Since the late 19th century, organic chemistry had made giant steps, providing perfumers with synthetic materials that were stronger, cheaper, more stable and more readily available than natural materials (availability would particularly become an issue during World War I and its aftermath). These new synthetics allowed perfumers to forego references to nature. Just as the invention of the paint tube had allowed the Impressionists to set up their easels wherever they pleased to catch variations in light, or as the advent of photography had freed painters from naturalistic representation, technical progress fuelled new paradigms in perfumery. But synthetics were often harsh-smelling and only the best perfumers had the skill, the inspiration or the audacity to blend them into a high-quality product. Ernest Beaux was such a man.
On their own, aliphatic aldehydes give off a not particularly pleasant smell of citrus oil mixed with snuffed candles and hot iron on clean linen. They were mainly used in the synthetic versions of natural essences like rose because they had the property of boosting smells, which meant they were mostly found in cheaper products, or in small amounts in finer fragrances to produce fresh, clean, soapy notes – for instance, in Floramye by L.T. Piver, which happened to be a favourite of Mademoiselle Chanel’s … Beaux’s genius was to use aldehydes both for their booster effect and for their specific smell; to blend them with the noblest, most expensive raw materials; to figure out that they could produce just the required freshness by lifting the heavy scent of the oils and counteracting their rancidness. In the formula of what was to become N°5, he injected an unprecedented one per cent. Later on, he would write that he had been inspired by the icy smell of lakes and rivers above the Arctic Circle.
Did he produce the formula to Gabrielle Chanel’s specifications? Or had he already composed it for the company he was working for when Chanel sought him out? Beaux worked for Rallet, a supplier to the Tsar’s court, which had been forced by the Bolshevik revolution to move its operations to the South of France. Some industry old-timers claim that as Rallet didn’t have the means to exploit its products on a large enough scale (most of its assets had been abandoned in Russia), it decided to offer the formula of its Rallet N°1 to Chanel …
Whatever the truth of the story, the official legend is as much a part of the perfume as its actual substance: a masterpiece in its own right. But it was that very legend that clouded my perception of N°5 until I stumbled on a pristine, sealed 30s bottle that ripped the veil. Then, at last, I understood its radiant, abstract beauty because the raw materials in it were much closer to the ones Ernest Beaux had used to compose it; their subtle differences were sufficient to jar me out of the cliché that N°5 had become. If I love N°5 now, it is because of the sheer artistry of it, and I discovered that artistry not because it awoke fond memories, since I had none, but for the opposite reason: because of its strangeness. That strangeness is the very reason that led me to the once-forbidden realm of perfumery.
Some people have a signature fragrance that expresses their identity and signals their presence; its wake is an invisible country of which their body is the capital. I’m not one of those people.
I am a scent slut.
‘To seduce’ means ‘to lead astray’, off familiar paths and into thrillingly uncharted lands. To me, perfume is not a weapon of seduction but rather a shape-shifting seducer. I have been exploring the world of fragrance in the same way, and for the same reasons, that I’ve travelled erotic territories, spurred on by intellectual curiosity, sensuous appetites and the need to experiment with the full range of identities I could take on. And just as my experimental bent has driven me to different men, situations and scenarios to find out what I would learn through them, it has led me to different scents.
Perfume is to smells what eroticism is to sex: an aesthetic, cultural, emotional elaboration of the raw materials provided by nature. And thus perfumery, like love, requires technical skills and some knowledge of black magic. Both can be arts, though neither is recognized as such. And I’ve been studying both in the capital of love and luxury, Paris, where I settled half a lifetime ago. It is in Paris that I learned about l’amour; in Paris that I stepped through the looking glass into the realm of scent. I’ve had good teachers: discussing the delights of the flesh as passionately and learnedly as you would speak about art or literature is one of the favourite pastimes in my adopted country. Here, pleasure is intensified by delving into its nuances. By putting words to it. La volupté is taken very seriously indeed, a worthy subject for philosophizing in the boudoir. And so I’ve come to think of perfumes as my French lovers – a way for gifted artists to seduce me, parlez-moi-d’amour-me and reflect the many facets of my soul in eerily perceptive ways …
Blame Yves Saint Laurent and the Frenchwoman who revealed his existence to me via the first drop of perfume ever to touch my skin.
3
I was eleven when I decided I’d be French one day. Not only French, but Parisian. And not only Parisian, but Left Bank Parisian: glamorous, intellectual and bohemian.
When she moved into the house next door with a German engineer husband, Geneviève didn’t quite replace The Avengers’ Mrs Emma Peel as my feminine ideal. Despite her closetful of clothes with Paris labels and her collection of French glossy magazines, Geneviève was still a housewife stuck in the suburbs of Montreal and even at eleven I knew I’d never be that. But when she opened that closet and those magazines, she drew me into a world where she herself had probably never lived. The world I live in now.
The scientific community is nothing if not international, but though my parents’ cocktail parties could have been local branch meetings of UNESCO, I’d never met a French person before. Next to Geneviève’s, my Quebec accent sounded distressingly rustic and I soon applied myself to mimicking her patterns of speech, which got me nicknamed ‘La française’ in the schoolyard. As soon as my homework was done I’d wiggle through a hole in the honeysuckle hedge and scratch at her back door.
Geneviève was in her late twenties, childless and homesick; she’d followed her husband as he was transferred from country to country, lugging a battery of Le Creuset pots and pans and a closetful of pastel dresses in swirly psychedelic or whimsical floral patterns which she’d happily model for me, and sometimes let me try on. I’d clack around in her pumps and twirl in front of the mirror. Sometimes we’d both dress up and stage make-believe photo shoots inspired by Vogue. Those were grand occasions since Geneviève would also let me pick from the array of cosmetics on her dressing table and carefully do my face. We’d model the looks in our very favourite makeup ads, the ones for Dior: pale, moody, smoky-eyed beauties with thin scarlet lips.
But there was one particular item on the dressing table I steered well clear of: a blue, black and silver-striped canister that said ‘Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche’. What if my lungs seized up? I hadn’t suffered an asthma attack since the age of six, but I’d witnessed my dad’s discomfort if we walked within ten feet of the perfume counters in the local shopping mall, so I wasn’t taking any chances. Geneviève gave a Gallic shrug when I finally, cringingly, explained about the allergies.
‘You North Americans really indulge your little bobos, don’t you? Here, look at this …’
She