The Perfume Lover

by Denyse Beaulieu

  But the approach pioneered in the mid-70s by Jean Laporte has also generated a different type of figuration, driven by the exploration of specific notes. These scents zoom in on restricted zones on the scent-map, much in the way Dominique Ropion has done with Une Fleur de Cassie or Carnal Flower, to reveal the micro-cosmos hidden within. They remain figurative, in the sense that you can recognize what they’re about. But because they explore olfactory archetypes in such depth, they verge on abstraction.

  At least, that was my experience with Mathilde Laurent’s Les Heures de Parfum (‘The Hours of Perfume’) for Cartier. I have a soft spot for Mathilde, not only because the maverick Corsican beauty with a Debbie Harry platinum streak in her hair is one of the most gifted perfumers of her generation, but also because she was the first to make me feel like a proper art critic. The first, in fact, to push me through the looking glass.

  After my fateful radio show with Bertrand and Octavian, Mathilde wrote me an email to congratulate me for speaking out for the cause of creative perfumery. I wrote back to thank her for the marvellous Guet-Apens she’d composed when she was at Guerlain. She was touched. She didn’t think anyone would remember a fragrance she’d done ten years previously, a limited edition she hadn’t even been officially credited with at the time, though it later reappeared under the name Attrape-Coeur … attributed to Jean-Paul Guerlain (it has since been discontinued). Guet-Apens was everything I loved about Guerlain: Mitsouko’s tender peach on a smooth-as-caramel amber shot with metallic glints of iris and violet. When she composed it, Mathilde was Jean-Paul Guerlain’s assistant. She’d been hired after an unpaid internship before she’d even graduated – she was that good. She thus had the privilege of being trained by a man who had himself been taught by his grandfather Jacques Guerlain, a direct line of transmission from the pioneering days of the art. After leaving Guerlain in 2004, Mathilde was hired almost immediately by Cartier to compose bespoke perfumes. In 2009, the jeweller gave her carte blanche to create a line of thirteen scents, one for each hour of the day plus an imaginary one, Les Heures de Parfum.

  As soon as I received samples of them, I realized that, despite having worn Guet-Apens for years, I did not know this woman. Who was Mathilde Laurent? How did her wonderfully quirky mind work? These were tough, cerebral, non-gendered, non-floral, unclassifiable: I was stumped. I could recognize the notes all right. That was the easy part. But as soon as I stuck my nose in them, they seemed to fly apart, each shard mirroring and distorting a fragment of the initial story. And then it dawned on me: I had experienced this very phenomenon with the late French Pop artist Alain Jacquet. In his best-known work, a variation on Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, Jacquet photographed the scene, re-enacted by real people, printed out the photograph like a movie poster then amplified the dotted pattern effect of the photomechanical print, thus revealing the irregular shapes of the dots. The perception of the picture depends on the distance at which you stand from it: zoom in and it dissolves in an abstract shimmer of irregular coloured dots. Zoom out and you perceive the image. There is a similar play on distance in L’Heure Brillante (‘The Bright Hour’), for instance. At first sniff, a green citrus. But follow its evolution and it becomes a carousel of things that say ‘green’ and ‘citrus’ in every possible pitch: lime, petitgrain, verbena, citronella, cut grass … Galbanum pops up, then green bean. Two bits of unripe fig are struggling to join up but don’t because the milky note needed to make up a fig has been left out. The whole set is precision-assembled so that you never lose sight of the idea of ‘green lemon-ness’.

  But the scent that transfixed me was La Treizième Heure (‘The Thirteenth Hour’). First sniff: lapsang souchong tea. Dive in: a smoky supernova expanding from a scorched leather core. Tar. Clove. Black tea. Juniper. Vanilla, which has a smoky facet, wrapped again in narcissus absolute, which picks up the vanilla’s smokiness through paracresol, the ‘horsy’ single-malt whisky note. Vanilla and narcissus also connect through a common tobacco facet – another allusion to smoke. The blend is topped off with bergamot, which connects with the tea note for an Earl Grey effect. The idea behind La Treizième Heure is the ‘fume’ part of perfume: it reaches out into the distant past, from the smoke of burnt offerings all the way back to the first fire lit by prehistoric men. But it is also a tougher, edgier version of Shalimar with its bergamot, vanilla and leather structure, shorn of its powdery, balsamic opulence. After all, Mathilde knows its formula inside-out since not only has she weighed the materials for vats of the stuff in the Guerlain factory, but she’s also composed an interpretation of it, Shalimar Eau Légère. Thus, La Treizième Heure is a reflection on the art of perfumery, on its history as well as on what it can say today. And this is what characterizes the perfumers who are moving the art forward: the fact that they are displaying, in a legible way, the process that drives their work.

  * * *

  None has gone further along this line than Jean-Claude Ellena, the in-house perfumer of Hermès and ‘spiritual heir’ of Edmond Roudnitska, whose streamlined approach he has carried on. Fittingly, Ellena is the author of the current edition of Que Sais-je? Le Parfum, which replaces Roudnitska’s. In it, he explains the principles of his creative process – like contemporary artists, he has figured out that an oeuvre can gain in value when it comes with its own instruction manual …

  What he calls his ‘haikus’ spring from an associative process reminiscent of Surrealist analogy: ‘When I crumple geranium leaves between my fingers, I smell geranium, of course, but also black truffle, and truffle reminds me of the taste of olive oil; this, in turn, reminds me of castoreum, which has the smoky smell of birch, etc. The association of birch and geranium is an interesting accord.’

  Ellena’s style could be summed up in three words. Transparency: he dreams, ultimately, of reproducing the smell of water and his compositions have often been described as water-colours. Traceability: he discloses his sources of inspiration and some of his materials, including the synthetic ones. He has also been unusually forthcoming about displaying his creative process, allowing the writer Chandler Burr to follow the development of one of his fragrances for Hermès in The Perfect Scent and writing two books of his own, the pedagogical Le Parfum and the more personal Journal of a Perfumer.

  The third operational concept in Ellena’s style could be called minimalism. His aesthetics are those of the short-cut: he seeks to produce the maximum effect with the smallest amount of materials, and has famously reduced his palette to fewer than two hundred materials. But he objects to being called a minimalist, as he told me in an email after I had published an article on his work. Point taken: Minimal art, in the art-historical sense of the term, refers to nothing beyond the literal presence of the piece and does not evoke an outside referent, whereas Ellena’s perfumes, however stylized and allusive, never sever their ties to representation. Let’s call it concision, then.

  * * *

  If anyone can be called a Minimalist, it’s Geza Schoen, a German perfumer who out-Ellena-ed Ellena by reducing the formula of his 2005 Molecule 01 for the brand Escentric Molecules to a single raw material. The velvety iso E super softens other materials, appeases tensions between musk, woody and floral notes, and makes perfume blends light as clouds. It is extensively used along with fresh green floral hedione and synthetic musks to create today’s light, airy textures: the three materials act as ‘fillers’ and smooth out any bumps in the formula. (Scene from a lab: a perfumer chomping on his pencil. He still has to find four per cent of his formula. Hell, let’s just stick in more iso E super). Geza Schoen’s tough, authentically Minimalist gesture was to rip the utterly synthetic, discreet but ubiquitous iso E super out of its hiding place and display it for its own olfactory properties. Molecule 01 represents nothing, refers to nothing. In a riff on Frank Stella’s words, Schoen could say, ‘What you smell is what you smell.’

  * * *

  The second perfumer to explore the realm of the anti-perfume is, surprisingly (but only i
f you’ve never met her), Isabelle Doyen, who has been turning out the lovely and utterly presentable Annick Goutals for nearly two decades from the tiny, shambolic Parisian studio she shares with Goutal’s daughter Camille, her business and creative partner at Aromatique Majeur. Isabelle, a slight, quiet woman who likes to listen to the French rap band NTM while composing, wouldn’t be out of place in the art crowd. In fact, when I did introduce her to an artist friend, she told me, ‘Yup, she’s one of us.’

  Isabelle Doyen had a couple of ideas up the sleeve of her leather jacket that would indeed be more at home in an art gallery than on department-store counters. Fortunately, the tiny Swiss independent house Les Nez, owned by René Schifferle, gave her the opportunity to develop them. When Isabelle told René she’d always wanted to make a perfume that smelled of nothing, he gave her the go-ahead.

  With L’Antimatière, Doyen explores the very limits of what can be called a perfume and still act as one though it is almost, if not entirely, imperceptible. While she won’t reveal what’s in it, she does say that it is composed of only five materials, all of them base notes: in other words, molecules so heavy they can take hours to fly off in the air and reach our noses. But this ‘antimatter’ is present nevertheless, and will subtly skew any other scent that passes through its gravitational field while oddly amplifying one’s own natural smell into the impression of a ghostly human presence …

  Along with Geza Schoen’s Molecules collection, L’Antimatière is one of the closest things to a piece of art the perfume industry has commercialized. And like any other piece of contemporary art, it sprung from its author’s need to do it. ‘It’s there,’ says Isabelle, ‘take it or leave it. I don’t have to convince, I don’t have to justify. I made it because it was necessary.’ To her, L’Antimatière is the olfactory equivalent of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’ aleph, a point in the world that contains the whole universe: ‘A smell that contains every smell…’

  Isabelle Doyen’s obsession with Borges has also led her to conceive ‘an outlaw perfume in progress’ for the Turtle project, ‘an open and chaotic network of diverse but interconnecting ideas, people, projects, events, and venues’ woven both online and in the real world by the American filmmaker Michael H. Shamberg. The Turtle Vetiver series is based on another Borges story describing a walk on a never-ending street in an imaginary country. People go past buildings that seem to be of the same colour. But when they turn around, they realize that, in fact, the buildings are in a scale of colours so subtly different that they couldn’t see them change as they were going by. Similarly, the Turtle series consists of subtle variations starting with the nearly raw vetiver oil, which Isabelle picked as a starting point ‘because it is so complete that you can wear it as is … I don’t know where I’ll stop. I might end up with a totally different note!’

  As she sits in her lab telling me about the people she’s met thanks to Turtle Vetiver – when the eighty bottles of ‘Exercise 1’ sold out, she started blending fresh ones for the members of the Turtle network passing through Paris – I realize that the scent is generating what the art theoretician Nicolas Bourriaud has called relational aesthetics. In a nutshell, relational aesthetics concern artworks that subvert the classic one-to-one relationship between the piece and its viewer by integrating within their very conception the relationships they elicit between the viewers. An installation or a performance, for instance, does not exist autonomously: the movements, laughter, discomfort, exchanges, even the theories they inspire may all be part of the piece. In the same way, Turtle Vetiver, by drawing its aficionados into a loose, real-world network whose node is Isabelle’s lab, goes beyond its nature as an adornment, a badge of olfactory identity, or even the matrix of a potentially unlimited series of variations on the formula. It has always-already been conceived to generate encounters, narratives. It creates community.

  But then again, that’s what perfume does – always has done, if you think of incense-burning. It’s just that it took us a century to realize it. And to do something about it: that’s when the online perfume community stepped in …

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  Why aren’t there any critical reviews of perfume in the press, like there are for books, restaurants, wines or films? Let me put it this way. Once upon a time, a women’s magazine I worked for had set out to test (unscientifically) everything from the pulling power of famous actors to the warmth of fake furs. In a bid to beat consumer report magazines at their own game, our publisher kept prodding us to find ‘a face cream that gave women pimples’. We found a hapless journalist who’d caught a rash from a big-brand anti-wrinkle serum and published her story. The detergent-manufacturing behemoth that owned the brand immediately threatened to retrieve every single page of advertising for every one of its brands from every single magazine the press group owned around the world. Official apologies were issued. My chief editor got fired. The magazine haemorrhaged advertisers, and barely survived another two months. End of story.

  There are no critical fragrance reviews in the press because the press depends on advertisers, and beauty features are essentially meant to keep advertisers happy. This isn’t to say there aren’t beauty editors who are knowledgeable about fragrance. And they do manage to slip in a few products from non-advertising brands that they actually love. That’s as far as they can go. Any straying from florid praise might discombobulate the luxury brands that keep the glossies alive. On the other hand, I can no longer keep track of the number of perfume blogs and websites. It seems every time I peer at the screen, another one has popped up.

  There was only a handful, three or four maybe, when I stumbled into them in mid-2005 after Googling Luca Turin, a biophysicist who’d published a perfume guide in French in 1992. Luca’s reviews were irreverent, lyrical, side-splittingly funny: I’d never realized before reading them that it was possible to talk about perfume that way and, every year, I hoped he’d publish an updated edition. My search yielded Luca’s blog, and when I’d finished reading it, I started clicking on the signatures of the people who left the most interesting comments. That’s how I found Octavian Coifan, who went on to become a friend in the real world, then Bois de Jasmin, Now Smell This, Perfume-Smellin’ Things, the Perfume Posse … Within two years, my perfume collection had shot up to well over two hundred bottles. Perfume bloggers were the supreme enablers, tracking the obscure, the cultish, the vintage, cutting through the purple prose of press releases and magazine blurbs. They sniffed, they swooned, they dished the dirt. And as they went along, they invented a new language to talk about fragrance.

  Most of the pioneers were members of Makeup Alley, a discussion board which features a reviews section. Now, reviewing cosmetics is a fairly straightforward business. Makeup and skincare make product claims: you’re meant to see the result. And if a moisturizer turns your face into an oil slick, you can tell. Perfume, on the other hand, does nothing but smell, which is why its advertising relies exclusively on the three aspirational ‘S’s: stars, sex and seduction, with a side helping of dreams or exoticism. To speak about it, Makeup Alley’s reviewers and their blogger offspring had to devise strategies that went beyond ‘Would I buy/recommend it?’ Descriptions, impressions, analogies, short stories, snippets of real-life testing, bits of history, parallels with music or literature … The styles could veer from ‘Gal in the Street’ to pure poetry. It was as though fragrance, because of its invisibility, mystery and evocative powers, had become a sort of writing generator that went far beyond its object. The very nature of the object seemed to attract a particularly literate community of amateurs, in the noblest sense of the term, ‘one who loves’.

  But perfume is devilishly hard to discuss. If you don’t have your own mental catalogue of olfactory references, which is to say, smells linked with words, you won’t get much past ‘sweet’, ‘soft’, ‘screechy’ or ‘soapy’. One adjective comes from taste, the other from touch and the third from hearing; the fourth refers to a thing. There are very few words specifical
ly related to olfaction in modern Western languages: descriptions draw from the vocabulary of other senses or from ‘real-word’ referents. Yet another problem is the names of notes that refer to nothing in common experience: amber, for instance. The word doesn’t designate the fossilized resin of the same colour, but two different things. Ambergris forms in the digestive system of whales when they swallow something that irritates their stomach lining, like cuttlefish bones. They eventually expel it; it rolls around in the sea for years, bleached by sun and salt, and eventually washes up on a beach in the form of greyish brownish lumps. The lumps themselves are pungent things that smell, according to Jean-Paul Guerlain, of ‘rye bread and horse manure’. Tinctured in alcohol, ambergris releases a delicate, warm, soft, slightly saline scent. For centuries, it was an essential material of perfumery and some houses still use it in their costliest blends, but few people have smelled it. Amber can also designate a blend of cistus labdanum (rock rose) resin and vanillin, invented by perfumers in the 19th century, a totally abstract smell that refers to nothing in nature. Yet ‘amber’ is a term commonly used to describe perfume notes and can refer to a slew of materials or accords. But go explain that to a novice who has smelled none of these.

  Write about perfume and you’ll be caught between your own limitations, those of your readers and the fact that, usually, they won’t have the fragrance on hand to compare their impressions with yours. Even if you had the actual formula under your nose, you’d need training to decipher it; even if you had all the actual materials on hand as a reference, you’d still strain to figure out why the fragrance produces the effects it does. That said, perfumes aren’t made for chemists, and if you write ‘violet, iris, wood, leather’ instead of ‘methyl-ionone’, you’ll have a better chance of conveying the feel of a scent. Even with no knowledge whatsoever of raw materials, a writer with a keen olfactory memory, a good repertoire of fragrances and a way with words can write an evocative review. Connecting a scent with emotions, impressions, atmospheres … isn’t that why we wear it? Isn’t it all subjective?