The Perfume Lover

by Denyse Beaulieu

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  I walked out that day with Une Fleur de Cassie, yet another call from Carmen. Like my old love Farnesiana, it is built around the Acacia Farnesiana and it is this flower that Carmen throws to Don José, the hapless officer whom she bewitches, rather than a rose or a carnation, as is commonly imagined …

  When I finally meet Dominique Ropion, a senior perfumer at International Flavors & Fragrances, I am the one to tell him about the Carmen connection, much to his surprise and delight. Ropion is credited with over fifty compositions since the mid-80s, including Amarige and Ysatis by Givenchy, Kenzo’s Jungle Elephant and Thierry Mugler’s Alien, all best-sellers and impressive achievements. But it is Une Fleur de Cassie and Carnal Flower I’ve come to discuss: in my opinion, they are two of the best perfumes to come out in the past twenty years, and the proof that their author is one of the most brilliant portraitists of flowers in the industry, with an exquisite sense of balance that owes as much to intelligence as it does to taste.

  A quiet, sharp-gazed man not given to poetic flights of fancy, Ropion looks as though he’d be more likely to pore over Schrödinger’s equation than perfume formulas, and he did in fact get a degree in physics before training as a perfumer. But as a young man, he says, he was more drawn to the arts, and it is both as an artist and as a scientist that he studies the secret harmonies developed by nature. In an interview with Annick Le Guérer for Le Parfum, Ropion compares his approach to that of classic painter: ‘To unveil the structure, the anatomy of a flower, a fruit, a bud, they would emphasize one aspect rather than another, isolate it from its context, thicken the line, represent it from different angles, go towards the infinitely small, reveal bits that would have otherwise remained invisible.’

  This is how he worked on Carnal Flower, teasing out and underlining certain aspects of the tuberose unearthed by the scientists at IFF (International Flavours and Fragrances) during fine-tuned analyses, in order to achieve a rendition that owed nothing to the iconic Fracas, up to then the template of every tuberose perfume. His first efforts produced a strikingly naturalistic hologram, he explains. But it was an odour, not a perfume, a distinction that often crops up in the industry: it means that the product, however realistic its rendition of its model, doesn’t connect with skin. This left Ropion with a problem: how to make his tuberose wearable without resorting to the usual tricks of the trade. The tried-and-true notes that had been used for decades would end up making his tuberose perfume-y and spoil both its originality and its natural feel. Ropion subtly tweaked his composition by working on lactones, present in the tuberose, and musks, which aren’t, until he reached a balance that would allow the flower to be perfectly recognizable, yet let it blend with flesh …

  He worked in the same way on Une Fleur de Cassie, but the end result feels much more complex and abstract than his tuberose because, he explains, cassie is a less familiar smell. In fact, he has found it something of an enigma ever since he was a student perfumer. It reminds him of a sculpture he once saw, he tells me, a large bronze sphere with apertures through which you felt you could enter: ‘You want to go in but you don’t quite know how, or what you’re going to find inside.’

  Thus, the tiny cassie flower opens up onto a secret parallel world: an artist’s re-framing of a section of the olfactory universe. Puddles and mud glinting in the spring sun between the clouds; not just the flowers, but the soil. Cassie smells of many things: wet cardboard, balms, wood, cinnamon, violets and bitter almonds, and those facets are stretched out until each is a character in the drama. Paired with mimosa and the sweet metallic sheen of violet, cassie betrays its leathery nature; indolic jasmine draws out the animal in it, just like Carmen’s wiles made José forsake the army, his mother and his fiancée. A slash of cumin dirties it up even further with its hints of human rankness. Yet throughout it remains fresh as spring and powdery sweet, which makes it all the more deceptive.

  But though he may draw comparisons from painting, sculpture or architecture to explain his method, Dominique Ropion is wary of pushing analogies too far. Ultimately, like most perfumers, he thinks in purely olfactory terms, he concludes. Jean-Claude Ellena, who contributed four scents to Frédéric Malle’s collection before being hired by Hermès, confirms this. In his Journal of a Perfumer, he writes that there comes a point when he must divest himself from words, images or memories: ‘When I can no longer describe [a smell], when it has a consistency, a depth, a breadth, a thickness, when it becomes tactile, when the only representation I have of it is physical, I can give it shape and create.’

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  How you represent reality. How you transform it. How you frame a section of it to bring out unheard-of connections between its elements. How old materials can express new effects. How new materials can shed light on classic forms or create novel ones. How to give shape to an idea in a way that hasn’t been done before, that you haven’t done before …

  These are not the questions asked by an artisan, a technician or an industrial designer. These are the questions of an artist, and initiatives such as Frédéric Malle’s have afforded perfumers the opportunity of pursuing the answers. Of approaching the art of perfumery on its own terms rather than as a response to a commercial brief meant to express a client’s brand identity. It isn’t by chance that, when he opened his house, Malle placed himself under the symbolic patronage of Edmond Roudnitska, a man who fought long and hard to get perfume acknowledged as an art form. Just as Michelangelo said, ‘We paint with our brains, not with our hands,’ Roudnitska insisted that perfumes were primarily works of the mind, hence his intense annoyance when perfumers were called ‘noses’.

  ‘Composing perfumes is a means of expression just like painting and music, depending on what the composer draws from his materials, which are neither inferior nor superior to colours or sounds,’ he wrote in 1968. ‘I haven’t said all perfumes are works of art of the first magnitude,’ he added ten years later. ‘Besides, all don’t claim to be, any more than those who compose them claim to be artists, since it seems a few of them deny they are. Art is not an obligation; it is only a beautiful possibility.’

  Is perfumery an art? The debate is still open – and because it is predicated on what one means by ‘art’, which nobody seems to agree on, it may never be settled. Obviously, the thousands of gallons churned out by a billion-dollar industry aren’t all worthy of being exhibited at MoMA. But then, neither are most things people hang on their walls. Put colours and shapes on a canvas and you can get Thomas Kinkade, the ‘painter of light’, sold in shopping malls all over America, or you can get Jean-Michel Basquiat. For its part, the industry doesn’t consider it is making art; it certainly doesn’t want perfumers to think of themselves as artists – that might get them uppity – though it is quite happy to sell the idea to the public.

  But the niche houses that have been springing up since the mid-90s, like Éditions de Parfums, have provided venues for exploring Roudnitska’s ‘beautiful possibility’. And they have often done so by questioning, implicitly or explicitly, the very definition of perfume.

  20

  When I was looking for a replacement for Habanita, I had dismissed L’Artisan Parfumeur as too hippie-ish. And indeed, when Jean Laporte founded his company in 1976, that was its story: amiable fragrances, often named after a single note, for people who weren’t quite ready to switch from head-shop patchouli and Jovan’s Musk to Opium or First. The names expressed a quintessentially 70s nostalgia for honest, hands-on, handmade pieces that let the materials express themselves. The scents were fairly sophisticated constructions, but the fact that they put forward recognizable notes as opposed to the abstract products of luxury brands seemed like a throwback to pre-industrial days when perfumers offered all-natural blends.

  The fact is that, despite or because of its nostalgic aura, L’Artisan Parfumeur was a trailblazer, and the template of what would later become the thriving sector of niche perfumery. In addition to naming perfumes after single notes, a practi
ce that had been almost abandoned after World War II (with the notable exception of the various vetiver-based fragrances) but was revived by the niche brands that came after it, L’Artisan Parfumeur took a series of game-changing initiatives. For the first time in decades, a new perfume house had appeared that wasn’t linked to a fashion label. It was also, along with Diptyque, the only perfume house to offer home fragrances (though Diptyque actually started out with fabrics and objects in 1961 before moving on to candles, then fine fragrance). And like Diptyque, L’Artisan Parfumeur was the first to establish standalone boutiques, something only historic houses such as Guerlain and Caron could boast of, so that customers could get the full experience in a controlled environment.

  The team who succeeded Jean Laporte (he went on to found Maître Parfumeur et Gantier) took similarly innovative options. Marie Dumont, who headed the company from 1990 to 2004, and Pamela Roberts, the creative director from 1992 to 2008, were both industry outsiders. The slim, sharp, decisive Marie had been a journalist and an advertising executive, while the petite, soft-spoken Pamela had worked in art publishing before taking a course at the Parisian perfumery school Cinquième Sens. ‘We were rather naïve and innocent,’ Pamela Roberts recalls. ‘We’d never done this, so we had no preconceived ideas.’

  Both women drew from their backgrounds and from L’Artisan Parfumeur’s repertoire of figurative scents to re-explore one of the early paths of modern perfumery, epitomized by Guerlain’s 1906 Après l’Ondée, an evocation of an Impressionist garden after a rainfall. The trend was already nascent in the mainstream as well. The year Pamela joined the company three groundbreaking products were launched. Angel was based on Thierry Mugler’s memories of fairground treats; Féminité du Bois reflected the essence of Marrakech as envisioned by Serge Lutens; L’Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert by Bulgari was Jean-Claude Ellena’s stylized rendition of the smells of a tea shop.

  These scents severed fragrance from its function as an extension of a female or male persona – the rugged guy, the innocent waif or the femme fatale – to turn it into a thing that was beautiful, interesting and evocative in and of itself. It was a different way of telling stories, but with smells; of looking at the world, but with your nose. Marie Dumont and Pamela Roberts had sniffed out the zeitgeist. From then on, L’Artisan Parfumeur’s fragrances would be as literary as they were olfactory.

  ‘We set off on extremely personal ideas,’ Marie explains. ‘Our editorial line was: if I love this, others will. In the end, what is most personal will be what others can share in the most. Exactly like the novelist tells his story, and this story touches others. Our stories weren’t stuck onto the fragrance by the PR department as an afterthought: they were written even before we started working on the juice.’

  L’Artisan Parfumeur’s scents conjure a place in time: a garden with a fig tree, a flower shop, a hedge in summer. Childhood memories: the ‘Je me souviens’ (‘I remember’) coffret was a series of familiar scents to be dabbed on a handkerchief. A trip: the ‘Odours stolen by a travelling perfumer’ collection. Dzing! by Olivia Giacobetti gradually unfolds all the smells of a circus, the wood of the ring, the horses, the caramels sold during intermission, the suave odour of the panther … Her ‘Sautes d’humeur’ (‘Moodswings’) coffret offered scents for every mood, including negative ones. To connect moods with smells, Pamela used metaphors:

  ‘Anger lights up like you strike a match. So with Olivia, we put sulphur in the top note to express the explosion of anger. The challenge was to make it wearable at the same time.’

  ‘Otherwise, it remains an experimental odour,’ adds Marie.

  As I speak with the two women, I can’t help but think of my own collaboration with Bertrand Duchaufour, who was part of their dream-team along with Jean-Claude Ellena, Olivia Giacobetti and Anne Flipo, later joined by Céline Ellena. Clearly, the ladies had a gift for casting. And I understand better now why my scented Sevillian story aroused Bertrand’s interest: he’s obviously got fond memories of a period that yielded some of his best-loved earlier creations, from Méchant Loup’s hazelnut-scented romp in the woods to the spice-laden Timbuktu … I prick up my ears when Marie explains how it was her role to make sure the perfumer stuck to the original story, and to determine when to stop – shades of Bertrand’s vexing question, ‘Do you know what you want?’ Like Marie and Pamela when they started out, I’m an outsider with a literary background. And however scant my experience, one thing I have is words …

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  But it is Christian Astuguevieille who Bertrand credits with giving him the opportunity of creating what he considers as his first truly personal work: Calamus, based on the plant of the same name, which he composed in 2000 for Comme des Garçons.

  ‘No one uses calamus because it’s really unbearable,’ Bertrand told me. ‘It has fantastic positive sides, it smells like a cake right out of the oven and, at the same time, it’s sludgy and it stinks like tanned hide you’ve just pulled out of the water; it almost smells like fish skin!’ When presented with the idea, Astuguevieille gave him the green light. ‘If I started taking on that kind of challenge, it’s thanks to him! He was the only one who dared at the time. He’s a pioneer because he’s an artist himself. He’s got stature.’

  Though he is an artist and a designer, words are what drive Christian Astuguevieille in his capacity as the creative director of Comme des Garçons Parfums. Just as the Japanese brand’s founder and genius designer Rei Kawakubo displaced every cursor of feminine beauty in the 80s by burying breasts, waists and hips under asymmetrical garments, Astuguevieille has pushed back the limits of what could be called beautiful in a perfume and even what could be considered the subject of perfume. In this subversive enterprise, language – the story supplied by the name and/or list of notes – plays as important a part as it does in any gallery-exhibited artwork.

  Consider Odeur 71, whose notes list reads like a Surrealist collage or an artist’s installation: ‘electricity, metal, office, mineral, dust on a hot light bulb, photocopier toner, hot metal, toaster, fountain-pen ink, pencil shavings, the salty taste of a battery, incense, wood, moss, willow, elm, birch, bamboo, hyacinth and lettuce juice’.

  Sitting in the blindingly white Parisian showroom of Comme des Garçons, Astuguevieille, a dapper, white-bearded gentleman, tells me how the iconoclastic Odeur 71 kicked off. He’d called IFF to say he’d be coming in to give his brief late in the afternoon. When he got in around 6 p.m., he asked where the photocopier was, dragged the five perfumers who were interested by the brief to it and told them: ‘This photocopier has been on since this morning, it’s overheated, it smells, and that smell is your starting point. That’s my brief. We’re going to work on overheated objects from our everyday life.’

  Perfumes such as Odeur 71 focus on ‘found smells’ much as artists produce ready-mades by pulling mundane objects out of context to exhibit them. L’Artisan Parfumeur had been there before, but their themes remained within an Arcadian realm of nature, exotica and childhood. Astuguevieille pushed the envelope with series such as the infamous Synthetics (Tar, Garage, Skai, Dry Cleaner and Soda), a blatant exhibition of the artificial nature of modern perfumery and an ode to the jarring yet oddly beautiful smells of urban life. If you think no one would wear the Synthetics, think again: within half an hour in the Parisian Comme des Garçons perfume shop, I saw three people walking away with them. Perhaps the most perverse thing about them is that they do develop, in the midst of those synthetic notes, very natural effects as well.

  ‘Imagine being asked about your perfume at a social event. When you answer Garage, it’s very provocative!’ says Astuguevieille. ‘The name acts as a wall label does for an artwork. It displaces things.’

  He does consider the fifty-scent line-up he’s produced over the past twenty years as he would an art collection: this play with the codes of the art world is, in fact, a deliberate strategy. When the first Comme des Garçons fragrance was launched in 1994, every bottle was shrink-wrapped di
fferently and randomly, and most people kept them in their wrapping to exhibit them. ‘I kept asking my friends what they thought of the smell, but none had torn the wrapping!’ recalls Astuguevieille. Comme des Garçons Eau de Parfum went on to become so popular in the art world that, for a while, before I caught a whiff directly from the bottle, I was convinced that this was what galleries smelled like …

  Comme des Garçons was not the only house to focus on ‘found smells’. Across the Atlantic, the American Christopher Brosius conceived the very popular Demeter Fragrance Library, a resolutely figurative collection of captured odours like Dirt, Tomatoes, Baby Powder, Angel Food, Gin and Tonic, Play Doh or Hershey’s. This figurative approach based on the pleasant surprise of instant recognition – ‘Hey! That’s exactly it! Wow!’ – was an intriguing concept as well as a clever marketing move aimed at consumers who were put off by the abstraction of mainstream perfumery or its ‘wear this and you’ll pull’ advertising. Tellingly, Christopher Brosius later launched a company called CB I Hate Perfume.

  In their various ways, houses such as L’Artisan Parfumeur, Comme des Garçons, Demeter or CB I Hate Perfume play on the notion of perfume as Proustian experience – no longer a memory sprung from a chance encounter but a deliberate, (self-) conscious seeking out of it – as well as on a figurative stance that expands the repertoire of what can be represented in perfumery.