The churlish man who’d snubbed me has turned out to be warm, friendly and almost disconcertingly straight-talking; an intensely focused listener given to boyish bursts of enthusiasm. About the story of Seville I’ve just told him, for instance. He loves it, he says it would make a good perfume, but I don’t know him well enough to ascertain whether he’s the type to follow through or if this is just a perfumer’s version of a chat-up line. And certainly not well enough to ask him straight out if he’ll do it. Why would he bother with what must be, for him, just one of a hundred different ideas? On the other hand, why wouldn’t he? His ideas do have to come from somewhere. I didn’t tell him my story because I thought it would inspire him. It just came up as we were swapping tales of far-flung journeys. But now this idea is hovering between us and I realize I want this perfume to happen more than I’ve wanted anything in a very long time. Why couldn’t I be a perfumer’s muse? I’ve come such a long way in the realm of scent, Bertrand, you couldn’t ever know … In fact, I was never really meant to poke my nose into it.
2
My father couldn’t stand perfume. My mother only found out after they got married: she’d never been able to afford fragrance until then. Her first bottle of Chanel N°5 exited their flat soon after she’d brought it home. After that, she never wafted anything stronger than our doctor-recommended Ivory Soap.
As an added excuse for the ban, I was diagnosed with a slew of allergies: cat dander, dust mites, assorted pollens and … fragrance. But though I grew up on a continent where allergies are a way of life, my parents decided I would continue to be exposed to allergens until I built up a resistance to them. Our tabby still curled up wherever she pleased, tucking her squirming litters in my dad’s king-sized Kleenex boxes. Perfume was the only item on the doctor’s list to remain strictly verboten. I was six years old, and didn’t care. A childhood deprived of N°5 doesn’t quite register as abusive, and as long as we kept the cat, I was content.
So I don’t come equipped with the perfume lover’s standard-issue Proustian paraphernalia. No fond memories of dabbing myself with the crystal stopper of Mommy’s precious Miss Dior or kissing Daddy after he’d slapped his cheeks with Old Spice; no tales of lovingly collected perfume miniatures. Nothing but a trail of crumpled-up tissues strewn in an antihistamine-induced daze. I sometimes sneezed so hard I could’ve propelled myself downtown had I been on roller skates, and my allergies pretty much left me nose-blind. Anyway, in the Plastic Sixties, the suburbs of Montreal didn’t give off much more than the smell of burning leaves in fall and fresh-mown lawns in spring and summer – but at the first buzz of a lawnmower, I was sent indoors with my microscope, books and Barbie dolls, lest my bronchial tubes start shutting down. Scented memories of childhood? Access denied.
Bertrand Duchaufour frowns.
‘Really? Nothing?’
Could he help me kick-start my memory again? After all, it worked with the orange blossom last week … I’ve just dropped by to take my second informal lesson and we’ve been zipping through some of the raw materials he’s used in recent scents. I’m on familiar ground until he mentions something called yara-yara. Yara-yara? Sounds like I ought to start swaying my hips to it.
Out comes a blotter and into the phial it goes. He waves it under my nose. Diluted, yara-yara smells of orange blossom. At this concentration: penetrating, narcotic, with a side helping of mothballs. And somehow familiar.
‘This reminds me of the wintergreen top notes in tuberose.’
‘I wouldn’t say so … Here, I’ll show you the difference.’
He snatches another phial from the refrigerator and we repeat the blotter ceremony.
Ah … This I know. In fact, I feel like I’ve always known it …
As it turns out, I do have scented memories. But mine come courtesy of Big Pharma. Not only because antihistamines allowed me actually to breathe through the nose every once in a while, but because my father was a pharmacologist.
My visits to his lab as a little girl were thrilling and slightly scary events. The emergency chemical showers in the hallways hinted at the permanent risk of toxic splashes and horrible burns. My dad obviously did a dangerous, heroic job and his lab was one of the most glamorous places in the world to me. It was a smelly place too, permeated with the reek of disinfectants, the salty musky odour of guinea pigs and horsy effluvia – the lab manufactured an oestrogen extracted from the urine of pregnant mares, and we had to drive by the stables to park at the back of the building where my father worked.
Is that why I’m so happy to hang around perfume labs? And why I tend to be drawn to the weird notes that make people blurt out ‘Yuck, why would anybody want to smell of that?’ The animal and medicinal zones of the olfactory map attract me. For instance, the nostril-searing aroma of Antiphlogistine, an analgesic pomade found in every Canadian household since 1919, which was one of the few smells strong enough to burrow its way through my stuffy sinuses …
My growing pains may well have been one of the reasons why I fell in love with the fragrance aptly named Tubéreuse Criminelle for the way it assaults the nostrils when first applied. I am so addicted to it that, some days, I’ll spray myself time and again just to catch its venomous minty-camphoraceous blast before the scent subsides in creamy floral headiness. As it turns out, it’s also a blast from the past since tuberose and Antiphlogistine have one thing in common: the ice-green burn of a molecule called methyl salicylate.
I know. Those chemical names are a bitch. You don’t need to learn them to appreciate perfume, but it helps if you want to make sense of it. Odorant molecules are the building blocks of perfumery. A natural essence may contain hundreds of them. The ones that contribute the most to its smell can be isolated and synthesized. Each will yield a distinct facet of the original essence – of several, in fact, since the same odorants keep popping up all over nature. These molecules can then be assembled to conjure an olfactory illusion in a few broad strokes: when your fragrance has a jasmine note, there’s a good chance it comes from a combination of the chemicals naturally found in jasmine rather than its actual essence, of which there might only be a few drops just so the advertising copy doesn’t lie. Taken separately, those molecules won’t actually smell of jasmine. But if you blend benzyl acetate (floral, apple, banana, nail polish), hedione (green, citrusy, airy), jasmolactone (buttery, fruity, coconut, peach) and indole (mothballs, tooth decay), you’ll get a decent impression of the flower that’s a lot cheaper to produce than the real stuff. Aromatic materials, natural and synthetic, can also be combined to reproduce the scent of a flower whose essence can’t be extracted, such as gardenia, lily-of-the-valley or lilac. And that’s not even mentioning the synthetics that smell entirely man-made … You didn’t think the musk in your Narciso Rodriguez for Her grew on bushes, did you?
Despite the breathless sales pitches, if fifteen per cent of what’s in your bottle comes from a thing that was alive at some point, you’re doing well. Any more would cut into profit margins. Natural materials are not always more expensive than synthetics, but they’re harder to source. A drought, a flood, a war will make prices shoot up. Crops don’t smell exactly the same from one year to another, so that you may have to mix essences from different sources to achieve the same effect in every batch of perfume, a practice called the communelle. With synthetics, on the other hand, you can produce batch after batch without worrying about Nature’s tantrums or geopolitical flare-ups.
It’s not just a matter of price or convenience. Glamorous, exotic and irreplaceable as natural essences may be, it is to synthetics that we owe modern perfumery, and many of the greatest breakthroughs came about as perfumers learned to use them. Synthetics allowed perfumers to structure their compositions by strengthening the relevant facets of natural materials; to conjure the desired effect with a few notes rather than having to draft the entire orchestra of the natural essence; to produce entirely new perfumes. In fact, without synthetics, perfumery would exist neither as an industry, nor as an art.
When Gabrielle