The Diary of a Nose Read Free

like showing and convincing; the only problem is that I make myself play a role. I’m both the same and not entirely the same individual. The need to please, to seduce, sometimes makes me alter work in progress and tend more towards fulfilling a demand – a decision which is satisfying at the time but will start niggling at me the very next day.
    Although in everyday life I’m drawn to exchanges of ideas and enjoy confrontation, in my work I need solitude.
    I don’t create using comparisons. Often, I don’t evaluate the new draft by comparing it to the previous one. I only want to see whether the overall olfactory result corresponds to the idea I have in mind. The painter Turner explained that he painted dozens of watercolors of the same subject at the same time, all from memory, and in the end kept only one, destroying the others. My approach is similar. For me it’s not a case of changing a few elements in a perfume’s formula in a linear progression towards a known goal, as a practiced craftsman might when perfecting a piece, but of striving for something that doesn’t yet exist. So, after a while, I stop and smell all the drafts, keeping only two or three (each of them with its own form of expression and not the result of the one before), and discarding the other trials. That is how I open up new territory. In fact, I’m quite simplyfollowing the trajectory of an artist, someone who seeks and, sometimes, finds.

    Messina, Tuesday 1 December 2009
    Quality
    I have a meeting with the R family, who own the company Simone Gatto, which specializes in producing essences of citrus fruits; their essences of Sicilian lemon and mandarin orange are bewitching, as is their essence of Calabrian bergamot.
    Sandro R and I are talking about quality. He’s telling me about meeting Lanvin’s perfumer André Fayasse in the 1950s, to make a presentation for an essence of bergamot obtained using a new process. The perfumer smelled the sample and announced that he had to turn it down, saying that the smell of this new essence didn’t correspond at all with the one he usually used. Intrigued by this rejection, the young Sandro made some inquiries and discovered that the essence of bergamot produced for Lanvin was obtained by packing parings of zest into a knotted muslin which was hung up by a rope so that the force of gravity made the essence drip down into a varnished terracotta vase below. The parings fermented overnight, giving a ‘distinctive’ note that the perfumer saw as a sign of quality, while the new process avoided such fermentation or oxidation. We laughed together over this story, which illustrates perfectly how difficult it is to change our reference points and our habits.
    Obviously the quality of materials used in perfumery is essential. Quality is a commitment; it should be sought after, for it is an integral part of perfume, but it cannot in any circumstancesbe considered to drive creativity. The most beautiful raw materials do not the most beautiful perfumes make.
    Essence of bergamot made in October is of different quality to essences produced in the months of November, December, January and February. Production is carried out for five months of the year and actually results in essences that start off with intense, fresh, green notes and continue with floral and gustatory notes. October essence has the highest content of linalool, a constituent with a floral smell, and February essence has very little linalool but contains fresh-smelling linalyl acetate. Thanks to tiny quantities of cis-5 hexenol, however, October essence is perceived as fresh. In February essence, molecules of cis-5 hexenol and linalool diminish in favor of linalyl acetate. Nature plays with our sense of smell, because it is only when it is used in compositions that the floral aspect of October essence versus the fresh aspect of February essence can be identified.

    Messina, Wednesday 2 December 2009
    Standardization
    Up until the 1980s I used