PORTRAIT
Just as some musicians dream of music, I dream of smells. It can be scents I have smelled before or that
And you say you dream of smells; tell us more about that...
I imagine. I have trained so much in olfactory mental imagery - trying to think of a smell to actually smell it - that today it comes to me completely naturally. Everyone can practice thinking about a smell: imaging research has shown that this ability is the result of training.
All the time! Every day, I do my scales, I train myself to recognise and rediscover bottles. Even if I've already
Do you have a perfume in mind that you want to create?
breathed in the same product 1000 or 2000 times, I still hope to be surprised! We are used to smelling something and thinking that it is just a smell. But in fact, it is a composition of several tens or hundreds of molecules. We imagine a smell as being in one dimension. But in fact it is a volume that has its own unique shape. When you turn it, you can see its rough edges: they allow you to make the connection between the various raw materials. This is even how they are put together... how they are blended.
I had a predisposition to smell, there's no doubt about it; but it's mostly a question of training. I was
Did you have a predisposition to be a 'nose'?
lucky enough to visit Givaudan in Geneva one day. One of the perfumers at the time gave an extraordinary presentation which made all of us, students as we were, want to enter this profession. At that time, Givaudan was the only “ nose ” school in the world. I was lucky enough to be accepted as one of three students in a class that rarely had any openings. What I liked was the crossover between the scientific and artistic worlds. I had an excellent and fascinating scientific education, but there was something missing, I couldn't see myself being a chemical engineer all my life. I didn't like it. I was always what I called a fake scientist. I had my head in the stars and I was asked to have it on paper, in formulas. This job has allowed me to be in both places at the same time...
OF ALL OUR SENSES, OLFACTORY MEMORY IS THE MOST PRECISE AND CONVEYS THE MOST EMOTIONS
ELITE'S PERFUME
Les clefs de Morphée, the olfactory signature developed by perfumer Daniel André for Elite, is a citrusy (through the extraction of citrus zest), floral, woody and iridescent fragrance. It contains verbena, bergamot, pepper, jasmine, iris and cotton (cotton balsam to give an impression of softness). In addition, there are musks, coumarin (an extract of medicinal plants), water lily leaves and a leaf that grows at night, which Daniel André calls "moon flower".
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