The Perfume Lover

by Denyse Beaulieu

  A co-author, then? Mathilde nods.

  ‘Yes. Definitely.’

  * * *

  A few days later, Mathilde Bijaoui and I resume our conversation in the sun-drenched offices of Mane on the verdant Île de la Jatte, once a bucolic playground for the Impressionists, now one of the poshest suburbs of Paris.

  A slender, striking beauty with her tangle of dark curls, Mathilde owes her vocation to her father, a keen amateur chef who took her to food markets to make her smell things. When she visited ISIPCA on an open day at the age of thirteen, she couldn’t believe there was actually such a profession as perfumer, and immediately set out to get the scientific baccalauréat she needed to be admitted to the school. She wasn’t yet thirty when she was singled out by Étienne de Swardt, the owner of État Libre d’Orange, to make proposals for Tilda Swinton’s scent.

  The star’s gender-bending persona would have dovetailed neatly into the house’s iconoclastic stance but she wanted to take another direction. ‘Scent means place to me: place and state of mind – even state of grace. Certainly state of ease,’ she would later write for the press release. ‘My favourite smells are the smells of home, the experience of the reliable recognizable after the exotic adventure: the regular – natural – turn of the seasons, simplicity and softness after the duck and dive of definition in the wide, wide world.’

  Swinton, who had been wearing Penhaligon’s Bluebell for so many years she no longer smelled it, was no perfume aficionada, though she quoted the very classic Joy, Calèche and 24 Faubourg as scents she was fond of. More tellingly, she forwarded a list of the smells that most touched her: simple and delicate flowers like sweet peas and honeysuckle, but also lapsang souchong tea, single malt whisky, wood smoke, bonfires and fireworks on Guy Fawkes Day, which happened to be her birthday.

  Smoke appeared clearly as a leitmotif, a boon for a perfumer working on a carte blanche brief. A first session introducing Tilda to raw materials confirmed this: she was strongly drawn to immortelle, an oddball note with its burnt, foody facets of curry and maple syrup. Perhaps its name rang as a subconscious call from Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s immortal male-to-female hero and one of Swinton’s landmark roles in Sally Potter’s 1992 film adaptation of the novel? She never said.

  Immortelle made perfect sense to Mathilde Bijaoui, whose synaesthesia makes her see the smell in orange. So orange became another leitmotif. It was the colour of Tilda Swinton’s hair; of the dress her character wore in Luca Guadagnino’s I am Love, which she was shooting at the time. It was even in the name of the brand putting out the fragrance. The idea was so impeccably consistent, but so simple, that Mathilde wondered whether it wasn’t just plain simple-minded, but it worked, and she went on adding layers of orange. Over the course of their conversations, Tilda had brought up the fact that she was a ginger, so ginger went in. Ginger called for pumpkin, and a pumpkin accord came about to soften the blend. It worked well with Tilda’s request for something homey; Mathilde envisioned a kitchen where a pumpkin pie was baking. Then she added carrot and mandarin: more orange, more flavours. Again, this echoed what Tilda was experiencing as an actor at the time: in I am Love, her character is a Russian-born Milanese trophy wife who falls in love with a young chef: ‘You have no idea of the match I’m doing between sniffing here and tasting there,’ she told Étienne de Swardt. Using food notes may have also been a way for Mathilde, who discovered the olfactory world with her amateur-chef father, to sneak something of her own biography into a scent where she’d been given such a free hand … After all, she and the actor, born Katherine Matilda Swinton, share practically the same first name: another reflection in the mirror.

  Swinton followed the development process closely over a dozen sessions, never missing an appointment and playing the game with utmost seriousness. She appropriated Mathilde’s proposal so fully she once had to call her to get a fresh batch of one of the mods: she’d worn it all. She was also the one to find the name, taken from the title of her favourite poem. She suggested it to Mathilde and Étienne when they came to pick her up at the train station. ‘That’s also when she said that the scent made her think of sex in the afternoon, in her own bed,’ Mathilde recalls. Developing Like This, she says, was a happy experience: no hitches, no glitches.

  ‘It’s very different from the way we usually work. She trusted me. She never poked her nose into the formula. I’d rather that than someone who tries to understand everything and understands nothing … It was real perfumery.’

  * * *

  If I’d been looking for a reflection of my own experience developing Duende as seen through a perfumer’s eyes, I’m not sure I’ve found it. Clearly Tilda Swinton, while eminently sensitive to smells and possessed of impeccable taste, was not enough of a perfume nut to delve into the technical details. The dynamics might also be different between two women. I need a second opinion, and I know just where to get it.

  The socialite, heiress and fashion muse Daphne Guinness has stated in interviews that not only did she make up her own perfume blends, but that she used to extract the smell of tuberoses herself in a DIY version of enfleurage: ‘I would collect them and put them all on greaseproof paper with a kind of gel, and then you leave it for a few days. Then you’d scrape off the gel and have a sort of essence…’ Therefore, she is clearly one of us, only more chic, richer and more famous: enough to commandeer one of the edgiest perfume brands in the world and the talent of one of Givaudan’s top perfumers.

  With his mess of blond corkscrew curls and leather jacket, Antoine Lie could be cast as a cool sexy streetwise cop in an existentialist French détective movie. Though he seems much too mild-mannered to play tough, I suspect he’s got the kind of quiet authority that wouldn’t require raising one’s voice. Nevertheless, when I meet him in Givaudan’s sleekly designed offices near the Arc de Triomphe, it is with the vague hope that the spectacular Ms Guinness has turned out to be more of a handful for ‘her’ perfumer than I’ve ever been with ‘mine’. Antoine admits he wondered what he was in for. After Comme des Garçon’s Christian Astuguevieille had offered him the job, he’d Googled Daphne and, judging from her flamboyant sartorial options, had expected a forceful, eccentric lady.

  ‘But in fact she was quite subdued. She was entering a world she didn’t know at all. She wanted to learn about it, and she was very respectful of the perfumer’s work.’

  Daphne had already sent over the two 80s scents she had blended to create her own signature fragrance, one based on tuberose, the other on patchouli. She wanted something along those lines, but which would be uniquely hers. Antoine liked the idea of working on a single person’s specifications, just like perfumers used to do in the era of classic perfumery; of composing a bespoke perfume that would be commercialized. He couldn’t envision himself doing it for just one person, but with something that was meant to come out, he felt he’d be more in control. What’s more, Daphne’s templates appealed to him: he started out as a perfumer in the 80s and he relished the perspective of revisiting the rich materials and sensuous notes of the era, a welcome change from the panel-tested products he worked on for the mainstream.

  Just as Mathilde with Tilda, their first session was focused on raw materials, to find out which ones Daphne preferred. Patchouli and tuberose: confirmed. She didn’t like spices much, but amber and oud conjured memories of her trips to the Orient. Incense she fell in love with during that session, he believes, though Daphne has spoken in interviews of her memories of High Church Masses. But, unlike Tilda, Daphne didn’t talk much about her life during that meeting.

  ‘She spoke about her olfactory memories, but mostly she focused on the materials,’ explains Antoine.

  From what was a very clear initial proposal, he set out to build a fragrance based on overdoses of the main notes, treated as blocks that could be perceived throughout the development rather than as a fluidly evolving scent with small facets, a construction Daphne agreed to. The result is a lush, broad-stroked descendent of 80s floral po
werhouses like Poison. I suggest this to Antoine, who hadn’t thought of it but doesn’t deny it: if Poison was, he suggests, ‘Fracas meets Shalimar’, Daphne could be thought of as ‘Fracas goes to India’. I also pick up a rich-bohemian-at-the-beach, tanning-lotion vibe – a result of tuberose’s coconut facets combined with salicylates and amber. Antoine explains – that quite matches Daphne’s childhood memories of her hippie-chic summers at Cadaquès.

  But my hopes of finding a more persnickety muse than myself are dashed: the development took all of two face-to-face appointments, two or three waves of mods and the addition of a bitter orange top note to liven up the blend before Daphne-the-muse was happy with Daphne-the-perfume.

  ‘She figured if Christian had given me the job,’ says Antoine, ‘then she could trust me.’

  So much for finding a mirror that can catch the reflection of a muse to meld with mine … Tilda Swinton and Daphne Guinness may have infused their perfumes with their personal tastes, followed their development, inspired the perfumers they worked with to go where they wouldn’t have gone otherwise, but their stories aren’t my story. And it’s not because I’m not famous. Perfume is immediate and intimate; it is blind to limelight. In confronting themselves with it, they had to shed their public personas, so that, whatever they put of themselves in those bottles, it goes beyond image. That is why we can be touched by Like This or Daphne, make them ours, even without knowing the women who lent their image to them. But also why, however many questions I ask, I’ll never know the truth of the story behind each, the unspoken secrets that were told through scent. At least, not beyond the word that struck me. It came up both times.

  The word is trust.

  38

  It may have been a mistake to leave me alone for so long with Duende 63. It’s been over two months since our last session and now N°63 is Duende for me, despite its technical flaws. But Bertrand finds it too harsh and dry, so he’s been toning down the incense and spices and reconsidering our decision to leave out musk: he feels he needs it to wrap the floral note, smooth it out, give it more amplitude.

  But every time I pick out a blotter without looking at the numbers, it’s to find I’ve fallen back on N°63: I can’t wrap my nose around the new mods. Perhaps I’m a little flustered by the set-up. Today, we are not in the lab but in the adjacent office so that Bertrand’s trainee Pascale can sit in. A pharmacist from Marseilles who decided to change careers and attended a perfumery school in Grasse, she is a sweet, considerate person and I feel comfortable with her. But the fact that this work session is not one-to-one gives it a different tone, more focused and technical. It is a normal part of the process as the term of our project draws nearer, but one that is making me feel a little dispossessed. Duende is becoming a product.

  Bertrand’s also lobbed a curve ball at me in the form of N°72, a variation on N°63 to which he’s added clary sage and ambroxan, a woody-ambery material present in many masculine fragrances, to boost the tobacco note.

  ‘It’s not Habanita,’ he explains, ‘but it’s the cigarette the guy is smoking as he feels you up in the crowd. I want to keep that note. It goes with the story.’

  Pascale says strangers stopped her to ask her what she was wearing the day she skin-tested N°72, though she’d sprayed it on hours earlier. Bertrand adds he tried it out on skin as well and that it’s got the volume and persistence that are missing from N°63.

  I’m torn. I can tell he is very interested in this new direction and I’m tempted to go along with it because, after all, the man knows what he’s doing … but no. Much as I enjoy the tobacco top note, I find the ambroxan too masculine. Besides, it swallows up what I love most about the opening of N°63, that gorgeous ethereal green whoosh that feels so exhilarating when I first apply it. If the idea had come earlier in the game, I might have gone with it, I tell them. At this point, it strays too far from the options we’ve taken. As Frédéric Malle once told me, you can’t kiss every pretty girl you see in the street.

  After much discussion and comparative sniffing, we settle on N°90, which seems the best balanced and most radiant of the new mods. I spray it on one arm and N°63 on the other: as I hold them out to Bertrand and Pascale I must look like the statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro … N°90 is better rounded, smoother and more diffusive than N°63, and I do find it delicious, even undeniably gorgeous, but I feel it doesn’t have quite as much bite.

  Bertrand decides to lay both formulas flat; he’ll copy them down side by side so he can see where he’s at and what’s been lost along the way, in order to readjust dosages and reintegrate materials he’s dropped. Pascale dictates the concentration and quantities, which are expressed in parts per ten thousand; the materials are grouped both according to their effect (citrus, green, floral) and volatility (as top, heart and base notes). This is the first time I see the formula in full detail. Oddly, instead of dispelling the romance of perfume-making, hearing this long, austere list is a disconcertingly emotional experience: as each material appears in turn, the formula conjures the whole history of Duende, as though it were a coded transcription of a year in my life. I remember the day they came up, the mood we were in, the things we told each other …

  Beeswax? I mentioned it right after I’d expressed doubts about the first two proposals, when I told Bertrand about the kids who collected the wax from the penitents’ candles to make balls. That day I took him back with me to Seville with my words; he said he felt he’d lived that experience, maybe in another life.

  Iso-amyl salicylate? The blood note Bertrand introduced last May after I’d given him Lorca’s book on duende.

  Algix and glycolierral? Sitting at a café terrace before the August holidays, a little bored by the names of all those chemicals, and being asked by Bertrand if I knew what I wanted.

  Magnolan? Flint and floral. This came up in September just before I went to visit Olivier Maure at Art et Parfum near Grasse, and I feel a flutter in the stomach at the idea that I’ll be going back when the first industrial batch of Duende is weighed.

  Tagetes, angelica and cassis? They appeared a year ago in May and made a comeback in October, the day I was cross with Bertrand for being away so much and not listening to me, and I brought in Habanita and N°5, and the scent took a new direction, and almost came to a screeching halt.

  African Stone? I made him smell it the day I told him that, in Monsieur’s opinion, the scent wasn’t erotic enough. It was dropped between 63 and 90, though not on purpose – Bertrand just forgot about it. He’ll put it in again, but he’ll also experiment with civet.

  Vanilla? The Moan.

  Black and pink pepper? They appeared just as I came back from the land of the perfume ban. Who knows, maybe they were a wink from my pepper-addicted father.

  Luisieri lavender? The first time I felt true emotion when I smelled Duende, because lavender reminded me of the beginnings of my affair with Monsieur, but also because Duende went from being a project to being a perfume that day.

  I’m also meeting the new players. There are two types of synthetic musk: ambrettolide because it’s got the effects of ambrette, a lovely natural material that contains vegetal musk but also smells of Poire William liqueur, and therefore reinforces the rum in the top notes as well as the waxy effects. Globalide for its tobacco and amber facets. He also added styrax to reinforce the waxy, smoky and balsamic ‘candle and chapel’ notes.

  Duende is becoming a fairly complex product with its forty-three materials. Each of the groups plays a role in the story. Citrus, green and floral notes for the orange tree. Lavender for the smell of the colognes in the crowd. A tobacco effect for their cigarettes and Habanita. Incense and its boosters, like pink and black pepper, along with beeswax, for the religious procession. And the oriental base with vanilla, benzoin, styrax and tonka bean, again for Habanita.

  Bertrand combines the two formulas to get back some of the bite and vibrancy of N°63 while keeping the lushness of N°90. But the new formula won’t be weighed immediately.
I’ll have to wait until next week to smell the result. Bertrand suggests grabbing a cup of coffee next door: it’s been a fairly intense session, he needs a break and we haven’t had a chance to catch up in a month.

  I miss the long, rambling conversations we had when we started meeting. Since that time, his career has taken a great leap forward. Now he’s so busy he’s wondering whether he won’t have to turn his one-man operation into a proper company. But it’s not just that. His status is shifting. ‘Bertrand Duchaufour’ is becoming a brand, and that brand is starting to get top billing, above his clients’. It might not yet have made him a household name, but that may be changing too. When we met in that radio studio, it was his first live media appearance. Now he’s just taken part in two prime-time television travel pieces. This type of exposure is a fairly new phenomenon: up to now, only the in-house perfumers of luxury brands had crossed over into the mainstream media.

  My own position within the perfume world has evolved as well over this past year. With Duende, I’ve taken the leap from the virtual world into the lab. Nothing will ever be more enthralling than the first step I’ve taken through the looking glass, but now that I’ve taken it, I want to go further. Bertrand has taught me so much: he’s trained me to become … what? Étienne de Swardt of État Libre d’Orange calls himself a parolier du parfum, a ‘perfume lyricist’. I could go along with that.

  Bertrand shakes his head:

  ‘No. You’re not a perfume lyricist. You’re a critic.’

  Granted. But then, in the sense the writers at the Cahiers du Cinéma were critics in the 50s.

  If perfumery is to be compared to an art form, I suggest to Bertrand, I’ve been thinking it should be cinema. Not because they create similar objects but because both have evolved along similar lines. Modern perfumery and movies were born around the same time, in the late 19th century. Both quickly burgeoned into an industry that aimed to draw in the public with appealing, widely available products, in contrast to the other arts, which were just then moving into the avant-garde and its assaults on aesthetic conventions. Both industries developed a system in which the creative forces were studio staff, compelled to express themselves within commercial constraints. And both found keen observers from outside the seraglio. For Hollywood, it happened in France when all the American movies produced during World War II finally made it across the Atlantic at the same time after the war. A group of passionate young critics discovered that directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk or Nicholas Ray had managed to develop and express their personal style and formal language despite working within the strict constraints of Hollywood: they called their stance the politique des auteurs, ‘the politics of the author’.