Use your nose and win hashish… well almost.
I was walking around in Paris with a lady friend, and two guys approached us wanting a “feuille” (the paper to roll up a cigarette). Being that my friend smokes, she offered one to them. I smelled that one of the guys was wearing a fragrance… with a feminine accord, X, that I knew intimately. I was really curious because perhaps there exists a men’s fragrance with X and a masculine twist to it and I would love to know about it.
So I asked him, “so I’m curious, which fragrance are you wearing right now?” I see the guy’s eyes light up, “you know, everyone keeps asking me this – it’s my little secret.”
“Are you wearing women’s perfume? I asked.
“Maybe…” he responded with a smirk.
“Amor Amor by Cacharel.” I smiled.
“High Five!”
Then the guy said to his friend, “They are so cool! Hey man, give them some free hashish.” I have never smoked in my life so I was very much less interested than my friend. However, his friend was very reluctant and wanted to be compensated, so nothing came out of it.
So… use your nose and win some hashish… well almost.
Surge of Creativity
Lately, I having been wake up in the middle of the night with ideas floating in my brain. I scramble in the darkness, one hand for the light switch, the other hand for a notebook. Accords and raw materials float around in my head and like the fusion of atoms, collide together.
Fig leaves. Cypriol. Loukhoum. Peony. Prunol. Ethyl Linalol. Tobacco leaves. Coranol. Tiaré. Methyl Pamplemousse. Rhubofix. Tangerinol. Immortelle. Ethyl Safranate. Osmanthus. Teas. Amberketal. Carrot Seed. Iso Tabac. Prunella. Lychee. Loukhoum.
I am tired having to do perfumery in my brain. Time to create my organ…
The sensitive perfumer, mental strength, and passion.
I have always had this love for people. My father is a kind and special man, a professor in the sciences but also a teacher in life and day by day, I realize that I find more and more of him in me. When I was a child, people always mentioned that I was special and that I had a gift, a gift of sensibility. I could look at someone and I could see right through him… I could sense pain and I could sense need and I knew what they needed. I have always had a calling to help people.
Because of this gift and this desire to “help,” I felt that it was obvious to be a doctor. I wanted to help heal and to be invested in people’s lives. I have always been a listener because I am naturally curious about people – I want to hear about their experiences in life. And this job as a doctor would allow me to do all of this. This would become the greatest battle in my life: the choice between being a doctor and a perfumer. But being a perfumer won, and I’ll save the reason for another day.
I would like to disagree that there is a link between being sensitive and weakness. I have overcome and endured more things so early in life (and some experiences that I hope young people will never have to experience so young)… near-death experiences, deaths of close ones, great sickness/accidents, having to leave my country at such a young age, living in a foreign country, surviving this perfumery industry 
, and so on – but I am so blessed to be in pristine health. All these experiences have made my skin thick and given me great mental strength to deal with stress/competition/injustices/rejection, but my heart is still soft. But sometimes I wonder how I have the tenacity to stay sane over the past 2 years of my life… and I attribute that to my passion for the job.
The strange thing about passion is a blessing and a curse combined. To feel true passion is feeling the entire spectrum of emotions that one could feel and that means great pain and great joy. I was talking to a great perfumer before leaving for Paris about passion. I explained how I lived a life that felt like a flatline and after following my passion, I felt emotions that I never felt in my life and it was great even though it included extreme pain but it came with extreme happiness. All he did in terms of responding was to nod as if he understood what I meant. I am rather discrete with my experience in the fragrance industry, but there is one person in my life that knows half of what I felt and experienced (and that is more than anyone does of me) and this young woman is still in Grasse. And this is just the beginning…
Though I may not have directly met and talked with all of them, I have at least seen most of the fine fragrance perfumers that I have wanted to see in person. They are all very different. If you just spend a minute to look and observe them, you can almost see the thick skin that protects them emotionally but behind all of that, I see many who are fragile inside. I know all have “suffered” to some degree during their careers. So I am starting to understand why they always say that one needs to have great mental strength to be a perfumer.
Respect.
I wish I could have met Laurent Bruyère
I love the rose and why is it that I want to do perfumery…
I ran into the writing of a woman who wrote about perfume and the rose and she said that she loves men who love roses, and who therefore loves women; only true men know how to appreciate them (I am guessing that them being both roses and women).
The rose is my favorite flower. While I did not have jasmine (and roses) growing in the fields around me like the Grassois, I had roses around me. I lived in three different houses in California during my youth and my father planted roses in every garden that we had. Olfactively, I have jasmine and tubereuse and lily of the valley running close behind in terms of liking but the rose takes me over emotionally.
I want and will create a great rose solifleur one day – I have an idea already: a rose with violet leaves; a green, fruity, cucumber accord; cassis; bitter orange; a prune base, damascones, ionones, a touch of praline, rose absolute/oils from Grasse, geranium bourbon, a special honey base, apricot, Indian sandalwood, patchouly, touches of jasmine absolute and animalic notes for the base.
And women. I truly love women. There are many reasons why I want to do perfumery, but one of the reasons is that it would be my gift to women, the people who had contributed to who I am today. A beautiful woman with good perfume is even more beautiful. A woman with a beautiful fragrance makes my heart beat.
My motivations for perfumery are pure… I do not care about my salary (though I want to make my company lots of money) or about fame. I just want to learn perfumery, win projects, and put fragrances on the market. Only if it were that simple.
I need to formulate!!
My passion for pefumery is going strong, but I going through a difficult time with my career (though I do not deny how blessed I am with where I am and my current education/professional situation). The fundamental problem is I am not formulating. This is what drives me crazy and this is what gives me creative pain. Like I mentioned before that I gave up a wonderful position where I got my hands dirty all day weighing formulas and creating formulas with access to a full palette… where I worked as a trainee perfumer, and I gave it away to go back to perfumery school and to work in another company. This is the unhealthy thought that I keep going to, but I know that as this decision might not make sense, it is all for the better.
To put myself back into another perfumery school was my choice, and I knew this was going to catch up to me. But to be able to only touch the raw materials 2 out of a 30 school day cycle drives me insane. And then the other 60 percent of the time, I am working in a new fragrance company but there I cannot formulate also (hopefully that will change) and my work title puts me quite far from fragrance creation there.
I have been trying to figure out a solution to this problem. To get more formulation time at school is not possible. I am waiting for my company’s decision on the formulation end. The simple solution from the beginning was to make my own organ. But the simple solution is not so simple. Realistically speaking, I am in an economic slump where I just sent off a big check to pay for my perfumery “education” and I barely get paid anything working in my company (please do not get my wrong, this is not a complaint – I would work for free for any fragrance company because I love what I am doing). I am living in Paris, and I honestly cannot afford living here, but I am doing everything to make ends meet.
Even if I had the money, there are lots of logistics to figure out. I have been thinking about them because I really might have to borrow some money and resort to creating my own organ. There are 600 or so raw materials that I would love to use, but inherently, I know that I could get away with the fundamental 200. Then I need to procure them and there is no way I could afford large quantities of raw materials, so I have to find an outlet for small quantities. Then the naturals, this will be more difficult due to cost and the little quantity that I would have to order of each one. Then I have to find a balance of high precision (this is no longer a simple DYI projet where I can get away with counting drops). Then I have to procure ethanol and distilled water then 15 ml bottles and caps. Then I have to figure about storing all the raw materials (buying an extra fridge), finding room in my mini Parisian apartment to fit everything.
That being all said, hopefully my company will let me formulate!
Use it: Helvetolide by Firmenich
The thing I love about Firmenich is they have talented team of chemists in Geneva helping add wonderful musks into the perfumer’s palette. For me, helvetolide is the “best” musk available to the public. Best, I mean its effect/modernity/aesthetic value to price ratio – and best in terms of personal affinity to its smell. Firmenich perfumers are lucky to be able to use large quantities of this raw materials (and boy, do you smell it in their creations!). Cosmone (Givaudan) is fantastic, “nitro” musk but still really expensive – at least for now (Cosmone is still a young molecule in the open palette).
Helvetolide is a musk with an ambrette quality to it (for me its a modern ambrettolide) and also a fruity, green touch of pear. It adds great volume to a fragrance and fills in the “gaps” that habanolide cannot. It is a “top” musk because you can really smell its presence in a fragrance from top to bottom. You can use this musk anywhere. While sometimes musks are said to be a more of a “masculine” or “feminine” musk, helvetolide has no bounds.
I would love to say that helvetolide would marry well with “this and that” but, it is so facetted that I could find a way to work in helvetolide in any accord. And I have seen this musk being used everywhere from chypres to fougeres. But I do have to say that helvetolide is very nice in chypres with its marriage with patchouli and floral notes within. I have noticed that helvetolide is great to help support transient fruity accords in the top notes.
If you are not familiar with this raw material, give it a try!
- Alex Lee
Ambroxan makes you think of me, Alex Lee?
Ambroxan is a fantastic/powerful but expensive amber note used in modern day perfumery. It was a pretty strange raw material to learn and it took me a bit of time to really understand it two years ago.
Interestingly, the fragrances in my rotation that I wear the most often consist of an overdose of ambroxan (no, I do not wear Molecule 2 as a fragrance). I am smelling my sweatshirt, and I smell the dry down of a fragrance that has about 5 times the ambroxan than a typical fine fragrance. So I have been sporting these fragrances, when I can of course, at my new perfumery school. Being that we are all perfumery students, we are really in tune as to what people are wearing. After we were introduced to ambroxan in our olfaction class, the students started to link this raw material to me because I always smelled of ambroxan.
After our first olfactive test several weeks ago, which consisted of ambroxan, several students thanked me by saying, “hey, when I smell ambroxan, I think of you Alex!” I am excited because now, I am tied olfactively to the future perfumers in my class and whenever they will use/smell ambroxan, they will think about me… time to restart the cycle with iso e super… muhaha.
Anyways… unfortunately, I was not familiar with these “ambroxan” fragrances when I was learning this raw material because if I did, I would have grasped this raw material in no time.
The lonely job… (part 1)
“Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.” Lou Dorfsman
During the past two years, I was lucky to be able to talk to many perfumers. If you listen closely enough, even though it is never said explicitly, they indirectly tell you: “perfumery is a lonely career.” During an important interview, I was asked the question: “how do you deal with loneliness?” (I told the interviewer, not to worry because I am used to it.)
It was very difficult to imagine this to be true in the beginning. On the outside, you see the perfumers working with other perfumers on projects. Then you have perfumers constantly working in contact with evaluators, clients, and so on. But perhaps the loneliness is not so much based on the number of people around you.
I am a social butterfly and I love meeting people. I have lots of wonderful friends in my life in Paris (in, France), so on that personal level, I am not “alone,” but I feel horribly alone in my career. I am in a new perfumery school with 19 other perfumery students, but I feel “alone” – and it is not even that I do not fit in, in fact, I fit in REALLY well.
Now the thing is, not many people get a chance to have a basic perfumery education and then even fewer get to get a more in-depth perfumery education. Perfumery is highly technical and another language. Maybe the “loneliness” exists in all forms of highly technical work. Cooks can talk to their friends of salt, vinegar, carrots, and poultry. Computer programmers/engineers run on a language of Java (before, C++), but I reckon that there are millions of people who know Java today.
I had a very unique experience… I believe that I received a good basic education in perfumery and I learned much more working within the companies that I had the chance to work for. While no one “held my hand”, I learned by myself and by asking questions and by listening and observing and being resourceful. It is humbling to wake up every day realizing that I still know “nothing” about perfumery.
I expanded my olfactive memory two-folds by smelling raw materials on my own and observing how these raw materials worked in the perfumers’ (who I worked for) formulas. I learned the most in my last company because I had a company that recognized my value and potential… and they trusted me to give me work. I had a computer with a perfumer’s software where I could create my formulae and I had access to the entire palette and technology and I worked to produce formulae. And I compounded nearly a thousand formulas for the other perfumers. I realize that I am lucky because not many young perfumery students get to have this privledge to get this chance.
While working with formulas, you begin to understand formulation. Your olfactive memory improves and you begin to understand how each raw material reacts with each other. On the side, I trained and added to my basic vocabulary. With a better understanding of fragrance structures and the raw materials, I realized that when I went into the perfumery stores, everything started to make sense.
My company wanted to keep me and officially train me as a trainee perfumer to join their fragrance team, but I sold my soul to the industry in Paris and now I am back in school (in a university setting) and working in a company where I am so far away from creation. This was the most difficult decision that I had to make…
So in school, I am still a “beginner” like all my colleagues, but the loneliness seeps in because I see perfumery in another context than all the other students because they had just started their experience in the perfumery world. I’m the second oldest in my class (24) and they are all a lot younger. I am relearning all the raw materials, which is great because I am correcting my weaknesses. But I am surrounded by all this theory and so little practice. You cannot learn perfumery from a book and sitting in a classroom (but again, it’s the best opportunity for a young student to begin)! But it is all theory that I had already picked up from my previous education and what I did not learn before in a educational setting, I had learned naturally because I love perfumery… from reading, from staying up to date with the industry, from talking to perfumers, evaluators, marketers, businessmen, from simply working in a company. The thing that keeps me sane is that I put it in my mind that I am here to fill in the holes that I needed to fill (and I have learned quite a bit of new things) and that maybe I can share my experiences and knowledge with students around me. And it’s also finding this balance between wanting to share and not coming off as a know-it-all.
Then I am happy to be working at a great company in Paris, but naturally based on the context, it is really humbling to restart at 0 and working in a department 2 degrees of separation away from creation (and having no access to the organ). I do not complain and I give 100 percent on my work and I even stay late afterwork because I love to work and I want to give to my company and my work is indirectly helping my company win. It is a challenge trying to learn about creation, but I am learning by listening and being resourceful. This is where having to be patient kicks in.
But I feel so disconnected from my immediate co-workers even though we work in a fragrance company… we’ll take a break to go back to a similar experience…
I remember my first internship in a fragrance company (I give my thanks to where it is due). I began my career in the quality control lab where I ran tests on incoming and outgoing perfumery raw materials. I was with a lab full of scientists and technicians and the bustle and workload made the hours pass very quickly. I was always in good company and my coworkers were amiable and present as we worked together as a team.
However, I was lonely inside. I was only a floor away from some of the best perfumers in Grasse and the creative laboratory where the assistant perfumers and compounders worked, and yet it felt like I was miles away. I had the chance to run tests on beautiful natural raw materials like, rose and jasmine absolutes from Grasse, tuberose, rose oils, liveche, everlasting, davana, castoreum, vetiver etc. Of course, I got the chance to work with quite a bit of synthetic raw materials. I was excited to work with these raw materials even if it meant only to take their densities and their flashpoints.
The difficulty was that no one else shared the excitement. My handles tembled for the first time when I had 20 grams of rose absolute centifolia in my hands because a kilo of this raw material costs thousands and thousands of euros. I sneaked in as many sniffs as possible. While all these wonderful materials passed through the labs, I observed that my co-workers did not even bother to smell the raw materials and these raw materials meant nothing but a piece of job for them to do. This is not a critique and I do not blame and judge them because the scope of their job is different than mine.
I remember testing Dewfruit, which is a famous base used in one of the best selling fragrances, and then Cassis base, another famous fruity base (one of Jean Claude Ellena’s favorite raw materials). While everything had a certain meaning for me, but it meant nothing for the others. This is where the loneliness comes from. I felt like I did not belong there….
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