The Diary of a Nose (4 page)

In the background, the sky, a landscape, a hazy world of smooth uninterrupted lines. The pile of cushions and its juxtaposition of green, yellow, pink, mauve and blue are allegories on the theme of harmony. They emanate a cheerful seductiveness that I would like to recreate in the women’s perfume I have in draft form, the one that takes an evocation of pears as its starting point.

Cabris, Monday 8 February 2010

Mint again

My usual suppliers have offered me different forms of mint obtained using a variety of distillation and extraction processes. Essences, because they are distilled using water vapor at more than one hundred degrees Celsius, lose the green notes of crushed leaves. Absolutes, which are made using dried vegetation (the inclusion of water being unsuitable for this type of extraction), smell like straw or cut hay, which is not right for this project. Extractions using carbon dioxide, because they are produced at extremely low temperatures, come closer to the smell of freshly chopped mint. Among those on offer, I am drawn to one product but, because it contains a lot of chlorophyll – a pigment that is spinach green in color – it will need work to remove the color. For, although I would like a ‘green smell,’ I want a colorless perfume, in order to have an element of surprise.

For the Hermessence perfume
Brin de Réglisse
, I decided to combine the liquorice (‘réglisse’) of the name with lavender. I used essence of lavender and intervened to modify its composition, which includes several hundred different molecules, so that I could have an ingredient in keeping with the idea I so coveted. In this instance, the composition of mint essences is not very complex, and I have no wish to modify it: the major constituents and those responsible for the smell are principally carvone or menthol. Carvone is the flavor of minty chewing-gum, and menthol that of minty sweets.

Alongside this research into ingredients, I am experimenting with new accords using the samples at my disposal. I am playing on the contrast between the cool greenness of mint and the dark suffocating qualities of patchouli: a surprising combination.

Cabris, Friday 12 February 2010

Anguish

I am no stranger to ill-defined, unexplained feelings of anguish. I never invited them in. They appeared out of nowhere when I was twenty years old or a little less. I loathed them, then accepted them. Much later, it was this anguish that led me to understand that ‘the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible’. This quote from Oscar Wilde, which is both simple and complex, shook me so profoundly when I first read it that I felt I had completely lost my footing for a few seconds. It was as if I were on the edge of a gaping abyss, empty of all knowledge; then this fleeting sensation dazzled me, it seemed like proof of an undeniable alertness, affirming my existence.

Anguish always surges up without warning, but I recognize the early signs. When I am composing perfumes, it most often appears when I start a project. So it is not unusual for me to feel choked with anguish when I read the first lines of a formula I have just written. This formula, reduced to just a few lines, produces a panicky feeling that I will run out of ideas, run dry. In fact, I feel an animal need to tackle each creation with a ‘pared down’ response (if that does not sound too presumptuous), as if stripped of facile automatic responses, of the reflexes that clutter up creators’ lives, particularly more experienced creators. Sometimes those first lines are the product of pure impulse, a short-lived urge, but more often than not they are dictated by an
attempt to transcribe a more extensive and elaborate project. In these instances, they represent a frightening promise that I have to flesh out with my intentions and desires.

A quite different anguish grips me when I am creating one of the Garden perfumes. The fragrance I am composing does not start with an abstract idea that I have to bring to life, but with the place I am in and the premise I choose. Choosing – from a whole palette of possibilities – a smell or smells to act as signals means setting off down a path that I will have to mark out for myself; the anguish is relative to the choice. It entails sleepless nights. Some might say that the choice is personal and does not work for everyone, and I readily accept that. And yet I believe that international exchanges are globalizing tastes and therefore our sense of smell, so that we share common predilections despite a few personal aversions.

Once I have chosen the path the anguish disappears, and then I am entirely wrapped up in the pleasure of bringing the perfume into being, of writing it. Sometimes it does return, though, when the time comes to make the final choice.

Moscow, Monday 15 February 2010

‘The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence’

I am in Moscow for the launch of
Voyage d’Hermès
. I am sitting in a hotel lounge and ask the waitress for some black tea. She offers me a selection from Hédiard. In the same standard of hotel in Paris, I would have been served Kusmi Tea, a Russian brand. Fernand Braudel was right when he wrote that capitalism was ‘a game of exchanges.’

Moscow, Tuesday 16 February 2010

A gift

I am interviewed by a journalist who asks me whether I have a gift. I understand that to mean a talent, an innate ability, a natural advantage. I reply that I couldn’t define talent, let alone what is innate or natural, so no, I don’t have a gift.

I chose perfume by chance, or rather perfume chose me. I could have been a plumber, a painter or a musician, but no one around me was a painter, a plumber or a musician. That is not completely true: my uncle, my mother’s brother, was a music teacher in a state school. I remember that when I was a teenager, and we were living in Nice, I went to him once a week for a few months to have a go at playing the piano, using Ernest Van de Velde’s
Rose Essor Piano Method
. I can still see the colors and art-deco graphics on its cover. But no one at home took any interest in my progress. It was a different story when, at sixteen, I went to Antoine Chiris’s company in Grasse, a factory that was the official supplier to the famous house of Coty for the first half of the twentieth century.

I went into perfumery as if into a religion, joining a firm that occupied the premises of a former Capuchin monastery. My habit was blue overalls. It was only later that I wore a white coat. Then that in turn was put away in the early 1970s: May ’68 had come and gone. There I met men and women who took an interest in me from the start, and who steered my first steps; with this support, I made progress. I was interested in everything,
distillation, extraction, research, manufacturing, analysis, buying. But I was not at all drawn to accounting; finance felt out of reach and far too serious. It was the beginning of an apprenticeship, a tentative process of exploration – one I still use today: that is how I became who I am. At the age of nineteen I left Chiris to fulfill my duties in military service. I had no idea what I would be. I just hoped that, when I came back, there would be a place for me in this world that I loved.

Since then, the Chiris facilities have been destroyed and their old premises now house the local law courts.

Cabris, Friday 19 February 2010

‘Nebulous’

I am home from Paris. I am listening to France Inter on the radio and a word suddenly catches my attention: ‘nebulous,’ spoken by a young writer who has been asked whether he is planning another novel. He replies, ‘I have just one page, there’s an idea there; it’s nebulous, but it’s all I need.’

Later in the evening, I open the book I am currently reading at page 141. As I turn the page I come across the word ‘nebulous.’ The word is following me. Nebulous is the idea I have in mind for the women’s perfume I have started work on. I know only that I want something floral, fruity and appetizing. Appetizing but not edible. Edible smells are lazy; something appetizing is exciting. ‘Appetizing’ is a word sufficiently evocative to be turned into a smell.

Cabris, Sunday 21 February 2010

Gardens

I am thinking back to a question I was asked, at the ‘Creation’ seminar at the Paris School of Management, about whether I needed to visit the actual location when I was creating the Garden perfumes.

When Hermès gave me the option, I remember saying it was not absolutely essential, a description of Leïla Menchari’s garden would be enough to fire my imagination. I thought my talent alone could identify the olfactory premise for the perfume that would become
Un Jardin en Méditerranée
.

In the end, the company insisted I went there in person. I accepted. Before leaving I read nothing about the place so that I could tackle the project with an open mind. All the same, I expect I took a Giono paperback with me on this adventure as a talisman, to help ward off my usual feelings of anguish. I was given a kindly welcome. The garden I discovered was nothing like the one I had imagined sitting at my desk. Just as people take a box of watercolors with them to make sketches, I arrived with a wealth of smells in mind – North African flowers, fruits and woods – but no knowledge at all of the concept, layout or personality of an Arab garden.

Beneath the cedars, eucalyptuses and palm trees shading long alleys, all my senses were bombarded. I was lost. My imagination was suddenly under assault and was soon taken prisoner by commonplace responses, banalities that I had to forget so
that I could learn to see the play of light and shade, smell the fig tree and the sea daffodils, listen to the song of water features and birds, touch sand and water. It took me three days to find and choose the premise for the perfume, to find the best way of expressing the shadiness and cool of that unique place.

Cabris, Monday 22 February 2010

Mint, still

Discoloring mint by extraction using carbon dioxide gives a clear, pale yellow liquid just as I wanted, but accentuates the cut hay/dry grass aspect that I don’t want in this composition. I decide to work using only traditional essences of mint, favoring spearmint and pennyroyal, whose unrefined smell I find enchanting. I put to one side the spearmint-patchouli harmony for a future eau de toilette: it is a dark harmony better suited to that form of interpretation, whereas a cologne should be more vivacious and afford instant pleasure.

I could work on a harmony of mint-petitgrain-bergamot-lemon, with the aim of achieving a classic cologne, but that construction lacks inventiveness and feels too banal to me. I try a new harmony by altering the proportion and intensity of each component. The blackcurrant base and the spearmint, which I use in abundance, have some common notes of equal intensity that harmonize well. Triplal is a powerful molecule with a hard, raw, green smell that needs handling with care. This compound gives an impression of cut leaves. By overdosing it in this composition, it partners and masks the spearmint’s ‘chewing gum’ effect.

The blackcurrant-spearmint harmony was first used in
Eau d’orange verte
for Hermès, but at the time it was just one of the characteristics in this chypre composition, and not its dominant
character. Here, the idea is to bypass the citrus elements so that there is simply a startling impression of freshly cut mint: the first drafts are interesting.

Cabris, Thursday 25 February 2010

Fashion

I do not consult the stars but readily turn to the nebulous blogosphere. There are a good many blogs that consider perfume to be an emanation of fashion, and yet the principles governing these two universes are not fundamentally alike. Perfumes and fashion may go hand in glove and may appear together in public but they do not live together. The timetable for couturiers’ collections does not follow the same rhythm as the development of a perfume. Perfume, in fact, avoids the short-lived fate of fashion. Fashion is, by definition, something that will be out of fashion. Because hundreds of perfumes are launched every year, it would be easy to see this as a fashion phenomenon, for only a rare few stand the test of time. Once bought, most perfumes are used up and forgotten. Only perfumes that emancipate themselves from this constraint become ‘fashionable.’ With perfumes, time creates the fashion and engenders inclinations, and it does this despite the efforts of the Escada brand, which has opened up the way for short-lived perfumes by offering an olfactory novelty every year.

This free association between perfume and fashion serves to stabilize a brand’s name, its signature. Perfume acts as a counterpoint to the transient enslavement exerted by fashion.

Cabris, Friday 26 February 2010

Trend

The ogre economy needs feeding. It has a fierce appetite and refuses to tighten its belt. And yet it has no curiosity, is not attracted by novelty, and always wants to be served the same dish: trend. Its relationship with trend is both obvious and a paradox. In order to accept it, the ogre economy needs to be told the same stories – stories about ogres – over and over again, and to have trend pumped up with talk and magic rites and tests. Trend, on the other hand, likes to have competitions laid on, beauty competitions, all sorts of competitions, because it wants to be accepted. It has to be referred to humorously, even ironically – it’s not afraid of self-mockery. It surrounds itself with groupies and bloggers and chatter.

Tocqueville anticipated the fact that, in a democracy, society would tend towards unified tastes. Trend may be the price we have to pay for democracy.

Hong Kong, Wednesday 3 March 2010

A bowl

A bowl with a slightly trapezoid base and no embellishments; the concept of a pair of hands cupped to hold water. A serene shape, stripped of any opinion, without an author. A bowl with a pure design, drawn with one stroke of the pen. It is white in color, white as snow in sunlight, as a cloud in a clear sky, limpid and luminous. It stands out from the other bowls in the glass display case. Its outline and color are accomplished, and give me a feeling of elation. An object, as the painter Chardin wrote, ‘has an inner truth – I would say a resonance too – that we reach only through feelings.’ The description says simply: ‘Bowl, eggshell porcelain, Ming dynasty, XVth century, Museum of Art, Hong Kong.’ ‘Bowl’ – the practical implications of the object remind me of Kant, to whom beauty could exist only outside usefulness. According to him, an object cannot be described as beautiful. Every piece of pottery exhibited in this museum is a refutation of that very Western judgment. From terracotta to ceramics, in China as in Japan, pottery has always had an influential role in art and craftsmanship; so much so that some pieces have been elevated to the ranks of ‘national treasures.’ This bowl in itself is a definition of beauty.