| Le Parfumeur Rebellee |
Happy 2009, my fellow perfume lovers, and my best wishes for the rest of winter! I hope it ends quickly. I myself rang in the new year with an engagement – so my year will be defined with wedding plans, lots of writing and good smells!
Over the course of last year, I met quite a few strangers who were all quite fascinated with my career choice as a niche perfumer. Some of the questions amused me no end, because the assumptions might make sense until you really, really think about it. For a fun introduction to the New Year I thought I’d share some of those frequently asked questions:
1. What’s your favorite perfume?
While most perfumers will have one or two fragrances we like more than another, for the most part, we don’t have favorites. When you’re constantly thinking about the next scent combination you’d like to concoct, you generally don’t get too attached. I certainly have scents that have strong emotional triggers for me, and I keep bottles of them nearby, but I don’t want to live in a constant state of “emotional trigger” so I rarely wear them. They are for when I need the emotional state to create or to analyze a challenge from a different perspective.
2. Does your house always smell good?
For fans of the Office US, you may remember the scene from when Jan brought her houseguests into her “candle room.” The look on Jim’s face (please kill me or make it stop) says enough about how living with perfume-strength odors all the time would affect a person. Since I don’t care to be as crazy as Jan and I would not like my guests suicidal, I do everything I can to control the odors. This is typical of most perfumers.
In my studio and in the studios and homes of most perfumers, we go to extra effort to keep odors to an absolute minimum in the entire home. The kitchen is cleaned very carefully, and a fan is run to disperse molecules after fixing food. Everything in my studio space is kept tightly capped, only opened long enough for me to mix a fragrance and to test it. If I could, I’d use some of those washer-balls that beat your clothing clean, and I probably will get them as my household budget allows.
This is not to say that my home has no odors; it smells like “home” to me. My sheets smell like “sheet” and there are the various smells I notice that are just part of the materials the building is made with. Since every so often we burn incense, I smell that sometimes, too, but never while I’m designing (we vacuum it up and clean the surfaces it was burned near before I start work.)
3. You must always smell wonderful!
Actually, I try to have as little personal odor as possible at all times. Part of this is simple social propriety, but much of this is also keeping my nose clear so I can mix well. If you’re going to be making a new perfume, you can’t smell it accurately at all if you’ve loaded your skin with other fragrances!
Anything I test on my own skin is cleaned off with rubbing alcohol. When I shower, I use unscented and low-scent products – my shampoo and hair conditioner are fragrance free, I use Aveno™ products because of my own allergies and because their odors are quite neutral (it’s remarkably difficult to find handmade bath products that are unscented!) and my body lotion is strictly fragrance-free. I’d hate to ruin how well I applied mandarin next to a wood spice because I couldn’t smell it accurately over the loud vanilla that goes into most body lotions.
4. Did you go to school for chemistry?
No, I did not, and while most commercial perfumers have, when it comes to fragrance chemicals, their formal schooling only teaches those perfumers a specific commercial way to think about scent, not how to make the scents themselves. The students who make it are hidden away and are not actually the perfumers creating the perfume in most cases – their job is to create individual molecules for the perfumers to use, and those are super-secret security-clearance jobs.
All the study in the world can’t tell you how something will smell before you put it together – you’re just going to have to smell it, and for that, a textbook won’t help.
5. Do you distill your own essential oils?
No, I do not. I work in a home studio space, which has no space for proper distillation. I’m sure much of this question comes from wishful thinking – other perfumers and a few of the curious wishing for a new supplier source.
Perhaps some of these people have this mental image of a lab where there’s this little glass pipe drip-drip-dripping everyday. While amusing, it wouldn’t be great for a perfume studio – the odor of the distilling oils would make it impossible to work. Essential oils are produced on a large scale, because they are one of the most profitable parts of world agriculture today. Entire farms can dedicate themselves to one or two crops, and this doesn’t take into account large sections of Africa and Asia and their own farming practices.
I’m a very small-time perfumer. Essential oil production is a very big-time thing; I just happen to be one of their customers on a microcosmic scale.
I hope that the niche perfuming lifestyle is somewhat de-mystified. I strive to be a scentless creature with a nose of objectivity. I am willing to do this to bring you the joys of scents you may not have smelled before; it is not suffering for my art but ensuring my art does not make you suffer.
So if you come to my home and smell something, let me know. I need to clean that up.