There is raw onion inside a black plastic bin liner, inside our neighbour's bin. I can smell it in the hallway, wafting out through their letterbox. An unmarked van drove past me today with a load of sanitary bins. I knew this from across the street.
The new J-Lo perfume smells remarkably like Hawaiian Tropic suntan lotion and Diesel Feminine like Pina Colada. A top note of Bergamot is guaranteed to seduce me. Over-the-top Tuberose is guaranteed to make me heave just a little.
New books and magazines must first be smelt; then examined otherwise.
When a childhood friend and I were playing one day, in the first floor bedroom of her house, I suddenly stood up in alarm and announced: "Something is burning."
She said: "I can't smell anything. Don't be stupid."
We were under 10 years old and had been left alone to play for a while. We shouldn't have been; it wasn't right, but there we were. Her mother had popped to the shops.
Her mother had popped to the shops and left a small pot of sauce on the gas stove. It had caught fire, set light to its surroundings and was now reaching for the kitchen ceiling like a long, fiery tongue.
If I hadn't had such a sensitive nose - to have smelled burning long before the fire got bad - we would have been trapped in that upstairs bedroom, all alone.
As it was, we made it to the bottom of the stairs and ran out, screaming for help from our neighbours.
A few years later, it was my nose that alerted a fire brigade to a burning kiosk outside the Helsinki railway station. Nobody else had noticed anything out of the ordinary, but I smelled burning plastic before there was visible smoke, much less fire.
I once approached a perfect stranger and asked her if she knew she was pregnant. She didn't, but she was. I was so convinced that I bought her a test out of my own money and she did it in a public toilet.
It may not come as a surprise, that one of my favourite subjects at school was chemistry and that when my college course turned to Cosmetic Science I realised that I'd have found an entire semester full of nothing but, absolutely fascinating.
A couple of years after college, I became the Training Manager for a cosmetics and fragrance distributor. When perfumers from some of our big-brand "houses" came to visit and brought a miniature perfume organ with them, I was enthralled.
I had known what happens, in theory, but had never been exposed to so many raw materials and to the process itself.
The way perfumes are created has always fascinated me. I started wearing real perfume when I was 13 (for this, I can thank my mother who may have ended up quite unhinged in her later life, but in her heyday was incredibly well groomed). Currently there are approximately 10 fine fragrances and 4 inexpensive body sprays in my perfume "wardrobe".
One of the fine fragrances is called "Soul Insurance", a blend of woody notes and Bergamot. Nobody else in the world wears "Soul Insurance" because it's something Pecksniffs of Brighton, one of the few remaining original perfumers in England developed for me, based on our consultation which cost £150 (including the 50ml finished product).
I can not only recall a memory based on smell; I can recall a smell based on memory. If I think of my mother, my olfactory system can produce the heady scent of Shalimar to order. I experience it as if I was breathing it in. The heady spicy sweetness fills my nose, my mouth, my throat.
Everyone's Olfactory system is deeply connected to memory processing and retrieval which explains why smells are such powerful triggers for memories, but the extraordinary thing about the way my Olfactory system seems to work is that it can apparently catalogue thousands of scents, scan through them like a database and even make myself physically smell them if I want to.
Sometimes I don't want to, but it happens anyway. Back to the Synaesthasia I talked about before - some experiences unwittingly trigger a smell, which can be a little strange without warning. The same can happen with taste (unsurprisingly, as taste is so strongly linked to smell). A particular scene might suddenly taste of tomato.
So why haven't I written to Procter & Gamble, or Quest international and offered them my talent? Ah. Why indeed?
Not just because of the potential for six figure salaries, but because of rigidly set acceptable career paths, the circle of the professional "noses" is extremely tight and not something you just bumble into. The old rules were (and according to the official website, still are) that every real perfumer had to be born, or in the very least receive their training in Grasse, France.
The next official rule was, that all perfumers (at least perfumers who were any good at it) were men because the female hormones would distort the sense of smell too much and thus, the female of the species would simply not be able to do the job.
Finally, it was expected that most, if not all perfumers would have to be chemists as well as "noses".
Luckily, this is changing. There are perfumers who have never set a foot in Grasse, obtained formal chemistry diplomas, or ever known what it's like to pee standing up.
Whilst there is a mixture of rule-breakers and traditionalists on the list of noses, one thing does remain categorically true - this list is very, very short. There are approximately 1000 officially recognised perfumers in the world, out of which only a handful become superstars in the industry.
Then again, if Jo Malone can go from home-made concoctions to Estee Lauder group aquisition faster than you could previously complete a decent Grasse apprenticeship, perhaps I could just find out how to do it myself.
Which, incidentally, is exactly what I've done. I've found a wholesaler of fine quality oils, purchased approximately 100 notes (not nearly all that was available, but rather, all that I could afford), searched for recipes, instructions, hints and tips until I was satisfied that something reasonably good could come out of them and set off to catalogue formulas. I made a lucky discovery in a homeware store: they had bought in some test tubes that were presented as possible containers for spices.
I had a better idea. To use them as test tubes! I bought all they had.
So far, I've tried approximately 30 combinations, out of which two formulas are beginning to emerge as something wonderful. I am approaching this with caution and going for notes that I am very comfortable with (it'll be much easier to develop simple scents at first).
Formula 10 is built around Neroli and formula 24 is The fragrance I've always wanted, but have never found; an opening wave of crisp Bergamot, a sensual heart of Jasmine Absolute and the sweet warmth of Ylang-Ylang. Obviously, once finished, both of these will have descriptive names. For now, they are just sketches of the finished product and measurements in my notebook.
I've had them in the test tubes, in their current composition, for just over 4 weeks now so that the oils have had plenty of time to keep each other company and develop into a harmony. Soon I will take them further and attempt to make something akin to real perfume.
I started experimenting with these formulas before my order of oils had even arrived. I knew what Sweet Orange, Neroli, Ylang-Ylang, Jasmine Absolute, Bergamot, Vetiver, synthetic Musk, oh, a whole host of notes smelled like because, as I mentioned before, they just seem to stick rather well.
So, I spent the waiting time jotting down possible combinations on my lunch break at work, waking up in the middle of the night with an idea: what if... all before I'd even received the ingredients. The only way to know for sure though, is to try. There is no way to guess exactly how that one drop of Ginger will change your existing concoction, or whether it really needed two drops of Vanilla, or one drop of Frangipani. The talent of the nose is in being able to intuitively guess what to try in the first place and in order to develop such talent, one must experiment and memorise.
Not to mention that many of the notes used are absolutely revolting and are not meant to be experienced as anything other than catalysts for the real composition. Even a layperson might have an indelible memory of Civet if they ever had the misfortune to smell it raw.
For a perfumer there is no bad smell. All the great French perfumes, every last one, has some ingredient in it that is repulsive, like civet, this hideous and ferociously powerful extract from the butthole of a Chinese tomcat. From: The Emperor of Scent : A True Story of Perfume and Obsession by Chandler Burr
Perfumers can crop up in the most unexpected of places. Like Nantucket. John Harding has set up Nantucket Natural oils to fuel his passion and presumably, to make pretty good business. He's gained celebrity endorsement and press coverage and if you're lucky, you can travel to his laboratory and try out perfume creation for yourself. I would really like to make that trip one day.
So there you have it. From the burning house to the rows of test tubes on the shelves. I am not sure how I would handle packaging and production if I were to attempt all this on a larger scale, but for now, it's just a developing hobby. One that I may just have a special nose for.
EDIT in 2008: Incredibly, this really was the beginning of something wonderful. Find out what happened, next ... after that...and then...(and the story continues!)
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This was cross posted to Blogcritics
Recommended reading: The Emperor of Scent : A True Story of Perfume and Obsession by Chandler Burr, Perfume : The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind, Perfume : The art and science of scent by Cathy Newman, Essence and Alchemy : A Natural History of Perfume by Mandy Aftel
