The Diary of a Nose Read online

  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.

  As a perfumer, I do not have an actual job, but I practice a craft, one that involves knowledge, know-how and skill. And yet that in itself is not enough: in order to continue to exist and to practice my craft, I have to keep re-inventing it and not just repeat any old recipes.

  Unlike a ‘proper’ job, which is quantifiable, a craft is always extending its field of operations, pushing the boundaries of the craftsman’s abilities ever further. Inventing means renewing, growing.

  Cabris, Tuesday 27 April 2010

  Iris Ukiyoé

  The name of the new Hermessence has been chosen. Having hesitated for a long time between Iris Ukiyo and Iris Ukiyoé, I chose the latter. The word ‘ukiyo’ means ‘the floating world’, an aspect of Buddhist philosophy that invites us to meditate on the poignant beauty of fragile things. It teaches us that the world is constantly changing, ephemeral, evanescent, and resists any attempt to model it. This word ‘ukiyo’ provides an echo of my vision of the perfume; the additional ‘é’ implies a pictorial expression of this world and refers more specifically to Japanese engravings. Here, the expression is olfactory. These engravings attract our attention and awaken our curiosity because they depict subjects drawn from daily life as the seasons go by: flowers, landscapes and journeys – such as Hiroshige’s Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (the route connecting Kyoto, the imperial capital, to Tokyo, the shogun capital). The same subjects, points of view, blocks of solid color and successive layers to suggest perspective, and the same rhythm in the composition itself, were used by painters in the late nineteenth century. I am very interested in painted screens, particularly those representing The Tale of Genji. A number of them narrate the lives of noblemen. They have a geometric composition, gilded enclosures and clouds separating and organizing men and women’s daily leisure pursuits. The absence of roofs enables viewers to see right inside their homes and to have access to the intimate details of a culture with an acute sense of propriety, much influenced by the arts.

  Corso di italiano per stranieri

  Over the last few months, I have started studying Italian again, not with a view to using it professionally, but for the pleasure. The pleasure of putting myself in a position of ignorance and learning; learning a language, or any other thing, means opening yourself up to the world once more; it is also a return to humility.

  I really like my young Italian teacher. He teaches in a private school in Nice, and speaks several languages including French, English and Spanish. Every Tuesday afternoon, he takes the bus to Grasse from the bus station in Nice, changes at Cabris and walks two kilometers to my workshop. It takes him nearly three hours – the same distance usually takes less than an hour by car. It is not so much the distance that matters as the journey itself. He does not complain about the wasted time. He takes pleasure in looking at the scenery, at sitting back and being driven. He reads and sometimes marks his pupils’ work. This trick of calmly and contentedly apprehending time strikes me as altogether delightful and enviable.

  The two hours we spend together are intensive and require an effort of concentration on my part. ‘Luckily,’ the teacher says, ‘you have a musical ear.’ I remember sounds, find it quite easy to understand what he says to me and to reproduce words correctly. The most difficult thing for me is listening to recorded conversations. Because it is impossible to interrupt them; I have to listen to these dialogues through to the end before trying to repeat the snatches I have understood.

  In the early weeks, unable to practice because of my busy schedule, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of dissatisfaction and guilt. Until the day when I realized there was no need to feel guilty and that I should give in to the thrill of rediscovery. No school marks, no exams looming, just the pure pleasure of wandering through this language I so love, in the same way that I stroll along the path of various perfumes I am planning.

  Late April, the month belongs to lily of the valley. It looks as if I am going to settle on the premise for a project, one I have been working on for several years, called Fleur de porcelaine.

  Cabris, Thursday 29 April 2010

  Evaluation

  ‘You don’t smell things the way we do!’ How often have I heard that during perfume evaluations! Taken at face value, these words could mean that I am unique, that my nasal appendage is out of the ordinary; and I could find myself hauled up to the summit, alone. But I could also view this pronouncement as a humiliation, a rejection: ‘You’re different, you don’t belong in our world; how could you judge things the way we do?’

  No, I don’t smell things the way you do. With the passing years, for the sake of perfumes and for them alone, I have developed an analytical, methodical and distant nose, and, although my curiosity may still be fierce and acute, I long ago stopped feeling infatuated with a new discovery. I envy the emotion an enthusiast experiences when he smells a perfume for the first time, using words of love that I wish I could come up with again.

  I do not expect technical comments from an evaluation, nor for the perfume to be positioned in terms of the market; I mostly hope for observations. I wait for people to appropriate the perfume, to experience it, judge it and get the feel of it without thinking about the aims of the project, and to describe it as a perfume lover would – one who responds to his actual experience and describes his pleasure or displeasure.

  Cabris, Friday 30 April 2010

  Féminin H

  My drafts for a perfume on the theme of pears have been waiting on the table for two months now. I smell the last trial and rediscover the smell I so liked. I ask my assistant for a ‘fresh’ solution of the concentrate that she keeps in a cupboard, away from the light. When the sample is diluted it has a hard, harsh smell. It will need to spend a long period of maturation steeped in alcohol to achieve the rounded notes of pears.

  What it says is appetizing, crisp, seductive but a little cold. So I modify the pear accord to give it a juicier feel, and I highlight the perfume’s sensuality by intensifying the little trill of chypre. I choose one of the trials and ask for a half-liter to be put aside to mature.

  The painter Cézanne said to Pissaro: ‘With just an apple, I want to amaze all of Paris.’ There is a bit of that ambition in what I am doing: I want to surprise and amaze with an everyday smell.

  Cabris, Saturday 1 May 2010

  Perfection

  I am with Jane, an American whose heart belongs in part to France, and we are talking about perfection.

  ‘Can you achieve perfection in your work?’

  ‘I think so, although I constantly question it.’

  ‘How would you describe perfection?’

  ‘I can’t give you a definition. What I can say is that Christian culture sets up perfection as a goal to aim for, while at the same time introducing a notion of struggle and unattainability into this aspiration, because, to Christians, God alone can embody and represent true perfection.’

  ‘I find that disturbing.’

  ‘In the West, Christian culture clearly permeates views, and influences the way people see and judge things. In Chinese or Japanese culture, perfection exists, it is also a goal to aim for, but the aspiration isn’t unattainable and isn’t tainted by a sense of guilt. Buildings, paintings, sculptures
and pieces of pottery are recognized as “national treasures” when they represent perfection. People, particularly artists and craftsmen with unusual skills, can also be described as “living national treasures.” France may also describe works exhibited in its museums as “national treasures,” but the term refers only to their value.’

  Cabris, Friday 7 May 2010

  ‘Craftsman and Artist’

  Hermès is an establishment whose heart beats to the rhythm of its ‘podiums.’ Twice a year, in January and July, all the creative departments present their spring-summer and autumn-winter collections to a gathering of its own chairmen, directors, designers, craftsmen and artists, and to the world as a whole. July is nearly here, and I am being asked to write the text for next year’s catalogue on the theme of ‘Craftsman and Artist.’

  Craftsman, artist: I have never managed to settle for one or other of these definitions for myself. I feel like a craftsman when I am completely wrapped up in making a perfume; I feel like an artist when I imagine the perfume I need to make. In fact, I constantly juggle with the two standpoints. If perfume is first and foremost a creation of the mind, it cannot actually be created without the mastery of true skill.

  When I am creating fragrances for the Cologne collection, I am very much the craftsman: the raw material gives the perfume its meaning, even when I twist its characteristics by omitting citrus essences, which are traditionally indispensable to this form of expression. It was in this spirit that I constructed Eau de gentiane blanche around white musk – the name given to synthetic musk – by substituting the age-old olfactory signs for hygiene and cleanliness that are citrus fruits with those of today: white musks.