Snow and love

There was still snow on the street as I stepped out of my building, but there was summer in the air. I was still wearing my winterjacket and a few other layers underneath but it felt like a careless night in the middle of August, intoxicated with some strangely intense feelings to a stranger.
The colors are more vivid. My senses are sharpened.
Is this all because of him? Is this all because of his smoky vetyver like smelling neck that I got a stolen olfactory glance only?
It s not a crush. It is not this maddeding passion I feel. It is my heart blooming, it is my soul cheering and my mind opening.
I feel alive.

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.

Olfactive Flashback VII.

It was at my fellow perfumer's house.

She bought some alcohol for me from Italy - it wasn't a gift, it's a 1 liter bottle of pure (95%, ideal for perfumery) alcohol that independent perfumers are obliged to smuggle around with, because selling and buying pure alcohol is highly restricted in France.

She invited me over to her place to take it with me after spending a nice lunchtime on a terrace catching up with each others on-going projects.

We walked up to her door in the dark building that for some reason smelled like tomato leaf and not like amber or patchouli as any normal old dark building would smell like. We entered the small artsy apartment she rents. She showed me around and she invited me to the living room for a drink. There it hit me.

This time again, the memories were coming faster than my brain trying consciously make notes of the present olfactory notes.

I was young again, around 5, a few years after my grandfather died. We - My mum and a few cousin of mine - spent a few weeks in the summertime at my grandmother's house in a small village, "behind the back of God".

I was at my grandmother's kitchen.

I could clearly smell the dust on the shelf for glasses which were kept for guests only. I smelled the dark and bitter cacao powder in its soon-to-be rusty metallic container. I smelled the cheap light green paint and its uneven layers on the old month-eaten wood cupboard, where the dinner service was stored. I smelled these as if I was at grandmother's kitchen. Exactly the same proportions. Beautifully dosed. Round and alive.

Bringing me back all the carefreeness and greediness of my childhood in a blink of an nose.

How come a fortunate and rather rare alignment of some random fragrant molecules are powerful enough to take me back to a place so quickly, diffusing so many visual memories and emotions?

I never thought of that smell in the last 25 years! - In fact, I don't think I ever consciously thought of that smell at all...

I am not sure what it was. And it was only passing by lazily, and disappeared in a few minutes later. I will probably never really understand these flashbacks, but in this period of anxiety, extreme stress as well as creative/emotional roller - coasters; I don't think there could have been any scent more nurturing and cocooning to me.

Where is ScentTrek when I really need it?!

Brown butter

My skin smells like half cooked baby carrots on brown butter today. Sweet, rich, caramel-like, with a touch of earthy notes.

My Signature Scents

I create a lot of custom perfumes, and each and every client want The One Scent that would match their skin to perfection, their signature scent.

Everybody I know got into the eternel quest of finding their soul-mate perfume. Just like everybody wants to find their - normal - soul mate. The One. True Love.

I think your true love is The One you can fall in love many times during your life.

I personally cannot be loyal to just one perfume during my whole life. I also think that this expectation is irrealistic, by the way.

I need continous impulses again and again. It's in my blood.

Paralel to love affairs, in your life, you might have :

• bunch of perfume-crushes ( Chanel/Cristalline Eau Verte, Paco Rabanne/1 Million, etc)
• a few unreturned loves ( Casharel/Eden, YSL/Nude )
• a few of those that you admire from far but you know that it will never work between you and them ( Nina Ricci/Nina, DG/Light Blue, Guerlain/L'Heure Bleu )
• and some that turns from friendship to love slowly slowly ( Dior/Dolce Vita, Lutens/SMLR)

But you can only experience true love one or two times maximum during your life.

The perfumes I go home to are Hugo Boss/Boss Bottled and Viktoria Minya/Hedoist ...and they always welcome me with open arms.

Hedonist sometimes punishes me for wearing other stuff for a few days by adding a sour layer to the divine floral one, but we always get back together in less than a week time and than I promise I won't be unfaithfull ever again ...until an attractive little thing turns my head (recently Hermes/Jardin Sur Le Toit ).

I also often go back to my ex lovers; I sometimes crave the presence of Kenzo/Jungle, or I cannot wait to go home and put on Rive Gauche Pour Homme. I recently took another try with some exes with who I felt we have unfinished businesses (Laura Biagiotti/Sotto Voce ).

With JoMalone/Lime and Basil I had a bad liason, but there is something about her that drives me crazy and makes me do the same mistake again and again.

Im into orgies too every now and than, and I would put on just anything that looks a bit good from the outside. Than I have this urge to conquire, so if there are no perfumes around, I staisfy my ignoble desires with any showergels or hair sprays. My nostrils are always open for any new opportunities.

In fact, with perfumes, I am a total bisexual bitch.

Coffee, anyone?!

It is almost 5am in France. It's been exactly 197 minutes I am tossing and turning in my bed, but my eyes cannot close, I feel fresher than any mornings I remember in my entire life and I just cannot wash off the huge grin from my face. I am so pumped!

I received the best news a perfumer can ever get: My first creation is going to be on sale in the world's most famous luxury department store, in Harrods! I was told that their buyer was enchanted by the "sophisticated and tastefully original" perfume centered around mimosa and placed an order without any hesitation.

I still cannot believe it. My creation on the same shelves with Chanel's exclusives and Versace's special editions! I need somebody to pinch me to make sure it is not a dream!

Harrods is a reference I didn't even dare to dream of! If somebody told me at the time when I first visited the shopping center that my perfume will be on those shelves in a few years, I would have laughed so loud out that probably security would have escorted me out directly from the Egyptian interior...

I went to Harrods at age of 24. I was on a few months long mission in London, when I was still in HR, intensively collecting money for the Grasse Insitute of Perfumery. With my french colleagues, after visiting every possible monuments a tourist could visit, we went for a round in the famous mall just to add it to our "UK-done" list. At the end of our visit, we realized that we have spent more than double the bonus we were about to be paid for the UK mission.

No wonder. The changing rooms were bigger than my apartment in Ile St Louis, the carpet was the most fluffiest thing my feet ever touched. I still don't understand the trick with the mirrors inside the changing rooms, but they gave the most charming reflection I have ever seen. It was like I were instantly photoshopped in those mirrors. To the point that I looked at least 10 pounds less in them. ( ...which perhaps paid an important role to the fact that I bought an extremely expensive lingerie for myself on that occasion. )

And Harrods smelled like a coffee. Well before spending a ridiculous amount of money on lingerie, my nose was searching for the source of that beautifully round but strong coffee accord appeased with light ambery notes and a touch of salty ylang-ylang. They were introducing the new A*men Pure Coffee collection from Thierry Mugler on ground zero, hence Harrods' exclusive walls were impregnated with coffee, and I have kept for years the A*men fragrance paper strip they have given me.

I cannot wait to smell the combination of mimosa and coffee.

French

I prefer the french language when speaking about perfumes, it is much more expressive than english. My favorite term is used when describing the "chemistry" between two raw materials:

English would say, e.g. white pepper oil and osmanthus are smelling nice together or they are matching. French are using the expression "se marie bien", i.e. that white pepper oil and osmanthus are "well married".

Creation

Some of you are asking me if creation is a pleasure or rather suffering for me. It is kind of both, really.

The moments of inspiration are of course thrilling, but when despite hundreds of trials, the scent is not perfectly expressing the feelings it was created for, composing becomes frustrating.

In most of the cases, creating is therapy. Maybe not when I am asked to compose a very powerful smelling jasmine-pink pepper for a shower gel in India for X USD per kilograms, but it really is, when I transform my experiences, feelings and memories into scents.

It is therapy, when I create from this inner urge piling up in me during many days just to burst out with elementary forces to settle down into a pile of raw materials in a brown bottle. The urge is so strong that I usually get afraid of it and try ignoring for a few days, but I get more and more nervous, more and more disturbed, the stress coming directly from my stomach, which won't ease until I "weight it out" in essential oils on a balance.

It's been a few days I am feeling melancholic and the melody of "mad world" constantly playing in my head. I came home after work, tried to postpone creation, feeling uncertain about it's outcome. I started with cleaning all the shelves. Then, I noted all the quantity of lab supplies at home, starting from pipettes to bottles and spatulas. Then, when there was nothing else to be done, I started to sharpen my pencils that I use for formulation.

I smoked the last cigarette I found in my apartment, and was enjoying feeling guilty. I still think that blowing out thick smoke from my lips is one of the best things in life. I was ready to make the juice. Inspired by the smoke of the cigarette, I added quickly vertyver to the formula I have drafted in my head already a couple of days ago.

It's been a few nights I have been dreaming with grisambrol, no question what mad world smells like.
Grasse gave me another push for creating a deviant perfume with sending dark clouds to quickly take over the arrogantly smiling sun. I would have been happy to hear a few thunders but getting an impromptu rainstorm is probably the maximum one can ask in the middle of the sunniest week of may in the French Riviera.

Grisambrol is a very animalic and ambery, dark and earthy. I put into the juice 500 over 1000. This would scare away any potent perfumer, and they are right, in theory, but I softened down the animalic part with bergamot and angelica root, which makes the perfume still dark but clean, deep but soft, earthy but fresh. The structure is very unusual, so it is more of a sillage than a typical mainstream perfume with well defined top/heart/base notes, but I prefer it this way.

Rain just stopped when I was done with my first trial. I still have a few hundreds to go and no more cigarettes.

Jasmine

It is worth it to be separated from my family and most of my beloved ones.

It is worth it to work in a field where competition is the highest within your own team.

It is worth it to live in a small city where during off-season, there are only you and stray dogs on the street after 7pm.

I have been waiting for smelling jasmine for 9 months now. . I haven't seen it coming, because the flowers that are the closest and hence visible on my balcony are only burgeoning still.

I came home from a long day of work ( If I have to do another caviar-accord, I resign! ) and as I was putting my clothes to the washing machine, my hand started trembling. She didn't come harsh on me, she is not a vulgar flower, she first started caressing my nostrils and only after a few seconds foreplay did she entered my nose which instantly filled my head with morphine.

It was like the most intense multiple orgasm ever, the one that you have after not being with your lover for months. Like an inside-firework, as big as the one that they made for the year 2000 behind the Eiffel-tower.

I stayed outside, standing still and keep on inhaling the best composition ever created by God. I closed my eyes, as if I were at the opera. I wanted to drink out the cup of joy until the last drops and I want to concentrate on the intense euphoria it gives me. I want to live this moment to the fullest.

The moment became a few hours and I am writing these lines outside as well. I tried to go back to my apartment and work, I have plenty of stuff to do, but I couldn't think of anything else.

Some people are alcoholic, some are on drugs, I am on jasmine.

Time

Perfume creation takes time, though in a multinational company where we have daily request to work on a perfume with shorter and shorter deadlines, the creation time is really reduced to its maximum.

I see more and more of my colleagues working in the following way: based on the client's request, they take an already existing perfume from the perfume library and work around it according to the brief. Also, the majority of the clients are already coming to us with examples in their mind, which perfume's atmosphere they would like to be recreated in their product.

Despite the very tempting perfume briefs, I already have refused to work on projects where the clients set an unrealistically short deadline. The tendency have been unfortunately set already, by other perfumers who claim that they are ready to come up with a finished product within just 5 days.

A totally different approach is, when a perfumer is creating a juice just to express feelings, manifest his own inspirations. I have many perfume samples that are always in the process of creation, whenever I have an hour free I continue to work on them, for years now. I am not sure I could sell these ever to any brands, they are so personal and representing important moments of my life. Unless I come up with my own series, they are going to be sitting on my desk and evolving until I still feel the need of changing them. Commercializing was never the reason I created them anyways.

I remember Alain Astori telling me how one of his colleague ( who wish to remain anonymous ) worked on the perfect scent for his wife. Estée Lauder came to the perfumers office and since she didn't like anything they were proposing her, she took random bottles from perfumer's desks. ( According to the anecdote, she always tested the perfumes on her skin, but usually sprayed more than one product to the same spot... )

Lauder took by chance the only bottle which the perfumer didn't want to sell and insisted to have that one as her next launch. And hence, Estée Lauder's next perfume turned instantly into an all time classic.

This is how all perfumes should be created. With love, passion, sincerity and pure intentions. And with the decent amount of time.

Caraway - Soup

Caraway essence is one of the raw materials that are widely used to create sparkling top notes for perfumes. Although it's characteristic scent is considered too herbal and sharp to create a perfume only dedicated to this spice, you could find it very often at a mild dose in most of the new perfume releases. We usually work with it in 10 % solution, and only add 0,03 grams over 1 kg of perfume concentration. The distinct scent matches really nicely Hay absolute, White Pepper oil and Ginger essence among others.

The herb ( carum carvi ) originated in Asia, but now is cultivated mainly in Africa, Norther and Eastern Europe.

Also known as Meadow Cumin, it is a very old and well known spice, commonly used as early as Stone Age. Caraway Seeds are very popular in our days as well, particularly in Eastern Europe and in the Indian subcontinent. On research, so many medicinal properties of the seeds have been narrated that it is said to be the cure for nearly all diseases!

The greatest benefit of Caraway oil lie in its calming and soothing effect on the nerves and the digestive system, it also helps with respiratory problems, in fighting urinary infections and about a dozen skin-related problems. On the top of that, it makes the skin bright and fair if added to your body lotion!

You can benefit from its healing properties by inhaling caraway oil with the help of a vaporizer or a burner, or even by just simply diluting a few drops in the bath. In order to keep your stomach healthy, and maximize the miraculous advantages of caraway, it is the best to eat it either raw, on scrambled eggs e.g. or by preparing the following traditional Hungarian soup, which softens the taste of caraway seeds, and is a great idea to serve as an entrée with crunchy bread pieces.

Ingredients:

- 3 table spoon of oil

- 4 table spoon of flour

- 2 coffee spoon of caraway seeds

- 2 coffee spoon of paprika

- 1 onion

- 1 liter of water

- salt, according to your taste ( I usually put 2 coffee spoon. )

You make the "roux" from the oil and flower, when it is of golden color already, you add the caraway seeds and you stir the whole mix for a minute or two. Then, you take the cooking-pot away from the stove, leaving it to cool for ca. 2 mins. Once it is cooled, you add the paprika, you place the cooking-pot back to the fire only when paprika is mixed already well with the roux and the seeds. You pour 1 liter of water, then add salt and a peeled onion inside the soup in full, no need to cut it in, you will take this out at the end, before serving. Starting from boiling, you will need 15 mins for your soup to be ready to eat.

Enjoy the unique taste and its marvelous medicinal effects!