"Perfume’s perfumes" By Luca Turin
I’ll start with an admission: I couldn’t finish Patrick Suskind’s book, and won’t see the movie until they show it on airplanes and I’m stuck in 44F. The sex-drugs-and-minuet thing bores me. However, one good thing came my way when the film was released: a limited-edition red plush boxed set from Thierry Mugler. Ah, the joys of being a perfume critic ! It retails for €550 and I get to play with it for free. It contains fifteen fragrances composed by "The Christophs", Laudamiel and Hornetz, illustrative of various scenes in the movie. They both work for the great fragrance composition firm IFF, and this was clearly a labor of love (they pitched it to the filmmaker, not the other way round) as well a couple of years’ work.
Laudamiel’s style is so distinctive I knew some of this was his work even before I looked at the beautiful website. What he excels at is bold, steely, transparent accords that feel like architect sketches for a penthouse flat flying in earth orbit. One third of the fragrances in the box are in this manner. Another third are lavish, classical set-pieces in period dress, all of them good. The remaining third are literal depictions, the best being a cobbler’s shop (Atelier Grimal), a wonderful, bitter leather accord, and another, depressingly entitled Human Existence, which contains the biggest, most fecal dose of civet in living memory . The centrepiece of the boxed set is a fragrance called Aura. There is nothing sketchy about this one, a melancholy milky-powdery heliotrope note reminiscent of Guerlain’s Après L’Ondée. Aura is the only one that will be sold separately, and apparently is to be used in conjunction with other fragrances, though it smells fine to me as is.
Who will buy this thing ? I would, for the sheer fun of it. Every year, at my children’s school, I do a two-hour presentation to the 6-year-olds explaining what perfume is about. Usually I cobble together bottles of raw materials, but next time I’ll just bring the red box. The range of abstract and real, old and new is a perfect showcase of what makes modern perfumery exciting, from strange and powerful synthetics to exotic, top-flight naturals. But there’s another reason to shell out: the bottle labelled Salon Rouge contains the most vertiginously beautiful accord I’ve smelled in years, supposedly made of davana fruit and sandalwood. If I could play the game in reverse and choose the film scene it illustrates, it would be Harold Lloyd dangling from the hands of a huge clock twenty floors up.
January 1, 2007
December 1, 2006
"L’Artisan Parfumeur 30 years later" By Luca Turin
"L’Artisan Parfumeur 30 years later" By Luca Turin
The first “niche” perfumery, in a field by now synonymous with frantic novelty and six-day -wonders, is thirty years old and still going strong. In 1976 Jean Laporte had the idea of creating bold, transparent, highly colored, deceptively simple perfumes that did not belong in the French Mainstream and to sell them to the (by then solvent) 1968 generation. The packaging was as clever as the compositions: Laporte made liberal use of synthetic materials, yet his boutiques had a cozy, floral, natural-feeling potpourri look to them, miles away from luxury goods. Having discovered a new continent, this latter-day Coty populated it with odd creatures: his Vanilia was the first vanillic to use huge amounts of the candyfloss material ethyl maltol and is still the most euphoric perfume in existence. His first big hit was Mûres et Musc (1978), associating galaxolide, a powerful synthetic musk with red berry undertones, to yet more red berry heart notes in a formula that still works fine.
A series of successes, oddly unacknowledged by the industry, made L’Artisan millions. Laporte is a true fragrance fanatic: a decade ago, he organized an astonishing exhibition in Paris in which all the great natural raw materials of perfumery were presented together with superb specimens of the live plants whence they came, all in full bloom. It was a logistical miracle, and a feast for eye and nose. Laporte started out as a chemist and once told me that his first olfactory experiment as a child involved putting cabbage leaves into an empty metal box and letting them rot for months, releasing on the way, as he put it, “most of sulfur chemistry.”. He left in 1989 to found Maître Gantier et Parfumeur, plowing a parallel furrow. After his departure, L’Artisan Parfumeur changed owners and seemed to lose its way, then recovered with a hit-and-miss string of very fashionable, slightly arty fragrances among which Olivia Giacobetti’s excellent Premier Figuier and Dzing!.
By this time (in the late 90’s), the niche competition was fierce, and within it the natural-materials tendency was in the ascendant. L’Artisan cleverly made use of the best talent available, that of Bertrand Duchaufour and Jean-Claude Ellena. Never underestimate the French gift for refinement: from Debussy to Nouvelle Cuisine, they do fresh, spare, subtle beauty like nobody else. No fragrance better illustrates this, and better exemplifies what amounts to a new school, than Duchaufour’s sensationally beautiful Timbuktu (2004). It is a vetiver, but unlike any other, with a cool, rosy, dawn-like radiance that makes you want to buy twenty years’ worth in case L’Artisan is ever bought by LVMH.
The first “niche” perfumery, in a field by now synonymous with frantic novelty and six-day -wonders, is thirty years old and still going strong. In 1976 Jean Laporte had the idea of creating bold, transparent, highly colored, deceptively simple perfumes that did not belong in the French Mainstream and to sell them to the (by then solvent) 1968 generation. The packaging was as clever as the compositions: Laporte made liberal use of synthetic materials, yet his boutiques had a cozy, floral, natural-feeling potpourri look to them, miles away from luxury goods. Having discovered a new continent, this latter-day Coty populated it with odd creatures: his Vanilia was the first vanillic to use huge amounts of the candyfloss material ethyl maltol and is still the most euphoric perfume in existence. His first big hit was Mûres et Musc (1978), associating galaxolide, a powerful synthetic musk with red berry undertones, to yet more red berry heart notes in a formula that still works fine.
A series of successes, oddly unacknowledged by the industry, made L’Artisan millions. Laporte is a true fragrance fanatic: a decade ago, he organized an astonishing exhibition in Paris in which all the great natural raw materials of perfumery were presented together with superb specimens of the live plants whence they came, all in full bloom. It was a logistical miracle, and a feast for eye and nose. Laporte started out as a chemist and once told me that his first olfactory experiment as a child involved putting cabbage leaves into an empty metal box and letting them rot for months, releasing on the way, as he put it, “most of sulfur chemistry.”. He left in 1989 to found Maître Gantier et Parfumeur, plowing a parallel furrow. After his departure, L’Artisan Parfumeur changed owners and seemed to lose its way, then recovered with a hit-and-miss string of very fashionable, slightly arty fragrances among which Olivia Giacobetti’s excellent Premier Figuier and Dzing!.
By this time (in the late 90’s), the niche competition was fierce, and within it the natural-materials tendency was in the ascendant. L’Artisan cleverly made use of the best talent available, that of Bertrand Duchaufour and Jean-Claude Ellena. Never underestimate the French gift for refinement: from Debussy to Nouvelle Cuisine, they do fresh, spare, subtle beauty like nobody else. No fragrance better illustrates this, and better exemplifies what amounts to a new school, than Duchaufour’s sensationally beautiful Timbuktu (2004). It is a vetiver, but unlike any other, with a cool, rosy, dawn-like radiance that makes you want to buy twenty years’ worth in case L’Artisan is ever bought by LVMH.
November 1, 2006
"An open letter to Mr Harf" By Luca Turin
"An open letter to Mr Harf" By Luca Turin
Dear Mr. Peter Harf, Chairman and CEO, Joh A. Benckiser, GmbH, and Chairman of Coty Inc.:
A strange thing happened recently, which you may find interesting: Lancôme released La Collection, a set of five classic fragrances restored to full glory. Lancôme, a second-rank name in fragrance, had so far shown no interest in its past. It had no need to. But when it did, the result was wonderful. My immediate thought when I smelled them was this: Why not Coty ?
Coty today is owned and run by the German private-equity company Benckiser. In 1905, the firm was started by the greatest perfumer who ever lived, François Coty. All who care about perfume know his masterpieces, which changed the world: L’Origan, Ambre Antique, L’Aimant, Chypre, Emeraude, etc. Yet all have vanished except Emeraude and L’Aimant, and the survivors smell nothing like the real thing. Let us be frank, Mr. Harf: Coty fragrances have been crap for twenty years.
There was one missed opportunity to fix this problem. Some years back I met Coty’s nephew, Stéphane. Because of his surname, he was allowed to sell "Stéphane Coty" fragrances without fear of retribution. He planned to reissue the Coty greats under different names. That was the good news. The bad news was that the impossibly handsome and charming Stéphane Coty had no sense of smell. He smoked forty Gauloises Maïs a day. What the perfume suppliers sold him was what the French call fonds de cuve, which had probably been sitting in a warehouse for thirty years. He was also a delightfully inefficient businessman: he once delivered a bottle across Paris in his sports car to a friend of mine who had failed to find it in the only place that stocked his products, the Bon Marché. He soon went bust.
Mr Harf, it is now up to you to restore Coty’s greatness.
You must reissue Coty classics in the original formulations. Do not let anyone tell you it can’t be done, because it’s done already. As it happens, I have before me four smelling strips of the “confidential” Coty reconstructions done by perfumer Daphné Bugey at Firmenich last year. They are Emeraude, la Rose Jacqueminot, L’Origan and Jasmin de Corse. They are all in full conformity with IFRA rules, and could be on the market in short order if you say so. How do they smell ? Heavenly. They will be an object lesson to all those who hide behind modern regulations to deface the great monuments of fragrance. Spare no expense in this labor of love. Neither will your customers.
Dear Mr. Peter Harf, Chairman and CEO, Joh A. Benckiser, GmbH, and Chairman of Coty Inc.:
A strange thing happened recently, which you may find interesting: Lancôme released La Collection, a set of five classic fragrances restored to full glory. Lancôme, a second-rank name in fragrance, had so far shown no interest in its past. It had no need to. But when it did, the result was wonderful. My immediate thought when I smelled them was this: Why not Coty ?
Coty today is owned and run by the German private-equity company Benckiser. In 1905, the firm was started by the greatest perfumer who ever lived, François Coty. All who care about perfume know his masterpieces, which changed the world: L’Origan, Ambre Antique, L’Aimant, Chypre, Emeraude, etc. Yet all have vanished except Emeraude and L’Aimant, and the survivors smell nothing like the real thing. Let us be frank, Mr. Harf: Coty fragrances have been crap for twenty years.
There was one missed opportunity to fix this problem. Some years back I met Coty’s nephew, Stéphane. Because of his surname, he was allowed to sell "Stéphane Coty" fragrances without fear of retribution. He planned to reissue the Coty greats under different names. That was the good news. The bad news was that the impossibly handsome and charming Stéphane Coty had no sense of smell. He smoked forty Gauloises Maïs a day. What the perfume suppliers sold him was what the French call fonds de cuve, which had probably been sitting in a warehouse for thirty years. He was also a delightfully inefficient businessman: he once delivered a bottle across Paris in his sports car to a friend of mine who had failed to find it in the only place that stocked his products, the Bon Marché. He soon went bust.
Mr Harf, it is now up to you to restore Coty’s greatness.
You must reissue Coty classics in the original formulations. Do not let anyone tell you it can’t be done, because it’s done already. As it happens, I have before me four smelling strips of the “confidential” Coty reconstructions done by perfumer Daphné Bugey at Firmenich last year. They are Emeraude, la Rose Jacqueminot, L’Origan and Jasmin de Corse. They are all in full conformity with IFRA rules, and could be on the market in short order if you say so. How do they smell ? Heavenly. They will be an object lesson to all those who hide behind modern regulations to deface the great monuments of fragrance. Spare no expense in this labor of love. Neither will your customers.
October 1, 2006
"Guerlain’s Biogenetic Law" By Luca Turin
"Guerlain’s Biogenetic Law" By Luca Turin
Given my fondness for both cars and perfumes, it was inevitable I should end up daydreaming parallels between coachbuilders and fragrance houses. Thus Dior is the refined and ladylike Carrozzeria Touring, Caron the shockingly angular Fratelli Zagato, and Guerlain the endlessly graceful Pininfarina. Like Farina, Guerlain never starts with a blank sheet of paper, but with a blurred filigree of everything they ever built. Then they stretch it this way and that, removing old and adding new features as taste evolves, before bringing it all into soft focus. As with Farina, continuity is dynastic: the mantle passed from “Pinin” to Sergio, and now to his son. But after five generations, no Guerlain seems to be willing to take over from Jean-Paul when he retires. There are two possibilities: either put fragrances out to tender like most other brands, and lose know-how and artistic coherence, or hire an in-house perfumer as Cartier, Patou and now Hermès have done. Who? Maurice Roucel must be the prime contender. He has a string of masterpieces behind him, from the forgotten Lyra (Delon) to 24 Faubourg (Hermès) via Envy (Gucci) and Tocade (Rochas). He has shown he can do things exactly in the Guerlain manner (L’Instant), though so far with unexciting results. His very French style of perfumery, that of a man who likes to make women feel gorgeous, suits the house perfectly.
Now comes his long-awaited Insolence. Once you get past the insane press-pack (lights and music when you open the perfume box), the first impression is odd. Roucel daringly breaks with the current obsession with prettiness up front. In the grand old manner, the first few minutes are all wrong: cloying violets in a cloud of hairspray. Insolence is going to be a hard sell unless the staff gets proper training. At t=300 seconds, when the tremendous rush of topnotes slows down and Insolence hits its loping stride, you realize you’re zipping along in one of the best-engineered fragrances in living memory. The reference to Guerlain’s past is clearly l’Heure Bleue, but with a powder-blue respray. For the next couple of hours Insolence shifts back and forth between that and a shimmering, ghostly echo of Amarige’s tuberose. Roucel’s hallmark ingredient, magnolia leaf, works wonders at making this big four-seater GT feel lighter and smaller than it is. If l’Instant was a Peugeot 406, this one is the family Ferrari, the 612 Scaglietti. Great from some angles, wrong from others, but overall fascinating to watch in motion. It’s not a 330 GTC (that was Chamade), but would you turn it down as a present?
Given my fondness for both cars and perfumes, it was inevitable I should end up daydreaming parallels between coachbuilders and fragrance houses. Thus Dior is the refined and ladylike Carrozzeria Touring, Caron the shockingly angular Fratelli Zagato, and Guerlain the endlessly graceful Pininfarina. Like Farina, Guerlain never starts with a blank sheet of paper, but with a blurred filigree of everything they ever built. Then they stretch it this way and that, removing old and adding new features as taste evolves, before bringing it all into soft focus. As with Farina, continuity is dynastic: the mantle passed from “Pinin” to Sergio, and now to his son. But after five generations, no Guerlain seems to be willing to take over from Jean-Paul when he retires. There are two possibilities: either put fragrances out to tender like most other brands, and lose know-how and artistic coherence, or hire an in-house perfumer as Cartier, Patou and now Hermès have done. Who? Maurice Roucel must be the prime contender. He has a string of masterpieces behind him, from the forgotten Lyra (Delon) to 24 Faubourg (Hermès) via Envy (Gucci) and Tocade (Rochas). He has shown he can do things exactly in the Guerlain manner (L’Instant), though so far with unexciting results. His very French style of perfumery, that of a man who likes to make women feel gorgeous, suits the house perfectly.
Now comes his long-awaited Insolence. Once you get past the insane press-pack (lights and music when you open the perfume box), the first impression is odd. Roucel daringly breaks with the current obsession with prettiness up front. In the grand old manner, the first few minutes are all wrong: cloying violets in a cloud of hairspray. Insolence is going to be a hard sell unless the staff gets proper training. At t=300 seconds, when the tremendous rush of topnotes slows down and Insolence hits its loping stride, you realize you’re zipping along in one of the best-engineered fragrances in living memory. The reference to Guerlain’s past is clearly l’Heure Bleue, but with a powder-blue respray. For the next couple of hours Insolence shifts back and forth between that and a shimmering, ghostly echo of Amarige’s tuberose. Roucel’s hallmark ingredient, magnolia leaf, works wonders at making this big four-seater GT feel lighter and smaller than it is. If l’Instant was a Peugeot 406, this one is the family Ferrari, the 612 Scaglietti. Great from some angles, wrong from others, but overall fascinating to watch in motion. It’s not a 330 GTC (that was Chamade), but would you turn it down as a present?
September 1, 2006
"Blue" By Luca Turin
"Blue" By Luca Turin
Bees specialize in flowers, and for some flowers the feeling is mutual. Bees only see ultraviolet (if you wear sunscreen, you’ll look streaky black to them), blue, and green. Lavender, the bluest of all blue flowers, wastes no time attracting less industrious insects and turns entire swathes of Haute Provence Apis mellifera Blue. I must have been a worker bee in a previous life, hence my laziness in this one: I love both the smell and the color. It is hard to unlearn an association once you’ve made it, but I swear even if it turned out the stuff came from hibiscus blossoms I would still find the smell of lavender, (and for that matter the electric sound of bees) intensely blue.
My anglophile grandfather always insisted on using on Yardley’s English Lavender (not bad, but no longer great). I followed his advice until I hit upon Caron’s Pour un Homme, and stayed with that until recently. Of late, though, it seemed to me that something less sophisticated, less yellow-vanillic (aptly, Pour un Homme is colored green), was called for, a really simple lavender. This is not as easy as it seems. Excellent grades of steam-distilled lavender oil come from all over the world, but adding just the right amount of other stuff to turn lavender into a real perfume is tricky. It is an uncooperative perfumery note, halfway between top and middle. It doesn’t quite fly off in seconds the way citrus does, but fades by the time you finish breakfast. Merely extending it with woody or herbaceous notes won’t do: wrong color.
What makes a great lavender is good fixation, that mysterious process by which heavy molecules make lighter, flightier ones stay longer. After smelling a dozen lavenders that fade to purple or gray, I think I may have found the true-blue best. It comes from Caldey Island, in Wales, and is sold by the monks that inhabit it (at www.manufactum.de, a,mong other places). Caldey Island Lavender has an exquisite quiet, musky drydown. It was composed by Flemish freelance perfumer Hugo Collumbien, now 89 years old. I called him up to ask how he did it, and he explained he used the best stuff from Sault, in the Vaucluse. I worked up the courage to ask what he’d used as a fixative: the legendary musk Exaltolide, now synthetic but originally found in the musk rat. What works for bees and rats works for us.
Bees specialize in flowers, and for some flowers the feeling is mutual. Bees only see ultraviolet (if you wear sunscreen, you’ll look streaky black to them), blue, and green. Lavender, the bluest of all blue flowers, wastes no time attracting less industrious insects and turns entire swathes of Haute Provence Apis mellifera Blue. I must have been a worker bee in a previous life, hence my laziness in this one: I love both the smell and the color. It is hard to unlearn an association once you’ve made it, but I swear even if it turned out the stuff came from hibiscus blossoms I would still find the smell of lavender, (and for that matter the electric sound of bees) intensely blue.
My anglophile grandfather always insisted on using on Yardley’s English Lavender (not bad, but no longer great). I followed his advice until I hit upon Caron’s Pour un Homme, and stayed with that until recently. Of late, though, it seemed to me that something less sophisticated, less yellow-vanillic (aptly, Pour un Homme is colored green), was called for, a really simple lavender. This is not as easy as it seems. Excellent grades of steam-distilled lavender oil come from all over the world, but adding just the right amount of other stuff to turn lavender into a real perfume is tricky. It is an uncooperative perfumery note, halfway between top and middle. It doesn’t quite fly off in seconds the way citrus does, but fades by the time you finish breakfast. Merely extending it with woody or herbaceous notes won’t do: wrong color.
What makes a great lavender is good fixation, that mysterious process by which heavy molecules make lighter, flightier ones stay longer. After smelling a dozen lavenders that fade to purple or gray, I think I may have found the true-blue best. It comes from Caldey Island, in Wales, and is sold by the monks that inhabit it (at www.manufactum.de, a,mong other places). Caldey Island Lavender has an exquisite quiet, musky drydown. It was composed by Flemish freelance perfumer Hugo Collumbien, now 89 years old. I called him up to ask how he did it, and he explained he used the best stuff from Sault, in the Vaucluse. I worked up the courage to ask what he’d used as a fixative: the legendary musk Exaltolide, now synthetic but originally found in the musk rat. What works for bees and rats works for us.
August 1, 2006
"Into the Ninth" By Luca Turin
"Into the Ninth" By Luca Turin
There is a slice of Paris, roughly the 9th arrondissement, stretching from behind the Galeries Lafayette to the dizzying railway cut of Place de l’Europe, that belongs in a city one quarter the size. You pass faded offices under flickering neons, hairdressers showing photographs of ugly hairdos nobody will request, driving schools with cut-open engines in the window, shops that still sell stamps and coins long after the last collector died. This is where, in years past, some perfume stores stocked the products of fallen firms like Lubin (the cheerily sad Gin Fizz) or Houbigant (the sinister Duc de Vervins). The Ninth is where French glory slowly fades to blue in shop windows, where disheveled glamour goes to die. It is my melancholy duty to report that I lately saw Parfums Balmain pass by Rue Lafayette, at dawn, looking haggard.
The telltale signs of decadence had been there for some time. For a start, the packaging hadn’t been changed for a decade. There was no need to, it looked great. But when that happens in a country like France, obsessed with sprucing up, you start to worry. And sure enough, the last two fragrances, Balmya and Eau d’Amazonie, were cheap, thin little things. Oddly, Pierre Balmain (clothes, watches) seems to be doing well, with prosperous-looking ads everywhere. Unlike Worth, Fath and Grès, where the fashion house went belly-up leaving the perfumes stranded, it seems Balmain just stopped caring.
Ironically, Balmain had caught the modernisation mumps early and seemed in great shape. The great Vent Vert, Germaine Cellier’s masterpiece, was beautifully reengineered by Calice Becker fifteen years ago. She also did the lemon-sandalwood Monsieur Balmain, still the sunniest masculine around. Jolie Madame, Cellier’s other great (a more civilized version of Piguet’s Bandit), is still in the range. And then there’s Francis Camaille’s Ivoire, the last of the monumental soap statues of the eighties. A range like that deserves to survive and expand.
When I was trying to contact Parfums Balmain, I was bounced around from phone number to phone number until I came to the firm that has recently acquired the license, and they sent me the full range. I asked what other brands they represent. My heart sank when they told me: Ungaro and Rykiel. It seems these former grands seigneurs now sit across each other in the tumbril, hands tied, on their way to the Ninth.
There is a slice of Paris, roughly the 9th arrondissement, stretching from behind the Galeries Lafayette to the dizzying railway cut of Place de l’Europe, that belongs in a city one quarter the size. You pass faded offices under flickering neons, hairdressers showing photographs of ugly hairdos nobody will request, driving schools with cut-open engines in the window, shops that still sell stamps and coins long after the last collector died. This is where, in years past, some perfume stores stocked the products of fallen firms like Lubin (the cheerily sad Gin Fizz) or Houbigant (the sinister Duc de Vervins). The Ninth is where French glory slowly fades to blue in shop windows, where disheveled glamour goes to die. It is my melancholy duty to report that I lately saw Parfums Balmain pass by Rue Lafayette, at dawn, looking haggard.
The telltale signs of decadence had been there for some time. For a start, the packaging hadn’t been changed for a decade. There was no need to, it looked great. But when that happens in a country like France, obsessed with sprucing up, you start to worry. And sure enough, the last two fragrances, Balmya and Eau d’Amazonie, were cheap, thin little things. Oddly, Pierre Balmain (clothes, watches) seems to be doing well, with prosperous-looking ads everywhere. Unlike Worth, Fath and Grès, where the fashion house went belly-up leaving the perfumes stranded, it seems Balmain just stopped caring.
Ironically, Balmain had caught the modernisation mumps early and seemed in great shape. The great Vent Vert, Germaine Cellier’s masterpiece, was beautifully reengineered by Calice Becker fifteen years ago. She also did the lemon-sandalwood Monsieur Balmain, still the sunniest masculine around. Jolie Madame, Cellier’s other great (a more civilized version of Piguet’s Bandit), is still in the range. And then there’s Francis Camaille’s Ivoire, the last of the monumental soap statues of the eighties. A range like that deserves to survive and expand.
When I was trying to contact Parfums Balmain, I was bounced around from phone number to phone number until I came to the firm that has recently acquired the license, and they sent me the full range. I asked what other brands they represent. My heart sank when they told me: Ungaro and Rykiel. It seems these former grands seigneurs now sit across each other in the tumbril, hands tied, on their way to the Ninth.
July 1, 2006
"The Belle Epoque" By Luca Turin
"The Belle Epoque" By Luca Turin
While smelling some leather perfumes recently, I looked up quinoline, the molecule that gives them their bitter, distinctive smell: it was discovered by Zdenko von Skraup in 1880. Small wonder they call it the Belle Epoque! The last fifty years of the long nineteenth century (1789-1914) gave us half of physics and mathematics, and a huge slice of chemistry, the latter mostly from Germany and Austria. The perfumery timeline is amazing: between 1868 (coumarin, the smell of fougères) and 1908 (undecalactone, the peach in Mitsouko) chemists discovered all the bones of modern perfumery, about fifty synthetics that defined the Golden Age. Very few of these chemicals were found by fragrance specialists, and almost all by accident. Chemists were just busy making things, and some of them smelled good and made their creators (or their employers) very rich.
In those days, there were no regulatory costs, no safety tests. If you put the thing in a fragrance and nobody dropped dead (no one ever did), you had a product. How things have changed. Today the cost of worldwide certification of a new product, before you find out whether anyone even likes it, is upwards of € 1M. Unless it is a blockbuster, you’ll get your money back fairly slowly. Few completely new molecules are being released. Maybe the industry has entered an age of diminishing returns. The perfumer’s palette is supposedly too large already, at somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 materials, and all the big composition firms are removing the seldom used items from their inventories. Everyone is running for cover; your best-selling product could give six rats a rash and end up on Europe’s least-wanted list next time the suits meet in Brussels.
I should know: I’ve just spent the last four years devising replacements for some of the most popular molecules in fragrance history, now classed as allergens. My job has been great fun, interesting science, clever chemistry and good business, but it’s essentially conservation, not construction. Just when you might think there are no new smells left to be discovered, a perfumer friend points out the existence of a new musk called Musk KS, made by Grau Aromatics in (of course) Germany. I ordered a sample, and it is stunning: hugely powerful, earthy, unlike any other. Then I saw the chemical structure. Never was a more optimistic molecule made: it contains two bromine atoms and a nitro group. These are things that give armchair safety experts night sweats. But Grau KG, god bless them, made it, made sure it was safe, and now sells it. Maybe another Belle Epoque is coming.
While smelling some leather perfumes recently, I looked up quinoline, the molecule that gives them their bitter, distinctive smell: it was discovered by Zdenko von Skraup in 1880. Small wonder they call it the Belle Epoque! The last fifty years of the long nineteenth century (1789-1914) gave us half of physics and mathematics, and a huge slice of chemistry, the latter mostly from Germany and Austria. The perfumery timeline is amazing: between 1868 (coumarin, the smell of fougères) and 1908 (undecalactone, the peach in Mitsouko) chemists discovered all the bones of modern perfumery, about fifty synthetics that defined the Golden Age. Very few of these chemicals were found by fragrance specialists, and almost all by accident. Chemists were just busy making things, and some of them smelled good and made their creators (or their employers) very rich.
In those days, there were no regulatory costs, no safety tests. If you put the thing in a fragrance and nobody dropped dead (no one ever did), you had a product. How things have changed. Today the cost of worldwide certification of a new product, before you find out whether anyone even likes it, is upwards of € 1M. Unless it is a blockbuster, you’ll get your money back fairly slowly. Few completely new molecules are being released. Maybe the industry has entered an age of diminishing returns. The perfumer’s palette is supposedly too large already, at somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 materials, and all the big composition firms are removing the seldom used items from their inventories. Everyone is running for cover; your best-selling product could give six rats a rash and end up on Europe’s least-wanted list next time the suits meet in Brussels.
I should know: I’ve just spent the last four years devising replacements for some of the most popular molecules in fragrance history, now classed as allergens. My job has been great fun, interesting science, clever chemistry and good business, but it’s essentially conservation, not construction. Just when you might think there are no new smells left to be discovered, a perfumer friend points out the existence of a new musk called Musk KS, made by Grau Aromatics in (of course) Germany. I ordered a sample, and it is stunning: hugely powerful, earthy, unlike any other. Then I saw the chemical structure. Never was a more optimistic molecule made: it contains two bromine atoms and a nitro group. These are things that give armchair safety experts night sweats. But Grau KG, god bless them, made it, made sure it was safe, and now sells it. Maybe another Belle Epoque is coming.
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