The Diary of a Nose (6 page)

Cabris, Wednesday 7 April 2010

Canons

Listening to Gérard Margeon setting himself the task of freeing wine from the canons of taste – canons that are continually exported and imitated, returning to us as an echo of themselves, standardized by other continents – made me think about perfumes and the history of perfumery.

Until the 1970s perfumes had to comply with standards dictated by bourgeois aesthetics and budgets inherited from the nineteenth century, following the rapid development of the chemicals industry. These standards were defined by the composition of a perfume, the olfactory family it belonged to and its concentration. The composition was determined by the inclusion and choice of accords of different notes: floral, woody, green, spiced, etc. The chief olfactory families were floral, oriental, chypre, citrus and fern. Perfume concentration was defined in terms of how the perfume was used. What is more, apprentice perfumers had to be familiar with some forty archetypes that represented the aesthetic canons of perfumery. By defining these rules, standards and aesthetic canons, perfumers were in possession of a repository of knowledge akin to an inheritance, a tradition and a national identity.

The only real innovations of the 1980s were the use of new products, be they chemical or natural, and a technique seen as revolutionary: the ‘headspace,’ which made it possible to analyze the smell of flowers in situ, although the resulting information
hardly made a convincing contribution in terms of creativity. Perfumery companies were becoming international and shifting from perfumery that had something to offer, to one that responded to demand; this globalized tastes. The rare few innovations likely to give the French market leaders something to think about came from the United States. They included the introduction of the smell of cleanliness, as well as the smell of prudishness, thanks to the widespread use of vaporizers, which were in some senses a natural consequence of prudery (a gesture made far away from the body, gadgetry substituted for the erotic). They also included a tendency to judge a perfume’s marketable value principally by its intensity and staying power.

It is difficult to classify a perfume nowadays. The raw materials used in perfumes, most of them chemical in origin, are moving away from references to ‘nature.’ The aesthetic approach to composition is no longer a question of adding different accords but a vision of a whole, which means perfumers can fully master its expression. Regrettably, a perfume’s performance – its diffusion and intensity – too often takes precedence over elegance, with the sole aim of making it more accessible and of gratifying an international clientele.

Commercially speaking, old perfumes are no longer venerated, only newcomers are considered. The ten bestsellers in France are recent perfumes, with the exception of
Chanel No. 5
, Guerlain’s
Shalimar
and Yves Saint Laurent’s
Opium
. Within the industry, the future does not really lie in discovering new fragrant
raw materials. On the pretext of increasingly strict legislation, of development costs and the countless compulsory safety checks, the budgets allocated to research have been reduced. Chemical manufacturers, who favor molecules with familiar smells that can be produced by the ton, contribute less and less to widening perfumers’ olfactory palette.

In order to endure,
haute
perfumery is therefore condemned to inventing new olfactory premises, a new style of writing, to redefining quality, to finding a new form of expression and a new way of behaving towards those who still believe in it and need it. It is only if it is able to meet these exacting requirements that the craft of composing perfumes will reclaim its full meaning and value.

Paris, Thursday 8 April 2010

Sweet peas

I am walking along the rue Royale. I stop by the window of the florist Lachaume. I have just spotted sweat peas in every color. I like their fragrance. I take out my mobile and call Anne, my assistant, to ask her to order some from Coquelicot, the florist in a village near Cabris.

Paris, Friday 9 April 2010

Leïla

Leïla Menchari is exhibiting window displays at the Institute of the Arab World – recognition for a profession that is both beautiful and futile, and one we need because it allows us to dream, which is very important. I first came across her displays on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in 1993, at a time when I was head perfumer for a German company. My office was opposite the house of Hermès and, four times a year, members of staff would go out into the street at the end of the afternoon to watch the curtain being raised on the main window display. Later, when I was taken on by Hermès, I met up with Leïla, whom I had first encountered in her garden at Hammamet, near Tunis. She encouraged me to look at and feel leather and silk goods, objects whose value owes everything to a deep knowledge of the raw material and to the precise, measured, repeated gestures of the craftsmen who work with them. Leïla knows the colors that bring them to life and the gestures that make them enchanting.

Paris, Saturday 10 April 2010

Beauty

I am making the most of this afternoon in Paris to see a Lucian Freud exhibition at the Pompidou Centre. I discovered his painting in 1995 at an exhibition at the Maeght Foundation that was dedicated to him and Francis Bacon. A large proportion of his work is devoted to nudes. The choice of life-size canvases makes them all the more immediate and alive. His models bear no relation to the aesthetic canons of ancient or classical beauty. They are like me; they are ordinary and, even though they may be disturbing at first glance, they eclipse themselves in favor of the painting itself; it is not the models that I see, but our bestiality and our humanity. Even if his work has a place in the tradition of figurative and realist painting, Lucian Freud is never one for seduction, illusion or appearances, either in his subject matter or with the colors he uses, and that fascinates me. Particularly as this sort of representation is diametrically opposed to my creative approach, which is enjoyable and seductive. And what if the enduring appeal that Lucian Freud’s work has for me were simply a feeling of love with no desire for possession?

Cabris, Wednesday 14, April 2010

The Princess and the Pea,
continued

This morning, waiting for me on the table that I use as a desk, are bunches of white sweet peas. I would have preferred them in bright acid colors: orange, pink, green, mauve and blue, but in terms of fragrance the white ones are preferable. The colors in the advertising campaign –
The Princess and the Pea –
reminded me, by association of ideas, of the colors of sweet peas, and, conversely, when I walked past Lachaume’s window display, the sweet peas reminded me of the advertising image: the smell of these flowers could become a possible theme, even if only a partial one, for a women’s perfume.

When sweet peas are gathered in a bunch, they remind me of the ruffles on flamenco dresses. A single flower on its own is slender and its petals have an organdie quality. They do not have a definite smell, but one that hovers between roses, orange blossom and Sweet Williams, with their hint of vanilla. I scribble down the seven components I think I will need to sketch the smell. One, two, three trials to balance the proportions, and I add a note of carnation to the fourth trial, and then go on to correct that too. The fifth trial feels right to me. I now have the outline of a fragrance with which to start a perfume.

SWEET PEA (trial 5)
phenyl ethyl alcohol	200
Paradisone®	180
hydroxycitronellal	50
rhodinol	30
acetyl isoeugenol	15
orange blossom (colorless absolute)	15
cis-3 hexenol	5
phenyl acetic aldehyde 50%	5
	500

To be smelled as a 5% solution in 85° Celsius alcohol.

Cabris, Thursday 15 April 2010

Green

My suppliers of raw materials visit me at regular intervals to show me products of chemical and natural origin. I enjoy dreaming a little with them. They know me, and know that I like to smell them diluted to weak concentrations, and that there is no need to come with demonstration formulae. On that particular subject, I remember one supplier who came to make a presentation and, intending to flatter me, had reproduced one of my creations and had substituted one of its components for a different component of his company’s own design. Although sincere and naïve in its intention, this irritated rather than touched me. Imagine a paint salesman coming to see you with a reproduction of one of your paintings, and trying to prove to you that his green is better than yours. I could understand if it were the color of a door, a wall or the front of a house, but not in a painting.

Today I am seeing the perfumer and the commercial representative from a particular company; they show me traditional products obtained using new extraction techniques, as well as an extract of nasturtium leaves and flowers. I find its green smell arresting and intriguing. I have been looking for new green notes for years. Of course, this absolute conjures up the green notes of nasturtium leaves, but also wasabi, horseradish, capers and bluebells. Its green smell is candid and unlike any other, it has something to say for itself. I do not choose a raw material only
on the grounds of the quality of the smell, but also for the possible uses I anticipate for it.

Green is the only color that makes sense as a smell. In my collection of raw materials, which is not arranged in a discriminating way with better ones and worse ones, I have different kinds of green: gentle, harsh, smooth, sharp, dense, etc. I have greens that smell of beans, fig leaves, syringa, ivy, seaweed, elder, boxwood, hyacinths, lawns and peas. Although I may not know of yellow, red or blue smells, I do know the characteristic smells of white and yellow flowers and those of red fruits.

Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, Wednesday 21 April 2010

The classics

We are all here to define our vision and the strategy we want to put in place for the years ahead. One of the issues we discuss is our old perfumes. Hermès is one of the rare perfumers to have continued selling its entire range of perfumes since they were created. The first,
Eau d’Hermès
, was composed by Edmond Roudnitska in 1951. I feel a particular affection for this perfume. It represents the early beginnings of a man who was to put his stamp as a perfumer on the third quarter of the twentieth century. Its formula is complex, unstructured, but contains a jumble of all the accords and ideas to follow. Five years later he composed
Diorissimo
for Dior, an archetype of refinement and a paragon of the smell of lily of the valley. Lily of the valley may be Christian Dior’s favorite flower, but I can only explain Edmond Roudnitska’s dramatic change in the way he composed perfume by the fact that he now worked for himself. He had left the De Laire firm, which specialized in making synthesized products, to set up on his own with his wife, and to found the company Art et Parfum.

The ‘classics’ – a lovely way of describing our oldest perfumes – represent only a small percentage of our sales, with the exception of
Calèche
(the Hermès logo is in fact a
calèche –
a horse and carriage). The economy and the retail strategy favor the young, and they have no use for the older perfumes. I am shocked by this because they are all beautiful perfumes. All the same, I do
not feel that the industry has a duty of memory which would mean that, a century from now,
Terre d’Hermès
should necessarily still be for sale – the International Museum of Perfumery in Grasse has that task – but it has a duty of respect. I like the thought that a man or a woman can choose a perfume at twenty and is still able to buy it when he or she is sixty, having indulged in a few infidelities.

Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, Thursday 22 April 2010

Craft

In the space of five years every single person involved in developing the perfume collections has been replaced. These people, with whom I shared a vision, and who were in charge of our work strategy, have all left their jobs. I find this disconcerting. Within a company employees don’t stay long in a particular job. It is true that a position can, by its nature, foster a need for change because, after a while and despite the variety of the work, tasks become repetitive, producing a feeling of boredom and a loss of interest.

Apart from the economic problems relating to salaries, changes produced by the constant remixing of personalities are probably a simple way of taking a fresh look at things. Without wishing to negate this, I do think that such a quasi-quantitative vision should be replaced by a more qualitative approach based on improving the value of the job; based, in other words, on apprenticeship and skill development.