The Perfume Lover: A Personal Story of Scent

But the very notion that perfume had curative or protective properties implied that it could have the reverse effect, at least potentially. In Ancient Greece, the word pharmakon, from which ‘pharmacy’ is derived, designated both the poison and the remedy. If aromatic essences could act on the body by penetrating through the nose or skin, they might also kill. Odours are invisible: unlike poisonous foods which you can choose not to eat if you suspect something is amiss, you can’t defend yourself against them – you can’t hold your breath forever. And strong, apparently pleasant fragrances could very well conceal subtle poisons.

In the midst of the religious war that tore France apart in the late 16th century, the Catholic Queen Catherine de’ Medici was thus suspected of having assassinated the Protestant Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre, with a pair of poisoned gloves made by her perfumer Renato the Florentine. Though unfounded (Queen Jeanne died of tuberculosis), the accusation gives an indication of the ambivalent properties attributed to perfume. Even natural fragrances were suspicious. In 1632, in a clear-cut case of collective hysteria, the nuns of a convent in Loudun accused the priest Urbain Grandier of having cast a spell on them: the first to be ‘possessed’ by the charismatic Grandier claimed she had been bewitched by the smell of a bouquet of musk roses. Grandier was burned at the stake for witchcraft.

By the middle of the 18th century, some of the very aromatic materials that had been considered both exquisite and prophylactic were being condemned. Substances of animal origin such as musk, civet and ambergris were lumped in with putrid matters through medical anathema. The smell of musk, for instance, was compared to that of manure or fermented human excrement. Its very strength unsettled ‘our more delicate nerves’, wrote Diderot and d’Alembert in their Encyclopaedia in 1765. As the upper classes renewed their acquaintance with water and came to enjoy light, vegetal scents such as the eau de Cologne, wearing heady animalic concoctions became the sign not only of doubtful hygiene but of depraved tastes, fit only for skanky old libertines and their whores.

Perfume would remain a remedy until 1810, when Napoleon decreed separate statuses for perfumers and pharmacists: since the latter were compelled to disclose the composition of their preparations, the former chose to relinquish any medicinal claims to preserve their trade secrets. But perfumers never completely shook off the ambivalence of the original pharmakon … No wonder a perfume-phobic pharmacologist’s daughter ended up sticking her nose in it.

If I wanted further proof that perfume is indeed toxic, I’d filch my dad’s old lab coat to analyse the 1999 Hypnotic Poison, whose red bottle contains the antidote to the green one I was given over twenty years ago: Snow White’s poisoned apple, ripe and fit at last for a grown woman.

Was the perfumer Annick Menardo aware of what she was doing when she stuck an almond note into its jasmine sambac, musk and vanilla accords? As any reader of classic English murder mysteries knows, you can tell whether a victim has been poisoned with cyanide from the lingering smell of bitter almonds. In fact, like apple seeds or peach and cherry pits, the bitter almond contains a highly poisonous substance, amygdalin, which in turn contains sugar and benzaldehyde, a common aromatic ingredient that smells like amaretto liqueur, but can also yield cyanide. And thus, Hypnotic literally reeks of poison disguised as a delicacy, its toxicity betrayed by the slight bitterness of caraway seeds rising from a powdery cloud …

I’d long wanted to ask Menardo about that almond note, and lay my love at her feet for what must surely be one of the weirdest scents to come out in a mainstream brand, Bulgari Black. When I wear Black, I feel that I’ve either a) dropped my liquorice macaroon in my cup of lapsang souchong, b) powdered my butt with fancy talcum and slipped on my rubber bondage skirt, c) crossed a tough neighbourhood where someone’s been burning tyres in a cab that’s got one of those little vanilla-scented trees dangling from the rear-view mirror, or d) been guzzling the world’s peatiest single malt whisky and gargled with Shalimar to hide the fact.

But getting in touch with the brilliantly gifted Menardo was a daunting task. Perfumers working for big companies are much less accessible than independents like Bertrand Duchaufour. You can’t just cold-call them – least of all Menardo, who is famously reticent and uncompromising. Every time I brought her name up, insiders would wish me luck. And I did get lucky: while visiting the offices of Firmenich, where she works, I bumped into her in a corridor, a tiny bristling dark-haired sprite in a hot-pink top. It seemed awkward to spring my question about almonds – how pleasant can it be to be waylaid by some strange woman on your way to a meeting or to the loo? So after gushing about Bulgari Black (she gruffly responded, ‘But that’s old stuff!’), I let her go, contacted her again through email, and we made a phone appointment so that I could ask her about Hypnotic Poison.

So: did she work in the almond note on purpose? She chuckles.

‘I didn’t psychoanalyse myself. It’s possible.’

She explains she worked on the idea of toxicity by playing on the strength of the smell: ‘I knew I had to do something that was meaner than Poison.’

I point out to Annick that the apple seems to be a leitmotif in her career: another one of her best-sellers, the anise and violet Lolita Lempicka, which came out the same year as Hypnotic Poison, is also packaged in an apple-shaped bottle. She answers that apple itself is one of her fetish notes – a fond memory of a shampoo she used as a teenager, Prairial – so she sticks it in wherever she can. By this time we’re chatting away quite happily, and I confide the story of Geneviève’s poisoned parting gift.

‘Green Apple? Hey, I wore that too when I was a kid!’

My phone almost drops from my hand. The formidable little witch who whipped up my antidote to Green Apple actually wore it herself. There are no coincidences with perfume: it’s all black magic.

6

Despite my admiration for the cavity-inducing Hypnotic Poison, olfactory pastries were never something I could get particularly worked up about. I may want to offer myself up at dessert when the mood strikes; I don’t want to smell of it. Which is why Bertrand Duchaufour’s take on vanilla delights me particularly: it reminds me of something I’d much rather wrap my lips around after dinner than a spoonful of vanilla ice cream … a good cigar.

Surprised? Yes, the vanilla pod, as opposed to the synthetic vanillin more frequently used in fragrances and desserts, does have a tobacco facet, and that’s what Bertrand has chosen to underline, down to the slight vegetal mustiness of cured tobacco leaves. This is one of the things I find most intriguing about his style: the way he slips in weird notes that mess up the prettiness of a scent. For instance, the quasi-surrealistic way he grows a Cuban cigar out of a vanilla pod, as though that had been the pod’s subconscious desire all along.

Bertrand’s been making good on his promise: this is my third lesson in three weeks. Today I’ve asked him to explain the structure of one of his compositions so that I can re-enact the demonstration in my London course: I’m making good on my promise too, since I told him I’d include his work in the syllabus. I’d be a fool not to. After all, the man is one of the most distinctive perfumers in the business, one of the few who has enough artistic liberty to develop a consistent oeuvre and to impose his vision on the projects he takes on.

It took balls to stake that claim. He had to break out of a system that was set up in the late 30s and still dominates the industry, similar in its set-up to the system of the classic Hollywood era, with directors on the payroll of studios and forced to work within their constraints. Like the overwhelming majority of his colleagues, Bertrand was thus employed by Symrise, one of the big labs that produce aromatic materials and compositions.

He’d wanted to be a perfumer since the age of sixteen, when a girlfriend introduced him to Chanel N°19, but he’d been advised to skip the Versailles perfumery school and get an internship in Grasse. As he had no contacts there, he gave up, convinced he’d never become a perfumer. After studying biochemistry in Marseilles, he took a gap-year to tramp around South America before coming back to France to study for a degree in genetics. It was then he learned that a friend of his had won the coveted internship in Grasse: at last, he’d found the contact he needed. He got one too, stayed on, and ended up in the Paris branch of the company, where he was mentored by Jean-Louis Sieuzac, who authored such best-sellers as Opium for Yves Saint Laurent, Dune and Fahrenheit for Christian Dior or Jungle Elephant for Kenzo. In time, he made his way up to senior perfumer.

Being a perfumer on the payroll of a big lab can be a thankless job. Fine fragrances are the most prestigious gigs but, more often than not, you’re put to work on functional fragrances, the stuff that goes into detergents, cosmetics or hygiene products, which is where the big money is because of the volumes involved. It’s technically challenging and it can be aesthetically gratifying – just smell Ajax Spring Flowers and tell me if it’s not as good as some of the juices that are sold in department stores – but it’s certainly not glamorous.

Fine fragrance perfumers don’t necessarily get much more wiggle room because of the way the system is set up. It goes like this: the client, usually a designer brand, wants to put out a new fragrance. The brand’s marketing team comes up with the name, the bottle design and the concept for an ad campaign before anyone remembers that something actually needs to go into that bottle. A brief specifying the style, target market and cost of the product is knocked together and handed out to several competing labs. The staff perfumers who are interested in the project must come up with proposals, usually within a matter of a few weeks. The budget rarely goes over sixty to eighty euros per kilo of oil (the blend of aromatic materials to which alcohol will later be added). By way of comparison, the price per kilo for niche perfumes can shoot up to four hundred or even six hundred euros, but what actually ends up in a department-store bottle is worth less than ten euros. The labs present their proposals, which they develop on spec. The client selects one. The perfumer goes back to the lab to tweak it; sometimes several team up to accelerate the process. If it is a big project, the product is tested on consumer panels, after which it is tweaked some more, often until every original molecule has been blasted out of its body. If sales don’t do well, it may be tweaked again.

The system is hardly conducive to creativity. Perfumers learn to do compositions that test well in order to win the brief: after all, they’ve been hired to make money for their employers. What tests well is what consumers are familiar with. What consumers are familiar with are either best-selling fragrances or everyday products like shower gels, fabric softeners and shampoos. Recipes that sell well get around from one perfumer to another and from one company to another; they are recycled endlessly, so that you find the same accords in every fragrance. The same twenty to thirty raw materials are used over and over, out of the thousands that exist. On top of that, the systematic use of gas chromatography, a method that allows companies to analyse the competition’s products, has led to a practice called the ‘remix’: take current best-sellers, cut and paste, and you’ll have the next designer-brand juice. Another practice is called the ‘twist’: take a best-seller, change a couple of things in it and presto! Pour it into a bottle. If you ever wondered why everything smells the same in department stores, now you know.

Like so many of his colleagues, Bertrand became a perfumer because he was fascinated by the classics. The market forced him to go in another direction, though from the late 90s onwards he was lucky enough to work with people who did value originality and afforded him an opportunity to develop his distinctive style. But he was too much of a maverick to fit into the ‘studio system’ for ever, which is why he and his employers eventually decided to part ways by common accord.

‘I was asked to do things that didn’t interest me and I had a lot of trouble coming up with a decent product both for the company and for the brand.’

‘So I guess you weren’t offered a lot of stuff to do …’

‘I wasn’t offered anything any more.’

‘Because you were difficult?’

‘Because I told them to bugger off.’

‘In other words, you were a pain in the ass.’

‘I was a pain in the ass, that you can be sure of!’ he chuckles.

I’m quite sure Bertrand can be a pain in the ass, and I can readily envision his temper flaring up if he’s prodded too hard. That’s why I’m a little wary of asking him if he was serious when he said my story would make a great perfume. What if he brushes me off? I’m hoping he’ll bring the subject up himself, but right now he’s busy playing show-and-tell with vanilla absolute, talking me through its facets in a gleeful, earnest voice, as though he were rediscovering it all over again. Vanilla has animal, leathery and smoky facets, he enthuses; it also has woody, ambery, spicy and balsamic facets, and even unpleasant medicinal notes. That’s what he wanted to get at: to draw out every aspect of the vanilla pod.

In the scent, the vanilla acts as the core of a star-shaped structure. Its different facets are picked up and amplified by the other materials, to form a second, phantom vanilla; an olfactory illusion sheathing the real thing; a space in which all the notes resonate.

As Bertrand speaks, I scribble a diagram with vanilla as the ‘sun’ and the other materials as ‘planets’: rum, orange, davana (fruity, boozy), immortelle (walnut, curry, maple syrup, burnt sugar), tonka bean (hay, tobacco, almond, honey) and narcissus (hay, horse, green/wet, floral). Pretty soon Bertrand is scribbling in my notebook too, writing down the effects conjured when the different materials meet. For instance, rum and immortelle emphasize the woody/ambery facets: because rum is aged in oak casks, it already has a vanilla flavour imparted by the oak (vanillin can be synthesized from by-products of the wood industry). It all ties in: the sheer logic of it is limpid.

Bertrand’s compositions are not only impeccably intelligent, but also a reflection on the art of perfumery: in this case, exploring vanilla as though it were a strange new material and deducing its place on the scent-map. The beauty of them is that they also tell a story. Think of vanilla and you’re already in Central America, from where the plant originates. From there it’s only a short slide to the Caribbean islands and two of their chief luxury exports, cigars and rum, both of which share common facets with the vanilla pod. Again: logical.

But if the fragrance is a thinking woman’s (or man’s) vanilla because of the new light it sheds on the genre, it’s also a sultry, Carmen-rolling-cigars-on-her-thighs scent. Is it useful at this point to mention that the very word ‘vanilla’ comes from the Latin for ‘sheath’, vaina? Just add that missing letter – the erotic subtext is part of vanilla’s appeal. Not to mention that, despite what Freud once quipped, a cigar is not necessarily always a cigar …

This is what’s been making Bertrand’s work so interesting of late: the feeling that he has been engaging more sensuously with his materials. His scents used to be fascinatingly weird, dark and austere, as though he were making a point of holding at arm’s length the more pleasing aspects of perfumery. But his latest stuff has been getting hot and bothered, languorous and dirty; it’s growing flesh. He says it’s because, since he’s set up as an independent, he has a more hands-on relationship with his materials – in his old job, he wrote down his formulas and an assistant blended them – but also because he is now allotted larger budgets and can use higher quantities of the better, richer stuff. Yet I’m not quite sure it’s only that. His perfumes still have quirky notes, but they’re … more pleasing. More wearable.

‘More commercial, you mean? Well, maybe now that I’m independent I feel more responsibility …’

That’s not what I mean. To me, it’s as though at this stage of his career, he doesn’t feel as much of a need to go for the weird. As though he can allow himself to play with more outrightly seductive notes without having the feeling he’s selling out …

That stumps him a bit. He knits his bushy eyebrows.

‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

He can afford to stray out of his own weird comfort zone, I tell him. After all, he’s one of the best perfumers of his generation. At that, he blushes deeply, cocks his head, mutters the Gallic equivalent of ‘Aw, c’mon’, and gives a little kick to the tip of my boot while staring at his own. Now it’s my turn to squirm on my chair. I’m no Coco Chanel, though I don’t like roses much either. I don’t care about launching another N°5. But, like Chanel, I know what I want, and now’s the time to ask for it.

‘So, remember that story I told you about Seville? You said it would make a good perfume …’ At that point, I’m loath to confess, I consider leaning forward a bit to flash some cleavage – a tactic which, I’ve learned during my years as a journalist, quite efficiently throws male interviewees off their stride. It’s an urge I curb. ‘… does that mean you might want to go ahead and make it?’

He pauses, nods and looks me straight in the eye.

‘OK. I’m game. Let’s do it.’

And that would just about be when I faint.

7

What do Michael Jackson and my mother have in common? They both wore Bal à Versailles, by Jean Desprez. What’s shocking about this piece of information is not that Michael Jackson and my mother had a point in common: in fact, they had two since they both married a Beaulieu, Lisa Marie Presley’s mother, Priscilla, apparently being a cousin of mine to the nth degree. It’s that my mother owned perfume at all. And that the fragrance she picked would be so … pungent. Clearly, when she indulged her rebellious side, she didn’t go for half-measures. In the mid-70s, there were a lot of fragrances that would’ve suited her brisk, no-nonsense personality much better, like Diorella or Chanel N°19. But no: she went for something lush, warm and powdery in the most classic tradition of French perfumery.

I found her secret stash while I was alone in the house, rooting around for her makeup bag. After seven years of frenzied gardening, oil painting and sewing my clothes, hers and my Barbie dolls’, my mother had gone back to work as a nurse at the local hospital the instant I’d started high school. A few months shy of my thirteenth birthday, I wasn’t allowed makeup and the nuns were strict about enforcing that rule. The grey-lipped Sister Jeanne would drag us by the arm into her office to blast off the tiniest trace of lipgloss, just as she made us kneel to measure how far up our thighs our miniskirts rose. So, of course, the forbidden pleasure of makeup was all the more covetable.

My mum must have wised up to my covert raids because one day, the makeup bag disappeared from under the bathroom sink. Her nightstand was the obvious place to look, and there it was, as expected, wedged between two books and a box. I’d just stumbled on my mother’s secret life.