Just onions

Sometimes you feel like you have nothing more to say, everything has been said in this way or another, so why even bother?

Then you enter your small Parisian kitchen for a coffee, and directly you smell onions cut just half an hour ago, invading your kitchen with this sour, unpleasant fustiness that actually makes you think that this is probably what death itself would smell like.

And then instead of any anxiety or disgust you are just there in the kitchen and you are amazed by this very fragrant molecule that is taking more and more air over in your apartment uncontrollably and you just say thank you to God, or to whoever you think has made this happen, and you know that tomorrow is going to be a different day, and amazing things are just about to come and you can still create beautiful olfactive stories that are original and creative, just as this is not the first time you have smelled tired onions either but you have never seen it this way, it's new and though unfriendly, but very charming.

It smells like magic...

I am preparing the concentrate of my new perfume to be launched; and on a foggy night in the middle of September, suddenly it is Christmas already.


The raw materials are sacred again. I use every pipette as if they were made from diamonds. I smell carefully each one before throwing it delicately to the bin next to me. Slowly I am getting high from all the beautiful olfactory impulses, I am thinking maybe a few grams of cocaine could have the same effect.  Even my perfume organ seems different, it looks more rustic today, like an great emperor with a lot of personality. I wouldn't exclude the possibility that it has magical abilities, something like that closet to Narnia or a powerful pendent.

Once someone told me that contrary to romantic expectations, most people will not be continuously in love with their chosen partners. In real life, it is more like you fall in love with the 'One' again again and again. This is what's happening with me tonight. I fell in love with perfumery for the second time: It is champagne and rose once again, instead of dirty dishes and daily routine.

I love my job. I love being a perfumer. I love being surrounded with scents so noble, so rare, so expensive. I enjoy the complete serenity of the moment. I am submissive and humble towards the great art of perfumery. I feel grateful. I am amazed by my own creativity, and how my work turned out to be so enchanting, intoxicating and radiantly erotic.

Paris is waking up

I haven't slept but a few hours only, it is still early. Anyways, anything before 9 o clock on a Sunday morning is considered dawn in France, so here I am sitting on my terrace with nothing but my thoughts and the view of Paris waking up leisurely.

 

It's just the very second day of September, but Paris is already cold,  grey and unfriendly in her own moody-whimsical way. There are a few birds on the neighboring roof trying to make it sound like it was spring again, but they soon get tired, muffled and eventually fly away. It is still gloomy and there is this fuzziness in the cold air, giving a quite mysterious edge to this new day. 

I am very conscious of time passing by. I always have been. I am very conscious of the preciousness of every single moment, if anybody I do live in the present. To the point that from the future, I am continuously longing for the nostalgic feeling of the moment that is about to pass. I live as if I was born at the time of war, when you don't know if there would be a tomorrow, so you just live as there wasn't cause you know one day, you' ll be right.   

Today, I woke up in a different mood. There is no rush to enjoy, there is no rush to produce or profit. There is just me and this bittersweet Parisian morning in front of me, smelling crispy, like fresh rose petals, chilly like the cool elegance iris root with the touch of something dark and murky like grisambrol - a synthetic raw material that resembles the odor of diluted naphthalene.  

Smells like rain

I would sit down with a coffee on my new parisian balcony and would read and tan under the sun. It was unusually hot, so I slowly started taking off more and more layers of clothes without shocking any neighbors or eventually finding myself on YouTube.

I got myself in "surrounding scent analysis mode" instead of paying attention to my moderately interesting new perfume book. It smelled just summer in the city. Heavy, dusty, fatty notes mixed with car pollution that my nose (mind?) translated into a rich, spicy-sweet carnation. 

I smelled thunder arriving soon, but I didn't expect actually and literally seeing it coming. Have you ever experienced watching heavy raining approaching while you are still standing a few meters away in the dry-zone? 
The smell of rain was arriving even faster, a beautifully earthy, unmistakable aroma as the fat drops harshly hit the dried sun-burnt soil. Powdery yet watery, dirty but still so clean... like lotus flowers with finely grated cloves.

Any summer rain is starting to be refreshing only after a few minutes, before that the humidity only accentuates the heat. This first minutes are the most interesting part for scent observation.
This is when a lovely jasmine flower suddenly has a rotten fruit side or a linden tree's widely spread aroma turns into a lazy marshmallow, just so that another few minutes or seconds later any facets of any fragrant molecules are washed away by what smells like watermelon with a touch of carrot.

Olfactive Flashback XI.

One of my best friend here in Grasse invited me over for dinner on Saturday night. I think it is the start of the goodbyes' series already, but I tried not to think about it.

She is an excellent cook, I was served chicken with asparagus. For the asparagus, she wanted to prepare a sauce made of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Her olive oil bottle was almost empty, so I helped her to refill it with their stock of olive oil coming directly from Tunisia. We wasted a lot of oil in the "rebottling" process, but most importantly I had another olfactive flashback when the thick aroma of the pure olive oil hit my nose.

To my biggest surprise, it took me back to my grandmother's house, inside the bedroom, changing the bed linen. The clean bad linen -stored carefully until usage into my grandma's cupboard ca. 25 years ago- smelled exactly the same like the scent of some premium quality extra virgin olive oil from Tunisia. Fatty, green, earthy and a bit acid too.

The smell was not "alike" nor "similar", it was the SAME. I know it. With my nose, with my brain where the scent directly went to poke that part where this particular scent was stocked just until now, to fill my head with memories and my heart with warmth and love.

Grasse - Paris, one way please

In 3 weeks time I am moving away from Grasse for good. As much as it is difficult to leave this place, I think had my dose. I had my "obligatory" 3 years spent in the cradle of perfumery, like all famous noses had at a certain point of their education. I am now one of them; one of the tiny group of people in an already small club of perfumers.

Grasse taught me the admiration for natural raw materials, I do believe there is no more ideal place to learn that. It was a priceless experience in a special environment, where the perfume industry is so concentrated and so intensely active.

Weird it might sound, but it is not in perfumery that I have learnt the most. It is the continuous personal development that everybody goes through who comes here for a definite time. I would say, it is a common "side effect" for all perfumers passing by Grasse.

3 years of living alone, being far from your beloved ones; managing alone in the highly competitive perfume industry makes you tougher, stronger, more confident, more wise but you cannot spare the suffering and pain you pay for the 'lessons'.

As the greatest mentors, Grasse made me a better perfumer and a better person.

I will miss it. I will miss my friends who turned into my family during the years. I will miss the beautiful climate the South of France is so famous for. I will miss the magnificent surrounding valleys blooming thousands of different type of flowers, a world class experience for both the eyes and for the nose.

I will miss my amazing jasmine bush on my beautiful terrace, which blooms exceptionally two months early this year... Probably to say goodbye to me in a proper way, to please me with its narcotic aroma on my last few days. Never had a nicer farewell gift.

Olfactive Flashback X.

The official odor description by Symrise says : highly diffusive, powdery-woody, with notes of ambergris aroma chemical.

Less official odor description: I am at age 10, I stand next to the corn crumbling machine, the white powdery notes of dry cob are mixed with the rusty metallic notes of the old apparatus. These two together, they echo the musty white walls of the chamber in my grandmother's garden. I am not happy, because according to my father, we have to finish crumbling all the corn in the old wooden storage behind the summer kitchen - all of them, by the end of our vacation. What vacation? - I am thinking...

My dissatisfaction is reflected by the dryness and the dark ambery aspect of the scent.

Perfumery is really miraculous. How else would it be possible that a single raw material smells exactly like one complete memory-flow?!

I swear I am smelling this the first time of my life!!!

...This was kind of the motto of my class while still in school following the initial perfumery training...

When there is more than 1000 raw materials ( naturals and synthetics together ) to know by heart, you of course, would expect that some of them are really resembling to one another. Indeed, sometimes, there is a tiny aspect of mustiness or a difference in the volatility that makes you know that these two samples are not the same.

On the other hand, day by day, you start to smell different nuances from the same sample you practiced on yesterday. Sometimes this discovery comes while doing blind tests, and that's the time when you would put your hands into fire for proving that this is a completely different raw material. Cause, no way, it smells so strong this time, so bitter, so etc, and you insist that you have been probably absent when the others learned this specific ingredient.

Here you are, some of my big discoveries from recently:

- Since when coconut aldehyde smells like celery?

- Why suddenly white musk smells like an ambery chocolate?

- How come bitter orange smells like humid tobacco leaves?

- Is it a bad sample, or lime oil DOES smell like marzipan?

- Since when chamomile smells like dry cognac?

Different nuances are sometimes linked to the humidity of the air, general weather or what have you smelled or ate just before. Sometimes, it is your nose becoming more sensitive to a special aspect, e.g. you detect more easily the spicy notes.

While these could be really confusing, apart from being an obligatory passage for all perfumers, it is going to be of a great help for formulation exercises. If you happen not to know that tarragon has a fruity side with green mango nuances, you will never end up with a relatively short, but beautifully natural, zesty, round mango accord.

Learning the different aspects of perfume ingredients is the basis for creating fragrances "in your mind". Once you can list by heart all the aspect of a certain perfume ingredient even if you are awaken in the middle of the night, you are ready to make intelligent perfume associations.

Olfactive Flashback IX.

There is this recipe that I wanted to try for such a long time now, and today I had enough time to finally make it.

I needed to cook the celery ( already cut into cubes ) first.

After like 10 minutes of boiling them, I realized that there is a beautifully ethereal, coconut-milky scent that is coming from my kitchen.

The scent with an instant calming effect took slowly over my apartment. It was tenderly sweet, not too sugary, with hints of sandalwood, enveloping me into a wonderful feeling of full peace and comfort. After a while, I wasn't smelling the celery aspect anymore, only a bit of earthy-ness reminded me of that perhaps, and I was back to my childhood.

I know I am not supposed to remember those times when I was still breast fed, but I directly had this scent associated with my Mother. Without any specific memory, I felt this amazing fullness, being in safe, being taken care of, nurtured, protected.

So either cooking celery made me unconsciously remember me of the times of being breast fed, or there was an angel passing by in Grasse.

January in Grasse

In the wintertime, Grasse smells like a juicy melon just taken out from the freezer.