on the theme of travel for the new perfume’s press pack. It was a wonderful idea. Our modes of expression are different, but both encourage a meeting of minds. We get together at the offices on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. He’s a man who talks freely, full of humor, and we soon feel like partners thanks to a preoccupation we have in common: ‘a clear line.’ He tells me how, when he started out in cartoons, he loaded his pictures with detail, but as he grows older he is more and more inclined to use a clear line, which implies a perfectly distilled drawing, luminous, sharply distinguished colors and a spare linear narrative.

I explain that I have a similar approach, and ask him to smell the perfume. He smells it and can sense this intention. ‘It smells very good!’ he says. ‘It’s a relief being able to tell you that. I was worried I’d have to pay you compliments out of courtesy, and that would have bothered me.’

Cabris, Wednesday 3 February 2010

Naming

I receive a telephone call from the project manager concerning the naming of a new creation, a divertimento based around iris flowers, which will be available in shops in the autumn. The theme may seem banal, for it is often used by perfumers. I avoided this trap by working on the scent of the flowers whose fragrance is actually not well known, hovering between notes of roses, orange blossom and mandarin; a cool delicate perfume that is fragile and yet assertive.

Being a collector of Japanese engravings, I’m picturing images of irises in the floating world, such as the famous
Irises
folding screen by Ogata Korin. As an echo of this world, my garden blooms throughout May and June with white and blue irises, from snow white to feather white, from blue black to azure blue, with a few touches of pink. The two worlds interpenetrate each other and I cannot see, smell or touch an iris without my responses being affected by the interpretations of Japanese artists.

The names of all the Hermessence perfumes comprise the name of the raw material that is at the perfume’s origin and one other word that defines the spirit of the composition. The research is done by associating ideas, or occasionally raw materials. In this instance, juxtapositions with Japanese words seem appealing: iris
Kon’iro
, the second word denoting the color blue; iris
Kado
or ‘the path of flowers’; iris
Ukiyo-e
or ‘image of the floating world.’ The names iris
Hiroshige
or iris
Hokusai
cannot
be used; they have already been registered. A name is a sound that should resonate with all your senses; it is the first point of contact with the perfume. This is why it takes several months to choose one, particularly as the search for copyright registrations is international, and sometimes goes on forever.

Cabris, Saturday 6 February 2010

The Princess and the Pea

Pages two and three of the latest
Nouvel Observateur
carry the new advertising campaign from the House of Hermès on the theme of fairy tales.
The Princess and the Pea
, an Andersen tale, is the first picture in the series. In a full-page image, a young woman with braided hair and wearing a brightly colored silk scarf rests her head on a pile of cushions with multicolored designs whose perky invigorating shades remind me of sweet peas.