Scents & sensibility
The Perfume Lover has a nose for fragrance and good storytelling,
So, let’s get this interview off on the wrong foot. (Yes, I know it’s bad journalistic technique) You write that you hate being asked your opinion of Patrick Süskind’s 1985 novel Perfume at cocktail parties. So I’m going to go ahead and ask why.
Well, for one, the sheer predictability of it! Also, my pet peeve is the depiction of creative geniuses as idiot savants. I call it the Amadeus syndrome — the way Milos Forman shows Mozart in his movie, as a giggling fool who just secretes sublime music with no self-awareness whatsoever.
Perfume is a good book, but it can’t teach its readers much about the actual perfume-creating process. And anyone interested in the pre-19th century history of scent would do better reading Alain Corbin’s seminal The Foul and the Fragrant, which Süskind used as background research. Failing that, I sum up Corbin’s book in a chapter of The Perfume Lover. You started out as a music journalist, reporting on Montreal’s punk scene. How did your PhD in 18th-century French literature lead you to perfume?
First of all, going to Paris got me that much closer to one of the perfume-making capitals of the world (the other is New York, but of course Paris has been at it for much longer).
But there’s also the fact that in France in the 18th century, great minds applied themselves to what other cultures would have deemed futile, from the art of love to what the French call art de vivre. It’s that combination of the intellectual and the sensual — philosophy and the boudoir — that makes French culture so unique.
Canada was cut off from that when the French lost la Nouvelle-France, so I had to go to Paris to catch up! Perfume is just a part of it. People are getting more sophisticated about their appreciation of perfume. Do you think that’s the work of writers like New York Times writer Chandler Burr? The man writes about perfume like a good wine writer writes about vintages. On a few occasions, I’ve had to duck into Holt Renfrew just to get a whiff of something Burr has written about so I can see how his words match up with the experience.
Oh, the perfume appreciation movement is much, much, much more grassroots than that. It really sprang from blogs and forums over the past decade.
Just like the number of foodies, wine buffs, chocolate connoisseurs or cigar aficionados boomed thanks to the Internet. Suddenly, tens of thousands of perfume lovers were enabled by blogs and forums to discuss their passion, dig up information, reach out to perfumers. Perfume went viral in the 2000s.
Also, the development of niche perfumery fostered a different type of communication from the brands, with more transparency, and the acknowledgment of perfumers, who used to be tucked away in labs.
It’s a virtuous circle, and Chandler’s articles are just a tiny part of it, though of course with the very prestigious NYT label. There are many great fragrance writers online, and inventing a new language to discuss perfume has been a collective, ongoing endeavour. You teach courses in perfumery. Are they kind of like a sommelier course for people who want to learn to appreciate perfume?
Denyse Beaulieu was born in Winnipeg with a laundry list of allergies and a father who hated scent. She grew up in Montreal in a household where perfume was banned. She was 11 when Geneviève, a transplanted Parisienne, moved next door and gave her a whiff of Yves Saint Laurent’s Rive Gauche. Beaulieu was determined to get to Paris if she had to swim across the Atlantic. She eventually got there 25 years ago, studied 18th-century French literature and became a writer, blogger and perfume industry insider. Her book The Perfume Lover: A Personal History of Scent, is a memoir of the journey she undertook with renowned perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour to capture, in perfume, the “story” of one erotic night during Holy Week in Seville. Her book was launched March 22 in New York City. She will appear in Montreal for a reading and book signing at the Westmount Public Library on April 3.
My course aims at helping people to connect words with smells — through real things as well as raw materials used in perfumery. Then to understand how those words can form phrases, tell stories.
Ultimately, picking out notes like you do in a wine-tasting session is just a first step. Doing it well is pretty much a matter of practice, and can easily turn into a party trick. What’s interesting is to understand why notes work well together; why their balance, harmony and contrasts create beauty.
Also, bear in mind that in wine, it’s all grapes and soil and sun. In perfume, someone actually combined dozens of different materials in very precise proportions to conjure a complex scent.
My role in this type of course is not only to put people’s brains in touch with their noses, but to shed some light into the creative process, by handing them the keys I’ve forged to understand it myself. Which is also what The Perfume Lover is all about: sharing that journey through the looking — the smelling? — glass. And now you’ve introduced me and the readers of The Perfume Lover to “African stone” and oud. You can tell me what they smell like, but now I have to experience them for myself. Where in Ottawa can I go to get a whiff of perfumes that incorporate these notes? Some of us aren’t lucky enough to live in Paris!
Oops. Ottawa might be a bit tricky. Both of these ingredients are very rarely used in commercial perfumery. African stone is actually a cruelty-free animal-source material — it comes from the fossilized output — urine — of a small South African mammal called the dassie — but it’s not produced in large enough quantities for commercial perfumery to use it, so it’s not likely to pop up in department store offerings.
Oud is a resin produced by the Aquilaria tree in South-East Asia when it is attacked by a certain type of fungus. It is a rare, costly material — sometimes more expensive than gold — so as you can imagine, it’s not likely to be used either by the big brands.
There are more and more oud-themed fragrances that don’t use a drop of it, mostly in the “exclusive” lines of big brands like Dior, Armani or Yves Saint Laurent, and in niche brands like By Kilian, Byredo or L’Artisan Parfumeur, but I’m afraid you’d have to trek to Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver to experience those. Muse, lyricist, critic. What was this role you played in the process of creating a new perfume with Bertrand Duchaufour?
It all started when I told Bertrand about that night in Seville as we were swapping travel stories. He said all the smells in that scene would make a great perfume.
At the beginning, I thought he was just saying that to make me smile, but then he started composing it! Initially, I just gave him the story and chronicled the development.
Then he asked me whether I knew what I wanted, and pretty much forced me to take on a role as a creative partner, which was terrifying: I’d never done it, and if the scent came out, it wouldn’t be my money I was taking a gamble on.
And in fact, when I did finally weigh in, the whole creative process almost imploded! It was very complicated, because the scent had to reflect my story, work well within Bertrand’s style, and within L’Artisan Parfumeur’s collection.
As the development progressed, Bertrand asked me to take on a final role as an evaluator, testing the successive versions of the scent to see if the notes were balanced, if there was enough volume, if it was sufficiently long-lasting, if we were staying oncourse with the story.
There was an actual professional carrying out evaluations for L’Artisan Parfumeur — fortunately, when we did meet for a session, we tended to see nose-to-nose! So basically, creative partner sums it up best. Orange blossom, vanilla, incense, beeswax. I’m burning to try some of that perfume, Seville à l’aube. But alas, although Sephora carries it in Canada, it is only available online. And the L’Artisan Parfumeur website says it’s sold out. Where can you catch a whiff of it in Canada?
Seville à l’aube was initially conceived as a limited edition. But it’s proven so popular, and got such good reviews on the blogs, that the batch sold out quite quickly. Now it’s being shifted into the regular collection.
Frustratingly, publication and perfume manufacturing schedules couldn’t be made to line up, so that the new batch of Seville à l’aube won’t be available in North America before the end of April, as far as I’ve understood. In Canada, you’ll be able to buy it online, at Ogilvy’s in Montreal and The Perfume Shoppe in Vancouver. It seems that every new perfume sold in North America now has a celebrity name attached to it and almost every new perfume seems to smell like teenaged girls and candy. Do you just have to explore the perfume niches to find what resonates with you?
You can find beautiful fragrances in a department store, too! And I’m sorry to say there are overpriced knock-offs in some niche brands.
Still, you’ve got more chances of finding complex, original scents with better-quality materials in brands like Annick Goutal, Serge Lutens, Frédéric Malle, L’Artisan Parfumeur or lines like Hermès’s Hermessence, Cartier’s Les Heures de Parfum or Chanel’s Les Exclusifs.
Those scents are not consumer-panelled to death — in fact they’re not market-tested at all — so they’ve got more soul. And therefore more chances of connecting with yours. And the money goes into the bottle, not into big advertising campaigns and famous faces. You say in the book: “One single perfume cannot express all that perfume can say, all that a perfumer can say, all that a perfumer can hope for.” Which of the bottles in your refrigerator would you take with you to a desert island?
Making up that kind of list can keep me up at night! Of course I’d have to take my baby, Seville à l’aube. Definitely vintage Mitsouko (Guerlain) and Femme (Rochas). And Bois de Violette (Serge Lutens). And 31 rue Cambon (Chanel Les Exclusifs). Le Parfum de Thérèse and Carnal Flower (Frédéric Malle). And a fabulous discontinued modern Guerlain called Guet-Apens. And L’Heure Fougueuse (Cartier Les Heures de Parfum). And Avignon (Comme des Garçons).
OK, that’s 10, I’ll stop here — whoops, no, I really need to grab a bottle of vintage L’Origan by Coty. And could I go on living without Chanel’s Cuir de Russie? I hope that desert island is the size of Australia.