The Diary of a Nose Read online

  In the late 1950s my mother wore Madame Rochas. Judging this perfume today, I would say it is a lovely, slightly quaint construction of florals and amber; but the image that has stayed with me is that it smelled ‘too much’ of perfume. This created a distance and elicited respect. Sometimes I dared to open the bottle secretly in the bathroom and I discovered a sweet generous smell of faded roses and old vanilla paper. It intrigued me and helped sustain the reassuring portrait I had of a woman of bourgeois elegance, who never changed her perfume. I could not imagine her wearing another, nor allow her to do so: my mother would no longer have been my mother.

  Olfactory legacies are often acquired involuntarily. For example, in the summer my paternal grandmother used to offer to help pick the crop of flowers for her neighbors, who were horticulturalists. I sometimes went with her, and spent the morning playing between rows of jasmine. I was safe in that world of flower pickers. Especially as, although I was as lazy as the cicada in La Fontaine’s fable, they were more generous than the ant:5 at the end of the morning, they each laid a handful of flowers in my basket. This meant I need not lose face when I went up to the owner, who had a notebook in which he kept a daily tally of the flowers picked; the pickers were paid at the end of the month. Since then I have not found a more sensual scent than that of bare arms on which the smell of sweat is mingled with that of jasmine flowers. In fact, I was learning the smell of perfumes and the smell of women at the same time. And leaving childhood behind without realizing it.

  After a three-year stint as an unskilled worker for Antoine

  Chiris, I went to Givaudan as a laboratory assistant in the late 1960s. My job consisted of weighing out formulae for three perfumers, which meant I learned the different ways of writing a formula for a perfume. There were formulae involving several dozen components as well as bases (combinations of a dozen raw materials) and subformulae (formulae within the new formula, which could themselves include bases), and these sometimes took a couple of days to prepare; and there were those that comprised some fifty components and just a few bases. I soon decided which I preferred: particularly as the handwriting in the complex formulae was so small and cramped, and so laborious to read, that it made the weighing-out process take even longer.

  Later, when I was starting out as a student of perfumery, my father bequeathed me two files and a box, rather like a shoe box, full of formulae. He had put a great deal of care into preparing them before giving them to me. Each formula was typed out on white paper, arranged in alphabetical order and numbered. A novice in the trade, I viewed this store of knowledge as a treasure trove; the names – Rose Tea, Opopanax, Amber Moss, Quelques Fleurs – may well have been evocative, but the formulae meant nothing to me. Yes, I could deduce their complexity, but I could not read them, even less imagine them as smells. To a young man of the 1968 generation, these formulae belonged to the past, a past I wanted to break away from as everyone was doing at the time. I have never reread them; they live in a plastic storage box. Nowadays I have a different experience when I read old books of perfume formulae, devised from the late nineteenth century up to the present day. And it is one of my dreams that they will one day be studied and made public, to show that perfume is the result of complex intellectual activity, work involving the mind, and not some haphazard combination of smells.

  Cabris, Tuesday 8 June 2010

  Afternoon visitors

  I have agreed to spend a few hours talking with three young perfumers. I am both delighted and apprehensive. My apprehension is because I always feel uncomfortable criticizing another perfumer’s work. I cannot do it without projecting my own vision, when I should be helping them express their own. I do not know whether my visitors are bringing any perfumes they have created. They arrive on time, and before we sit down I give them a tour of the laboratory. I imagine they feel the same degree of curiosity as mine when I first visited Edmond Roudnitska’s office; I remember analyzing every last detail of the place in order to understand the man and his perfumes. We come back into the living room, which acts as an office. They ask me a lot of questions about how I work, and my relationship with the marketing and evaluation departments. I tell them that here the marketing department is called ‘the perfume collections development department,’ and has no decision-making power in the choice of perfumes. As for an evaluating department assessing creations in terms of the market, there is none. Willing though I am to hear everyone’s and anyone’s reactions and to know other people’s opinions, I alone can judge my creations. My visitors say they noticed perfumes from different companies in my fridge, and ask what I need these for. I explain that they are mainly there as historical benchmarks of quality, below which I must not and would not want to fall. They have aesthetic dimensions that I value: sillage, longevity, presence, diffusion, vigor and clarity.

  ‘I saw a bottle of Diorissimo.’

  ‘It’s one of my points of reference. No, it’s more than that; it’s among the creations I admire because it so accurately captures the difference between a smell and a perfume. Its starting point is the smell of lily of the valley. The end point for a composer of perfumes is to transform a unique smell into a perfume. In this instance, nature provides a smell that our senses can decipher. Thanks to our training, we know how to reproduce it. So we have our theme, our idea; now we have to add something of ourselves: our own desires and – this is the most complex part – our personality. When I create a perfume, I extend it with a story. I think everyone should try it. We reveal a part of ourselves when we compose a perfume. Whether the story is written before, during or after the creation, it’s our story, and it supports the creative process, even though it only expresses a part of it.’

  They do not show me any perfumes. I thank them for this, explaining how awkward I feel when I have to smell and judge another perfumer’s work.

  Cabris, Wednesday 9 June 2010

  Memory

  I have been told that a journalist from Le Nouvel Observateur is going to call me tomorrow in connection with an article about memory. And to think I don’t trust my own memory even though I work with it!

  When I was an apprentice, I used to organize memorization competitions. The exercise consisted in smelling a dozen test blotters, each of which had been dipped into one of the primary scents in the collection. The winner was the person who could identify the raw material the fastest. We managed to commit a hundred smells to memory in this way, then two hundred, then a thousand, and we were proud of our ability. We could recognize them, but we did not know them. Putting a name to a smell is not all it takes to appreciate its character, its limitations and possibilities. With the determination of an ignoramus who wants to learn everything, know everything, control everything and measure everything, I filled whole notebooks on each of them. I classified smells by type, by family, in alphabetical order and in order of their performance. The act of writing definitely helped to reinforce my memory. Sometimes if I lose my way when I am searching for ideas, I trawl through these notebooks, but I very rarely find an answer. In spite of that, I still fill them out conscientiously.

  Because I constantly try to find new aspects to smells, they remain indistinct, their contours ill-defined. Smells are not like pieces of Lego that we can fit together to make a perfume, but insubstantial entities that I strive to render intelligible.

  Cabris, Thursday 10 June 2010

  ‘The smell object’

  I take the call from the journalist. I answer her questions and talk at length about the ways in which fragrant raw materials are used. Building a memory means giving olfactory contours to a smell or, to be more precise, managing to make the smell no longer merely something that can be appreciated with the senses but something that becomes an intelligible object, so that it can be used, manipulated and given direction.

  I have hundreds of primary scents at my disposal. Over time, I have reduced my collection to fewer than two hundred smells in order to pinpoint the ‘smell object’ as accurately as possible.
When I was starting out as a perfumer, smells were undefined, and I had only a meager, restricted vocabulary to describe them. By immersing myself in smells on a daily basis, my vocabulary has become more precise and extensive.

  Natural sources are complex. They have clearly defined, immutable contours which do not lend themselves to inventiveness, but they have an advantage that I put to good use: their ability to seduce, to envelop, to establish themselves clearly, and sometimes to be the basis for the perfume form I want to express.

  Synthetic sources are more interesting because, except in a few cases, their contours are not so defined and are therefore more versatile and better suited to manipulations, abstraction and creating illusions. For example, phenyl ethyl alcohol, a synthetic substance, can be used for every kind of floral note.

  This smell provides a consistency, a roundedness and a tranquility that are more important than the smell of roses with which it is associated. I only have to think of phenyl ethyl alcohol, or of any of the raw materials I use, for the smell to take shape in my thoughts. This is how I avoid classifications or terminology getting in the way of smells. When smell and thought are interchangeable, then I am a composer of perfumes.

  Cabris, Wednesday 16 June 2010

  Nasturtiums

  I would describe my feelings towards smells as friendship, and sometimes as an unpredictable infatuation that can veer into disappointment. When I smelled the extract of nasturtium leaves and flowers that I was given a few months ago, I was instantly filled with passion. I had been longing for some time for a lively, green smell with a distinctive character that would bring out the originality of a future idea. I set about using it in new accords and when putting the finishing touches to various projects. I felt that these accords and works in progress were flawed, but I put this down to other causes, not my use of the nasturtium concentrate. Passion blinds us, and that was the case here. Having left my trials out on the table for a few weeks to mature, I noticed that their flaws had become more pronounced and that they now had a vinegary smell, similar to that of pickled gherkins. I was forced to conclude that the nasturtiums were to blame. They disappeared from my trials and – with some regret but not without hope – I asked the supplier to look into the problem of their olfactory instability.

  Cabris, Wednesday 23 June 2010

  Patience

  This morning two irises the blue of a winter sky bloomed. They flowered for the space of a morning and I hope they will flower again next year. I have been waiting for them to open for a few days. I am very attached to them, even though their beauty is banal. What speaks to me and awes me is all that patience, the slow, sustained effort to achieve their opening once a year.

  To be honest, I know nothing about these irises, having brought them back from my travels when I was creating Un Jardin après la Mousson in 2007. When I was visiting the Kerala Hills, I remember stopping at a garden center. These places have nothing in common with our own, there is nothing exotic about them, no profusion, just a few local plants in pots, and in a barn, sheltered from the sun, a massive store of carefully categorized seeds for vegetables, flowers and medicinal plants. With a little patience and a few seeds sold by the gram, the Indians can create gardens. As I came out of the barn, I noticed a terrace edged with blue flowers that looked like irises, a variety I did not know. I asked a young Indian woman what they were called, and she was able to tell me. Intrigued, I asked her whether I could have one of the rhizomes; she hauled out a clump of irises and used a knife to cut away three rhizomes for me. Back at the hotel I wrapped them in toilet paper and slipped them into a plastic bag to keep them damp. When I arrived home, not knowing what sort of soil there was in Kerala, I put them in pots. Since then they have flowered every year in June.

  There are two trials in the refrigerator waiting for me to smell them. They will reach full maturity in a week. I have been working on this theme for several years now, and I feel as if the birth is now near, in other words the perfume has achieved the form I so wanted. Rather than a smell, what I am looking for in it is a texture, a consistency, and I want it to be unusual and self-evident. I have called my trials Narcisse bleu. I do not yet know which one I will put forward.

  Cabris, Wednesday 30 June 2010

  Resistance

  It is not the market that homogenizes olfactory premises, but what we offer it. Starting with this statement, I have begun a gradual process of resistance. So I fight against ‘uniform’ perfumery, the sort that trumpets its pleasantness, boasts about performance and strives to make its mark because, once normalized, it cannot go back to its roots or be reinvented.

  No demonstrations or outspoken tirades; I hope to establish a serene presence for perfume. As I see it, perfume whispers to our noses, speaks to us intimately, makes connections with our thoughts. In order to express this, I bend the market rules by breaking away from the women’s versus men’s dogma. I do not like the terms ‘unisex’ or ‘mixed’; usage does not define a genre. Which is why I make perfumes for sharing, novel-perfumes, novella-perfumes and poem-perfumes.

  Cabris, Thursday 1 July 2010

  Cost

  In response to market demand, I tend to formulate a perfume with materials that come at a high price, and using an important variable: concentration. I prefer quality over quantity, because I do not believe that excessive concentration in a perfume or longevity on the skin are necessarily proof of quality. I have met many women who cannot smell their own perfume, although my nose felt they had applied excessive amounts. I am all in favor of the notion of abundance, plenty and richness being a perfume’s aesthetic expression, but when its olfactory performance – its diffusion and staying power – is the ‘plus point,’ then its performance in other terms is inevitably poor.

  Cabris, Friday 2 July 2010

  Launch

  For the launch of Iris Ukiyoé, we have invited a few journalists to the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. I am delighted with this opportunity to introduce a perfume in such a setting. It gives me a chance to talk about my interest in Japanese culture and its influence on Western culture to this day. I mention the concepts of fullness and emptiness. Fullness, which is so dear to the West where the subject of a painting fills the entire canvas, leaving little room for individual imagination, where the eye is led from left to right and the idea of the work, once grasped, is fixed for all eternity. Emptiness, which is valued in Japanese art, where the subject floats and dissolves into and on the surface of the paper, leaving gaps and spaces for individual projection, in which artists celebrate nature, life, the seasons and other forms of eternity.

  I talk about the different mindsets of painting with oils, or water-based inks; about oil in the West, about working with a colored substance, its richness, the feel of it, its excess and density; and about water for Japan, about impregnating the paper, black ink in all its nuances, about simplicity, clean lines and telling gestures.

  I am not trying to pit the two cultures against each other, merely to explain my stylistic choices (which echo Japanese art) and my desire to ‘wrong-foot’ the nose.

  Cabris, Wednesday 7 July 2010

  Féminin H, continued

  While I am tidying up the things on my desk this morning, I smell a forgotten test blotter for Féminin H. I notice an effect I previously missed, one I find bewitching and sensual, and which entices me to embark on a new path. I put to one side the work based on pears and keep the words ‘appetizing’ and ‘crisp’ as guiding principles, expressing them this time with an accord I am fond of with slightly acid blackberry–grape–redcurrant notes. I associate this with the commonplace elegance of patchouli and other molecules that work together well. The first trial has a rather muddled form with the high percentage of patchouli playing out alone and producing the effect of a camphorated refrigerant as it begins to evaporate, but then melting away pleasantly after a few minutes. The overall impression is seductive. The proportions will stay as they are. I simply correct the juxtaposition of sme
lls by adding some woody notes. This trial is an open invitation to continue along the same route.

  Cabris, Thursday 8 July 2010

  Sixth sense

  To conclude his article, a Dutch journalist asks me whether I have a sixth sense. ‘Perhaps a sense of time,’ I reply. I should have said, ‘a feeling for time.’

  In the 1990s, I held the position of head perfumer and had a team working for me. I remember a very heated exchange with one perfumer after I had smelled one of his creations. I criticized his style, which emulated the style of the 1970s. He replied that the 70s were the golden age of perfumery and this was how he liked to work. It was his point of view. I might have understood and even accepted it if he’d been a free agent. But I stated emphatically that I could not accept his reply because our clients, who had entrusted us with this commission, were looking for perfumes with a contemporary spirit.

  Ever since that exchange, I find myself smelling my work with a lurking fear that my compositions have a fragrance only for the present. I am wary of nostalgia; it confers on perfumes a complacent seductiveness. I cannot predict the future, and those who try often get it wrong. In fact, I am not aiming to be sidelined, but outside fashions, trends and time, and yet of the present.

  Cabris, Wednesday 21 July 2010

  Style

  Having worked hard to define a style for my compositions, a way of writing perfume, I know that there is a danger of being overly faithful to myself. Repetition leads to caricature, stagnation and even exhaustion. By restricting myself to one premise, I run the risk of no longer being heard or watched with anticipation. Conversely, if I listen too much and am too influenced by trends, I rapidly condemn myself to being part of the ‘contemporary scene’ and losing my individuality. More than once I have allowed myself to overcomplicate things and to be very slapdash with my formulae, only to throw my work away, forget about it and start all over again in order to find my way. With the balance of a tightrope walker, I have to hear without necessarily listening. I may be acutely aware of what I am doing, but I also value doubt, and I nurture it: I know no better aid to the creative process.