Perfumery Design and Creativity

In an industry where the client is king and innovation is a risk, there has to be someone in the industry still thinking about fragrance design on a deeper and different level. Someone must be thinking about design strategies for winning, commercial fragrances. There has to be someone thinking outside of the box and looking to do new and amazing things.

I need to find him or her.

Relearning the palette

So I’m in my second year in perfumery, going through another perfumery education, and I have to basically relearn everything that I had learned. I am relearning the palette with students who had never studied the raw materials before. And I see how much my skill set has improved over the past two years. Observing the struggles of my colleagues, I am brought back to the first days when I was introduced to the perfumer’s palette.

Learning the raw materials is tough mental process. Thank goodness that I was taught under a very good system. But I remember all of us studying the rose alcohols (ie. PEA, geraniol, citronellol, nerol) and not being able to differentiate them for weeks. I don’t even want to begin with the ionones/irones (violet/iris notes)… ionone alpha, ionone beta, methyl ionone gamma coeur, irone alpha… if I translate what I smelled in terms of a value, ionone alpha would be like 5.0 and ionone beta would be 5.05 and migc would be 4.95 and irone alpha would be 4.97. While these numbers are arbitrary, what I am trying to demonstrate is when you smell this family of raw materials you know you are smelling an ionone/irone, a “5″, but I would struggle to find the distinguishing facets between these raw materials. As months of training passed smelling and working with them, the raw materials “separate” out as if their smell value moved away from each other… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Now, each ionone is a world apart from another. Amber notes, musks, and sandalwood notes in the same aspect are also tough families to learn because they all contain raw materials that smell very similar.

The family of rose ketones – alpha damascone, beta damascone, and damascenone (also, the citrus oils… oh boy!) used to be a problematic. My head was pounding trying to figure out the difference between orange oil, bitter orange oil, and mandarine oil… now I look back and I chuckle, “how could I possibly have mixed up these raw materials?”

As you expand your olfactive memory, you have to constantly update your olfactive memory. You may learn the smell of geraniol and citronellol and they smell alike in the beginning of your learning. You find facets to distinguish them and with lots of olfactive practice, they become two different smells: 1 and 1.2. And then you smell rhodinol (ex. geranium) which is a mixture of citronellol and geraniol extracted from geranium. Now you have a raw material that falls between 1 and 1.2 as, 1.1 for rhodinol. As a student, you have to continue to find a way to distinguish rhodinol from citronellol and geraniol.

With thousands of notes to learn, your nose has to become finer and finer to find the details that separate one raw material from another.

It is exciting relearning the basic palette with the knowledge of the raw materials that I had learned from my previous perfumery school plus the extra few hundreds of raw materials (mostly specialities) that I learned by myself as an assistant perfumer because I am able to find new combinations that I would not have been able to make because I did not have those references.

And I realize that my nose has become finer and finer in terms of distinguishing raw materials… to have a strong and wide olfactive base, as mentioned before, is important. When I learned the smell of liffarome back in the day, I had already smelled cis 3 hexenyl acetate. Liffarome smells is finer, greener, and fruiter version of cis 3 hexenyl acetate. It is a simple mental description but it does the job until I discover another raw material that share the same characteristic as liffarome, the description stands good and efficient.

I’m seeing the perfumery matrix now… yeah!

Antoine De Saint-Exupery on Design

“You know you’ve achieved perfection in design, Not when you have nothing more to add, But when you have nothing more to take away.”