11

If I know men, I’d say this one was sulking. I’ve been here for a full five minutes and Bertrand hasn’t said a single word since he’s sat down to pour alcohol into the mods he’s prepared for our sessions – ‘mods’ being perfume industry jargon for the successive modifications of a scent-in-progress. Perhaps he’s a little cross at having to spend time on a non-priority project. He’s leaving for Madagascar in forty-eight hours and he’s got more urgent tasks, for which he’s actually getting paid, by actual clients. Still, when I walked into the L’Artisan Parfumeur boutique, where for some reason he was dealing with a customer, he greeted me with a happy, friendly smile. I guess it may not have been very clever of me to waltz in crowing I had a sample of the next Serge Lutens, especially since every woman in the shop demanded to smell it on the spot. It probably didn’t help either that it was a leather scent, like Bertrand’s autumn launch, which, being inspired by a journey to Istanbul, also features a prominent leather note. Was I subconsciously exacting my little revenge? When I showed up for our last appointment, he’d forgotten to write it down and we couldn’t work, so I just dropped off a Spanish book I wanted him to read.

He hasn’t even offered me a seat. I shift my feet as I watch him dip the blotters. The first two mods didn’t really speak to me and I’m a bit wary of what’s in store. At last, he waves me towards a stool. We jump straight into mods 3, 4 and 5.

‘I’ve toned down the incense and the aldehydes. We’re forgetting the soap and lavender, we’ll see about them later. I’ve focused on the floral note. Green. Nectar. Pollen. Narcotic. Indolic. I’ve played on lily and jasmine. They suit the theme.’

N°3, with its cologne-like effects, is the core of the three new mods: it’s an orange blossom in the top, heart and base notes. In other words, they all contain materials that say ‘orange blossom’ throughout the development. Perfumery materials evaporate at different rates because their molecules are of different sizes: the smallest ones need the least heat to fly off into the air, which is why, for instance, the citrus notes of cologne dissipate very quickly since citrus essences are composed of tiny molecules. The largest, like musk, sit on the skin for hours. So the development of a perfume is like a relay-race: when a material evaporates, another material or another accord (notes that are ‘played’ at the same time, like a piano chord, and create a different effect combined than individually) takes up the slack to continue the story. The consistency in the development of a fragrance rests on the interplay between top, heart and base notes.

N°4 is more floral, more indolic and spicier than N°3; its spiciness introduces the lily we spoke of during our last session. In N°5, the amber, wood and musk have been amped so that the scent is no longer as much of a floral. But I can’t smell the incense. There’s a whopping four per cent in the formula, Bertrand informs me, but apparently it’s absorbed by the orange blossom because they go well together.

‘When you wear it, you’ll notice pretty obvious skin and blood effects.’

Blood? How do you even produce a blood note in a perfume?

Bertrand explains that blood’s metallic, warm, mineral, salty and rusty facets are rendered through different materials: specific aldehydes, incense, salicylates … The latter generally have a sweet, balsamic, slightly salty ‘solar’ odour: in Europe, some salicylates were once used as sunscreens until more effective products were found and thus have come to be associated with the smell of sun-heated skin. But Bertrand finds that iso-amyl salicylate also has something matte and metallic about it, like blood. He’s kept the costus from the previous mods to produce the effect of veins under the surface of the skin.

‘You can’t smell veins through the skin, can you?’

‘Of course you can. Skin smells the strongest where veins run just under the surface. Here … and here,’ he says, touching his pulse and his temple.

‘I’ve never noticed that.’

I’m tempted to go and have a sniff at him to find out.

‘Well, when you smell a woman there…’

‘… which I haven’t…’

‘… which you might have, for all I know … Well, in those places she’ll smell a bit like warm leather and sheep. Costus conjures that effect. Raw wool. Greasy, dirty hair. It’s got a lot of negative connotations in perfumery, but it shouldn’t. It’s such an amazing product!’

Bertrand rummages in his refrigerator to pull out a phial of costus, does his strip-dipping number and hands me the stuff in a ten per cent solution. I brace myself for a waft of rutting ram but all I’m getting is a rather pleasant, faintly fatty-waxy odour.

‘I can’t smell much.’

‘You can’t? You’re scaring me!’

‘I thought it would be more powerful.’

‘It’s soft and muffled, but if it’s too strongly dosed it can destroy a product, because it gives off a mutton couscous effect.’

‘Still, I can barely make it out.’

Bertrand thinks about this for a second.

‘You may be anosmic to it because it smells of yourself. You can’t smell your own referent.’

How glamorous. I’ve just been told by a top perfumer that I smell of mutton and dirty hair. Note to self: change shampoo brands. Now let’s go back to the blotters, shall we?

I’m not sure about N°3: too bright, too cologne-like. N°4 is turning into a lily. N°5, with its warmer, ambery-musky notes, is pretty sexy and that’s the one I’m drawn to the most, but what’s it got to do with my story? In fact, what is it exactly that made Bertrand see a perfume in that story? I’ve never asked him in so many words. I do so now.

‘Simply the story. I told myself that associating incense with blood and orange blossom would be a challenge.’

But how does he deal with the fact that he’s working on another person’s experience? When he did olfactory travel sketchbooks like Timbuktu or Dzongkha, he’d actually been to Mali or Bhutan. He knew what they smelled like.

‘Stories are pretexts. I start the perfume before leaving. I adapt it and complete it afterwards. The smells you discover on trips can be very striking, but they’re usually negative. Un-ex-PLOIT-able. You go to a market, you get hit in the face by smells of dried fish, durian, fresh coriander and mango. What do you do with your dried fish? With durian, which smells like baby shit? So you tell the story your way.’

Oh. And there I was thinking of him as an explorer gathering swatches of exotic landscapes to stick them in a bottle.

While we’re studying the development of the three mods, I start telling him about my next perfume course in London: I intend to do a comparative study between his interpretation of tuberose and that of another perfumer. As soon as I’ve said the words, I realize I’ve just wedged my Louboutin sling-back firmly between my molars. Bertrand scowls.

‘It’s so annoying to see there’s a bunch of tuberoses coming out at the same time…’

He’s right: the perfume world is barely emerging from a tuberose tsunami as we speak. He shouldn’t be surprised, though. If an idea is in the air, more than one perfumer is bound to get it.

‘Well, that pisses me off! I’m fed up. What do you have to do to be unusual? Truly unusual?’

You can’t be too unusual, I venture. You need to please at least a few thousand people. So you can’t veer too far off the charts.

Soon, we’re egging each other on into full-blown angst. We talk about the way luxury giants are killing off the art of perfumery; about the paucity of truly original ideas; Bertrand is even saying, shockingly, that the dream is gone for him.

‘What about you?’ he asks. ‘Are you still moved by perfume?’

Actually, I am, every now and then. But I understand how he feels. Sometimes it doesn’t seem worth it to add another product to the glut. We speak for a while about the depressive phase artists go through periodically: the moment when it all seems pointless. It’s all about breaking down the language we know to find the possibility of another language, I suggest. Like in that Leonard Cohen song that says there’s a crack in everything: that’s how the light gets in. But you have to go through that destructive phase first. Force the crack open. Bertrand nods.

‘It’s probably a natural cycle, like plants.’

‘And right now you’re in the humus, decomposing!’

Well done. Now I’ve got us both depressed. He needs a holiday and he’ll be taking one in a couple of days. I’m not, and I’m eyeing the nearby Pont des Arts with a wistful gaze. Still, the fact that this guy, who’s at the top of his game, is willing to disclose his doubts makes him that much more likeable to me. I’ve been around enough artists to know he’s behaving like one right now, even with that sulk about the competition breathing down his neck … time to clear the air about that.

‘Anyway, that new Lutens leather doesn’t have anything to do with yours.’

‘Yes, it does. And that’s what pisses me off.’

‘At least the beauty editors will have their work cut out for them: they’ll be doing a leather theme next autumn.’

‘That’s just it. Being part of a theme, that’s what gets on my nerves.’

I must be doing this on purpose.

‘I guess the toughest thing we learn as we grow up is that we’re not unique,’ I add dismally.

Just kill me now before I go on sabotaging this session.

‘Exactly,’ replies Bertrand. ‘Knowing you’re not unique. But at the same time, it’s stupid to think that way. It’s egocentric. We’re not unique. We’re here to serve life, not the opposite. Life isn’t here to serve the individual. Never. You understand?’

What started me on this riff? I’m beginning to suspect that just as he’s depressed by the idea that whatever he comes up with, he won’t be the only one to come up with it, I must deal with the fact that, to him, my project is one among many, albeit one he took on of his own accord. Whereas for me, it is unique: the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me as a perfume lover …

Those three slender strips of paper I’ve set on his desk are gangways thrown over the sinkhole we’ve been skirting. It’s time we got back to them. I sniff the blotters in turn. The clove-laden lily in N°4 is merrily chewing up the rest of the formula: Bertrand thinks the eugenol – the clove note – slices too much into its volume.

With N°4 out of the running, we compare N°3 and N°5. Bertrand thinks all the different effects – green, mineral, animalic, salty, narcotic – come out better in the former. The base notes, he says, are freer to express themselves in N°3 because N°5 has got twice the amount of musk. As a result, it’s the fullest and the most powerful of the three mods, but the sensuous effects of N°3 are crushed: musk wraps the notes beautifully, but the wrong dose can also smother them.

I love the lily in N°5, though: it’s a warm, spicy, flesh-eating flower whose dark, honeyed, tobacco-y tones I find compellingly sexy. But my story is about orange blossom. So if the lily is interfering, let’s chuck it.

‘We can play in a more nuanced way with the wood and vanilla,’ suggests Bertrand. ‘What I’d avoid is the spiciness of the lily. The eugenol almost cancels out the effects of the indole. Both are phenols. Add indole to eugenol and wham! Eugenol takes over.’

He’ll use N°3 as a base for the next mods, while adding some of the sensuous effects of N°5. Amp up the tobacco note, tone down the green cologne effect …

‘The perfume’s far from done yet. What’s good is that we’ve prised it apart. We’ve taken a big step today. I know exactly what to do for the next time.’

Good. Now I can go home and scrub off the mutton grease.