Making Smells
KEVIN PILLEY gets all nosy in Grasse, the French town considered the world’s perfume capital
I HAD MY own “Nose”. All to myself. “The town didn’t always smell this nice. It used to stink,” my Nose told me.
“It was a leather tanning town and the stench was unbearable. The first fragrance produced was for designer gloves. Rose water to mask the ghastly smell. Catherine de’ Medici endorsed them. And Grasse quickly became the perfume capital of the world.”
I was being shown round The Galimard Studio des Fragrances in Route de Cannes. My Nose was a perfume expert and professional petrochemist. “Every perfume has its own unique composition made from 147 notes,” my private Nose said.
“Each perfume has a peak, heart and base or, fond note. The job of professional noses is to create a harmonious formula. When you visit Grasse you must prepare to be seduced.”
For 400 heady years, the tiny village in the foothills of the Alpes-Maritimes above the French Mediterranean coast has been the centre of the international perfume industry. Chanel No 5 was invented there in 1922. It was the first perfume to use synthetic materials — aldehyde. Every year 27 tonnes of jasmine are harvested from the surrounding countryside and used by local “fumeries”. There is also a weekly market in the Genoa-inspired square, a rose festival in May and a jasmine festival in August. And the perfumeries are busier than ever.
My parfumerie crawl moved on to the museum on the third floor of the yellow-walled Fragonard factory, where I was given a new Nose who invited me to take a deep breath. “You
standing in the most fragrant place on earth,” my Nose informed me. “You can smell the whole world from here. These are the finest smells the earth can produce.”
My nose swooned. My Nose reeled off the aromas. “Turkish roses picked at dawn, Egyptian orange blossom, lavender from the plateaux of Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, local petal-less wild mimosa, Madagascan ylang-ylang, Californian lemon, Calabrian bergamot, Israeli grapefruit, Indian Ocean vanilla, Russian coriander, Somalian frankincense, Sri Lankan sandalwood, Filipino cloves, Japanese ginger, Kenyan cedar, Italian iris, Guatemalan cardamom, South African geranium…”
I couldn’t hold my breath any longer. The spiel was highly concentrated and I was starting to hyperventilate. But my Nose asked me to muster one more inhalation. She wanted to educate my nostrils. Her nose told her I didn’t know my “intuition” from my “knowing”. Or, my “Youth Dew” from my “Brut”.
“If you want to smell the world you need only have to come to the French Riviera. We can now simulate the world’s most arousing animal musk. Did you know ambergris is a substance secreted
by the digestive system of sperm whales? And castor is produced by beavers’ glands?”
There was a lot of talk about modern, high-tech techniques and meeting the qualitative and quantitative expectations of the modern marketplace and making human beings smell desirable in an ecologically desirable way.
Having finished the maceration rooms and proud of myself for finding out that ylang-ylang comes from a tree belonging to the custard apple family, my next stop was The International Perfume Museum in the Boulevard du Jeu de Ballon. It’s a modern makeover of an 18th-century hotel and crammed with perfumemaking paraphernalia, “olfactive stations”, “essence fountains” and “vapour trails”, telling the same story of distillation, absorption, supercritical carbon dioxide volatile solvents and how it’s become possible to smell like Jennifer Anniston and Liz Hurley.
Feeling sufficiently up for molecular science, I read the walls for some more background. Using donkey-drawn carts, the earliest French “parfumiers” carried their primitive and very crude distilling vats into the mountains around Grasse, gathered wild flowers and extracted scents on the spot in the open air by steaming the plants in large copper cauldrons. The skill had been introduced from Arabia and an Italian monk, Mauritius Frangipani, had discovered that perfumes can be preserved in alcohol.
In 1759, using skills learnt from the pomade (hair ointment) makers of Montpellier, the people of Grasse began supplying Parisian scent-makers with raw materials. Business grew and soon Grasse was producing iris-, hyacinth- and rose-scented soaps in special containers. Antoine Chiris founded one of the first perfumeries in the town at the end of the 18th century. There are now three times more man-made fragrances on the market than natural ones. Approximately 6,000 essential oils are used by the cosmetic industry.
Today, the Grasse perfume industry employs a 3,000-strong workforce. The global cosmetic industry is thought to be worth US$12.4b. Four factories in Grasse are open to the public and guided tours explain the series of washing, filtration, purification, evaporation and impregnation that constitute the highly involved and painstaking production process, all of which are overseen by one expert affectionately known as “The Chief Nose”.
The International Perfume Museum, which opened in 1989, also has a collection of antique amphorae and stoppered bottles from famous houses like Lalique and Baccarat. Also exhibited is Marie Antoinette’s travel case
and chatelaines (private perfume bottles on chains).
In 1990, Bouchon Mures, an electric blue flagon by Lalique, fetched a staggering £38,000 during auction. Fine scents are like fine wines. But the bottle is almost as important as what is inside. Many, like Ernst Beaux’s Chanel No 5 bottle, have become design classics.
The story of perfume contains a few surprises. Russian astronauts went into space with phials full of perfume and essential oils to remind them of home. From its earliest documented use, perfume has put man in touch with the heavens. The word “perfume” is derived from the Latin “per fumum” meaning “through smoke”. The ancient Greeks and Egyptians burnt aromatic substances in their temples to placate the gods and mask the smell of burning flesh during human sacrifices.
As Christianity spread, perfume was frowned upon as a vanity until it was revived by the Crusaders returning from the Middle East. In Tudor times, Europeans sprinkled pleasant-smelling love-in-the-mist seeds into their hair to prevent lice.
Perfumes fall into three basic categories: Floral, oriental and oceanic. Multinationals now control the major perfume houses. Parisbased L’Oreal, founded in 1907 by chemist Eugene Schueller who invented the world’s first synthetic hair dye, has a portfolio of 21 leading brands including Lancôme, Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren and Cacharel. Someone once worked out that 85 of its products are bought every second every day. That’s a stat not to be sniffed at.
Along the Boulevard Victor Hugo in the Molinard workshop, I achieved my lifelong ambition of creating my own fragrance. A smell that is uniquely me. One day soon I hope to create a whole range of smells, that will turn heads.
For €40, I learnt the art of alchemy and seduction and was allowed to indulge my madprofessor fantasy to create my own toilet water. Using pipettes, I concocted my personalised scent and received a “diploma l’eleve”, certifying that I had attended the tarinology workshop and graduated as a “trainee nose” from one of Grasse’s highly respected perfume schools.
I am now qualified to boast that I know what it takes to smell well. I haven’t named my scent but I have decided to dedicate it to Giorgio Armani, who once said: “For those who live with style and elegance, dressing is a ritual. The final act in that ritual is fragrance.”