Heart Notes

Grasse is a modern mecca for perfume and where industry professionals are made. It’s also where fragrance enthusiasts can get a heady introduction to the aromatic world.

If there is a sacred land of perfume, a pilgrimage destination for enthusiasts, it’s Grasse, France: a small town filled with medieval buildings, perched on a hill overlooking the sea, a halfhour drive inland from Cannes. To the eye, it’s a rambling collection of weathered villas, their chipped facades painted the same hues you’d find on a ripening peach. But to the nose, it is everything. Known as the world’s perfume capital, Grasse is home to over 60 fragrance and flavour manufacturers, accounting for more than half of France’s annual production. Chanel’s roses are grown here; Dior’s jasmine, too. Scent is so integral to the town’s raison d’être that even its streets are rigged with perfume sprays. When I arrive on a

hot night in August, the town smells like white flowers and my heart expands to twice its size.

I am in town to attend summer school at the Grasse Institute of Perfumery (GIP), one of a handful of fragrance institutions in the world. Launched in 2002 by Prodarom, the French trade union of perfume manufacturers, the GIP offers a prestigious and competitive yearlong training program to students seeking to become accredited perfumers, with only 12 students chosen each year. Fortunately for the casual dabblers, dilettantes and latenight frequenters of fragrance forums like me, the GIP also hosts introductory workshops open to anyone who’s passionate about scent. These courses cover everything from herbal medicine and

aromatherapy to the fundamentals of perfume creation, which is what I signed up for. This year, they’re expecting over 200 students.

But what lures everyone to Grasse instead of similar workshops in Paris or Los Angeles? “Its 120 years of experience in the fragrance industry,” explains Alain Ferro, the GIP’s director. “You don’t find that anywhere else.” In addition to the privilege of being taught by working perfumers in a historical setting, students tour fragrance manufacturers and are given rare access to the farms growing precious raw materials such as jasmine, rose, tuberose and lavender. On our third day in class, we take a field trip to a nearby flower farm and assist the growers with that morning’s jasmine harvest. The resulting basket of jasmine petals is rich, narcotic and dizzyingly beautiful. Everyone collectively agrees: It’s the best day of our lives.

The perfume community mostly gathers online, but in my class of 12 scent nerds, I see its microcosm. Some of them are chemists and analysts who want to try their hand at creation; others are hoping to turn a passing interest into a career. For my classmate Marie Clapot, who works as a museum educator for access programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, scent is a way of bringing forth different dimensions in works of art. She has come to Grasse, she says, for a better understanding of the materials—tools with which visual ideas can be expressed in olfactory form.

Which is precisely what we get. Most of our days are spent studying the natural and synthetic materials that make up a perfumer’s palette and learning to use them in our own compositions. To my delight, the GIP provides access to over 500 raw materials, many of which I discover for the first time. Marigold. Civet. Opoponax. It’s like stepping out of a black-and-white photograph and into a vibrant world. As we pass scent strips around the table and collectively break down the characteristics of each ingredient, my notebook fills with idiosyncratic memories and associations: Apple cider. Barnyard. Hot wax?

This inability to describe scents accurately is at the heart of my interest. I’m a word person, and the challenge in writing about scents has always been the absence of a proper lexicon. Few scent-specific words exist in the English language, so we have resorted to borrowing from the other senses: While a smell might be sweet or sharp, these descriptions remain translations riddled with subjectivity. “That’s why in perfumery school, you learn a vocabulary,” says Jessica Buchanan, a Canadian graduate of the GIP training program and the creator of the niche brand 1000 Flowers. “Because even if ‘green’ means something different to you than it does to me, these molecules are in the green family, and therefore they are our definition of green.” It’s as much about classification as it is about communication. How can you brief a perfumer on a fragrance if you can’t put it into words?

My class comprises students from all over the world— Brazil, Japan, South Africa—but learning this fragrance genealogy arms us with a shared vocabulary, a common ground. For two weeks, we uncover olfactive memories, exchange our ideas and evaluate one another’s compositions. Inevitably, one person’s creation will remind another of a childhood memory or a favourite place; it is in these moments that I am most moved—and grateful. Because while scent will always be rooted in the realm of the personal, this class has offered me a chance to experience it from someone else’s perspective.

I leave Grasse with the lingering sillage of this experience, the unbridled joy of two weeks spent alongside those who feel as passionately about scent as I do. They’ve given me the invaluable gift of confidence: that a niche hobby can also be a soul-fulfilling experience and that a dabbler can still create something profoundly evocative. As for our shared language, I take it with me as a new way of moving through my days. It’s the oft-forgotten language of the redolent world around us, a world that has its own poetry: violet, jasmine, rose, cardamom, oakmoss and cedar.