The Diary of a Nose Read online

  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.

  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 fee
ls 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 7th 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.