The Diary of a Nose

by Jean-Claude Ellena

  Hong Kong, Friday 5 March 2010

  Artificial

  ‘What’s that artificial thing?’ someone asks. The thing or, rather, things are white cubes, slightly larger than sugar lumps, dotted with black flecks the size of poppy seeds, and mixed in with diced apple and watermelon, and slivers of mango and orange – this is a fruit salad offered as part of the hotel breakfast. The ‘thing’: cubes of dragon fruit, a fruit with pink skin and white flesh that is very popular in Asia but, to us Westerners, has little taste. It is ignorance that makes us believe and announce that something like that is artificial, when the familiar clearly seems natural.

  How many times have I heard someone say: ‘Your perfumes only have flowers and natural products in them, don’t they, nothing artificial?’ A question to which I invariably reply that I use just as many artificial products as natural ones, and that without artificial products I would not be able to create perfumes.

  It was the chemistry of perfume that allowed the artisans of perfumery, towards the end of the nineteenth century, to become artists by freeing themselves from the constraints of nature.

  Hong Kong, Saturday 6 March 2010

  Disappointment

  I brought in my hand luggage the draft for the women’s perfume with pear as its top note. Being somewhere else is a good way to smell something differently. I vaporize the perfume and smell it. I am disappointed. Is it because of the heat and humidity of Hong Kong, or is my nose playing tricks on me? The smell is rasping, acrid, a distortion of the idea I had in mind. I close the bottle and put it away in my bag. I will smell it again later.

  Tokyo, after the plum trees have blossomed but before the cherry trees have

  Juxtaposition

  Seasonality has a cultural dimension in Japan. It is customary there to begin a letter with a reference to the season, to dress in the season’s colors and to eat according to the cycle of seasons. This evening we have been invited to dine in a restaurant that cooks soba, noodles made with buckwheat flour. We have the restaurant to ourselves. The place is the size of a small lobby. The smell of flour is very noticeable and reminds me of roasted chestnuts. We sit down at a counter made of cypress wood. We are greeted by three cooks in their whites wearing blue bandanas round their foreheads. They are at our service, here to prepare dishes and serve them to us. One of them kneads the dough and leaves it to stand for a while. He then picks it up again and, following a precise ritual, spreads it into a square shape. Then, using a ruler, he cuts away noodles the thickness of a shoelace. Meanwhile, another cook mills grain of buckwheat with a pestle and mortar, making the flour that will be used for the next sitting. The noodles are thrown by the handful into the hot stock kept at the ready and removed almost immediately, shared out between our bowls and served. The meal begins. I am advised to take big slurps. Noodles are eaten noisily in Japan.

  After the first bowl of noodles, there is a succession of many other dishes, each presented in different tableware – in Japan tableware changes according to the season: ceramics in winter, glass and bamboo in summer. And each new offering is a surprise to the eye and the palate. Each concoction plays on the juxtaposition of colors, textures and tastes, and on the seasonality of the produce. The freshness of the ingredients is essential, the flavors are subtle. In this sort of cuisine, over-piling the plate, extravagance and sauces are unknown. Mixtures, which are typical of traditional Western cooking, allow for correcting mistakes. Here mistakes are not allowed. The performance played out before us contributes to our pleasure, a temporal hedonistic pleasure, and requires excellence from the cooks.

  Kyoto, Wednesday 10 March 2010

  Courtesy

  We are leaving the ryokan this morning; the owners of the inn see us out on to the street and thank us at length, leaning their torsos forward, straight-backed. We set off in the taxi and travel a few meters. I glance back and the owners wave to us once more, keeping a watchful eye on our departure. I hesitate to look away. We lose sight of them when the taxi turns at the end of the street.

  We need to take the Tokaido Shinkansen, the high-speed line that will take us to Kyoto. I am impressed by the size of the station, by its cleanliness and signage, thanks to which a foreigner has no trouble finding his way. When we reach our platform, I am surprised by how calm and disciplined the other travellers are: each passenger waits silently between the lines on the ground indicating where the carriages will be. The train arrives. We settle into the seats that we reserved in France. A vague waft of Chanel No. 5 hangs in the carriage, and I turn round to find out who is wearing it. There are only men in the carriage. Could the air conditioning be perfumed? The ticket inspector checks our tickets. He turns to us, greets us with a tilt of the head, then leaves. He comes back at every stop and greets us every time. The woman selling drinks pushes her trolley between the seats, dressed like a schoolgirl, white blouse and black skirt. She has put on a purple and yellow apron tied at the back with a pretty bow. When she reaches the automatic door, she turns round and she too leans her torso forward, with her back straight, her eyes focused on the tops of the seats.

  Whether it is on arrival or departure, in hotels or inns, in cafés or shops, to the Japanese salutations are a day-to-day mark of courtesy. Courtesy is not a virtue – these small acts of courtesy, which can appear artificial and even false, almost make me want to smile – but it is a quality, a ritual that facilitates life in society, and one that I appreciate.

  Kanazawa, Monday 15 March 2010

  Natural

  After spending a few days in Kyoto, the city with two thousand palaces and gardens, the place people cherish in their memory when they are in love with Japan, we take the train to Kanazawa, known for its garden, which symbolized ideal beauty in the days of the Song dynasty. Whether they are rock or moss gardens, or gardens simply to stroll in, Japanese gardens seem artificial to our Western eyes. Of course, to our Japanese guide there could be no more natural gardens. I remark on the layout of the garden, the choice of stones, the use of water, the refined way the trees are pruned, the contrived arrangement of branches right down to thinned-out pine needles, bough by bough, on the symbolic beauty, whose composition makes full use of the surrounding landscape – but when I comment on all this she maintains her pretty smile and good humor, and tells me that it is all natural. What is natural is therefore cultural.

  Tokyo, Friday 19 March 2010

  Bill Evans

  Talking about jazz in Japan might seem incongruous. It is not at all. Jazz is part of Japanese culture. There is a Blue Note in Tokyo.

  Apart from Starbucks outlets, which favor rock, most cafés and meeting places greet you with the sound of jazz, with a preference for the jazz of the seventies and eighties and often groups of three or four instrumentalists. Restaurants, on the other hand, prefer classical music, Debussy and Mozart. And, although Mozart may feel out of place to me in a country that eschews extravagance, Debussy or Ravel are perfectly in keeping with it. A people that listens to jazz is a people that favors human exchange.

  A jazz lover myself, I walk into the famous Yamano Music shop in the Ginza district hoping to unearth a recording I have not heard of Bill Evans, whom I think is one of the greatest pianists of the genre. I find a rare DVD. Back at the hotel, I slip the disc into the Sony player and listen and watch as the trio play: Bill Evans, Marc Johnson and Joe La Barbera. There is in Bill Evans’ playing a sensitivity, a precision, a presence and a clarity that make me love humanity. His ‘sound colors’ are reminiscent of Gabriel Fauré’s and Claude Debussy’s.

  I would like to transpose those ‘sound colors’ into ‘olfactory colors.’

  Cabris, Monday 22 March 2010

  Works in progress

  I am back in my workshop this morning, and at my table, where a number of projects are in progress. There are three colognes based on different themes waiting for me there. One, the mint cologne that I have already mentioned, I have put aside for now. The second is a cologne based on elemi – the citru
s-smelling resin from an exotic tree. The third is based on mandarins and I have christened it Eau de mandarine bleue, a playful title inspired by the poet Paul Éluard, although he preferred oranges.

  I also have a new Garden perfume underway and have christened it Un Jardin sur le Toit, a homage to the terrace at 24 Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which, during the Second World War, was a vegetable plot intended to provide some produce for the Dumas-Hermès family, and was transformed into a garden when Jean-Louis Dumas took over as chairman of the company. A garden made up of white flowers through the seasons, roses, irises, pansies, impatiens, tulips, not forgetting the pear tree and apple tree.

  The women’s perfume whose draft disappointed me in Hong Kong – but with which I still have an affectionate relationship – may yet turn into something.

  I am also working on the Hermès classics Calèche and Bel Ami, which I am interpreting like jazz standards, with my own sensibilities. I have named them Vétiver de Calèche and Cuir de Bel Ami. I could mention other work, such as Bois amer, Bois de pierre, Fleur de porcelaine and Narcisse bleu, that may never see the light of day.

  For now all these perfumes are ‘in progress.’ Although their names do not reveal much about the form I have in mind for each of them, but they make it easier, once I have set them aside, to find them again. Of course, I could have assigned them codes or numbers, but I prefer names, names are one of the keys to their stories.

  Cabris, Thursday 25 March 2010,

  after listening to the writer Patrick Modiano

  in L’Humeur vagabonde3 on France Inter

  Temperament

  Up until the 1970s, perfumes prided themselves on being accomplished works. They were complex rather than structured; they were piled high, an accumulation, an addition, and afforded only one reading. There was a sort of pretention in this, a desire to dominate that tolerated no criticism. I followed this model when I composed First for Van Cleef & Arpels in 1976. Gorged on analyses of market archetypes, I collected, borrowed and conflated every signal for femininity, wealth and power into this perfume, which, over time, has become alien to me. I certainly do not disown it. The loving relationship I had with it lasted only the time it took to create it.

  With successive creations, the way in which I conceive perfumes has changed. I no longer listen to the market – creativity sometimes needs a deaf ear. I no longer pile in components, I juxtapose them; I no longer combine them, I associate them. My perfumes are accomplished perfumes but not finished ones. Each perfume is linked to the one before and already features the next. That is not to say that they are alike, but they are united by subtle connections. I never take an existing formula as my starting point. Every formula is forgotten once the creation is completed. In fact, I work from memory on variations on a few themes that are special to me; I try to revisit them, correct them and take their form of expression further, somewhere else, in a different direction. None of which means I do not look for new themes. Charles Trenet said that of the thousand songs he wrote only a dozen were successes to his own ears.

  This approach does not imply a desire on my part to impose on people, but a constant need to awaken pleasure and curiosity, and create an exchange. So I deliberately leave gaps, ‘spaces,’ in perfumes for each individual to fill with their own imagination; these are ‘appropriation spaces.’

  Paris, Tuesday 30 March 2010

  ‘Shrewd’

  I am at the Paris book fair with Gérard Margeon, who is Alain Ducasse’s sommelier, and the philosopher Chantal Jaquet, to talk about smells, wine and perfume. Gérard Margeon expresses his hope to see wine tasting go beyond a purely figurative conversation. Citing notes of raspberry, blackcurrant, oak, rose or leather is only a starting point. This sort of vocabulary is used in the first stages of apprenticeship, but it needs expanding with references to location, soil, mineral content and, most importantly, the man who makes the wine. A wine’s character should express the temperament of the man who makes it, otherwise the wine is condemned to responding to market demand and simply pandering to the palate, in other words to repeating itself, using the same formulae to seduce the maximum number of people, and becoming a ‘lowest common denominator’ that no longer really expresses anything. I can sense his longing to set wine free from the canons of taste, which establish its typicity once and for all. This discussion delights me and reinforces my views. I intervene to tell him that – unlike a wine master, who proceeds by assembling the various types of grape, sorting, measuring and adding them – I proceed by subtracting, in order to simplify my perfumes. Where the master of wine is concerned, man adds to nature; as a perfumer, I remove myself from nature to reduce it to the level of signs.

  Chantal Jaquet invites the audience to understand the world through their noses, and not just their eyes, and to question their prejudices about our sense of smell, such as how weak it is and how underdeveloped. She quotes at length from Nietzsche, who said that to philosophize was to ‘have a nose.’ The word ‘shrewd’ recurs frequently in her talk about our sense of smell, and it stirs my curiosity. That same evening, I have fun looking up the definition for it and finding synonyms for it on my computer. A ‘shrewd mind’ is a mind with the ability to grasp things quickly, through intuition and acuity of thought. But there is an element of sixth sense to it too, of sniffing things out: perspicacity, discernment, intuition, insight, sensitivity, subtlety. All of a perfumer’s art summarized in a single word. So could you say perfumers are characterized by this ability to sniff things out, this ‘sixth sense’? The idea is both amusing and gratifying.

  Cabris, Wednesday 7 April 2010

  Canons

  Listening to Gérard Margeon setting himself the task of freeing wine from the canons of taste – canons that are continually exported and imitated, returning to us as an echo of themselves, standardized by other continents – made me think about perfumes and the history of perfumery.

  Until the 1970s perfumes had to comply with standards dictated by bourgeois aesthetics and budgets inherited from the nineteenth century, following the rapid development of the chemicals industry. These standards were defined by the composition of a perfume, the olfactory family it belonged to and its concentration. The composition was determined by the inclusion and choice of accords of different notes: floral, woody, green, spiced, etc. The chief olfactory families were floral, oriental, chypre, citrus and fern. Perfume concentration was defined in terms of how the perfume was used. What is more, apprentice perfumers had to be familiar with some forty archetypes that represented the aesthetic canons of perfumery. By defining these rules, standards and aesthetic canons, perfumers were in possession of a repository of knowledge akin to an inheritance, a tradition and a national identity.

  The only real innovations of the 1980s were the use of new products, be they chemical or natural, and a technique seen as revolutionary: the ‘headspace,’ which made it possible to analyze the smell of flowers in situ, although the resulting information hardly made a convincing contribution in terms of creativity. Perfumery companies were becoming international and shifting from perfumery that had something to offer, to one that responded to demand; this globalized tastes. The rare few innovations likely to give the French market leaders something to think about came from the United States. They included the introduction of the smell of cleanliness, as well as the smell of prudishness, thanks to the widespread use of vaporizers, which were in some senses a natural consequence of prudery (a gesture made far away from the body, gadgetry substituted for the erotic). They also included a tendency to judge a perfume’s marketable value principally by its intensity and staying power.

  It is difficult to classify a perfume nowadays. The raw materials used in perfumes, most of them chemical in origin, are moving away from references to ‘nature.’ The aesthetic approach to composition is no longer a question of adding different accords but a vision of a whole, which means perfumers can fully master its expression. Regrettably, a perfume’s performance – its diffusi
on and intensity – too often takes precedence over elegance, with the sole aim of making it more accessible and of gratifying an international clientele.

  Commercially speaking, old perfumes are no longer venerated, only newcomers are considered. The ten bestsellers in France are recent perfumes, with the exception of Chanel No. 5, Guerlain’s Shalimar and Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium. Within the industry, the future does not really lie in discovering new fragrant raw materials. On the pretext of increasingly strict legislation, of development costs and the countless compulsory safety checks, the budgets allocated to research have been reduced. Chemical manufacturers, who favor molecules with familiar smells that can be produced by the ton, contribute less and less to widening perfumers’ olfactory palette.

  In order to endure, haute perfumery is therefore condemned to inventing new olfactory premises, a new style of writing, to redefining quality, to finding a new form of expression and a new way of behaving towards those who still believe in it and need it. It is only if it is able to meet these exacting requirements that the craft of composing perfumes will reclaim its full meaning and value.