Features

“Whether odors are good or bad doesn’t matter; these materials are like words, I use them to tell a story. Perfume has its own syntax, its own grammar. My nose is nothing more than a measuring instrument.”

I’ve always considered Jean-Claude Ellena to be a ‘quiet rebel’ within the perfume industry. His style of fragrant watercolours, particularly the ones for luxury brand Hermès, serve as a marked contrast to the many, bolder styles within mainstream perfumery and he has always come across as someone who very much does their own thing. Jean Claude-Ellena is the master of understated elegance - in a world where so many feel the need to shout, he confidently whispers.
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Happy New Year Basenoters!

We’d like to let you know about some of the exciting fragrant news we have planned in this new year..
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As we move onto a new year (hello 2012!), I thought it would be fun to look back at what the most viewed fragrance, threads, news articles and features were on Basenotes in the last year. These top ten lists are based purely on page views and not on anything else. The other criteria is that all of the items listed have been launched, written or posted in 2011. Enjoy!
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Here’s something you don’t need me to tell you: perfume doesn’t come in Size Zero. In fact, perfume may well be more genuinely ‘One Size Fits All’ than any other beauty product imaginable. (Or should that be ‘One Fits All Sizes’?) The fashion world continues to do battle with forces that are - quite rightly - calling for it to display a more realistic variety of human beings on catwalks, but fragrance doesn’t care what you look like. Sure, the advertising of scent could learn a thing or two about body diversity, but the juice itself is quite happy to enchant you whether you’re tall, short, skinny or plump. Perfume is an equal opportunity seducer.
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A floor down from where we sleep, a Santa is caught in the act of stocking delivery by a grown up child. A cry of alarm cuts through the quiet of a soft Christmas night, contrasting with the snow-dampened quiet outside. Just for tonight though, an old bearded man at the end of the bed is not sinister but merely an attempt by a father to retain a little sparkle and dance in the air around his children, despite their progress to reason a decade or two ago.
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On the 9th of December, perfumer Mona di Orio passed away after having complications from surgery.

Mona was born in 1969 in France to parents of Spanish descent on her mother's side Italian on her father's. She grew up in Annecy and took a degree in Fine Arts & Literature. Her career took a different path when she met Master perfumer, Edmond Roudnitska in 1987.
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Let me make one thing clear from the start. If you're anywhere near Grasse and you have a few hours to spare, you must visit the International Perfumery Museum. You may not end up liking everything about it, but you can’t afford not to see it.
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Love them or hate them, the King and Queen of perfume-related snark are back with another instalment in their guides to perfume. This time Turin and Sanchez have sifted out the bad and the ugly and have focused on creating a compilation of their top 100 perfumes of all time.

Well, saying this is a compilation of their top 100 perfumes is slightly misleading, as Tania Sanchez tells us in the forward, these aren’t the greatest classics of all time, they are in fact “those that struck us as far above their peers in quality, inventiveness, or straightforward beauty”. The Little Book of Perfumes turns out to be 96 of the top rated fragrances from Perfumes The A-Z Guide and for that reason you can expect the usual witty, honest and well-informed perfume evaluation that we have come to know and love (or hate).

Like Perfumes The A-Z Guide, it is worth remembering with The Little Book of Perfumes, that perfume is entirely subjective and that those Turin and Sanchez consider to be classics may not rate so highly in your opinion. One man’s treasure is another man’s trash as they say.

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In the first of a series, Lila Das Gupta tries out a weekend course at the Cotswold Perfumery.

Let me start by saying that I have no intention whatsoever of becoming a perfumer. Apart from the time that it would take to train, comparable to training a surgeon, I know already that I have the wrong personality to make it in a lab. My slapdash ways as a cook usually turn out rather successfully, but while an extra glug of olive oil can really liven up a dish, a random glug of rose oil that leads to a masterpiece is no good at all if you can’t reproduce the formula. This much I knew already: if you are not meticulous about recording what you do, you are doomed as a perfumer.
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Walking in gilded shoes can be a rich and prized role but can also weigh heavily on the wearer. Three years ago, Basenotes interviewed the then newly appointed perfumer, Thierry Wasser, who was plucked and handpicked from the rich gene pool of perfumers to head up the prestigious House of Guerlain.

He has had three years to adapt and create fragrances, oversee not only the makeup and skincare fragrance formulations but also maintain the integrity of the company’s valuable investments in raw materials, a role that has been fascinating and challenging.

What has been of great significance is the role Wasser has played in the cultivation and resurrection of defunct farms and fields in the raw materials sector. Through his travels, he has been able to create or revive precious bespoke materials in underdeveloped countries giving local farmers a new lease on life.

The job of overseeing not only the creation, but also the launches and successes within the stable of Guerlain products, has made for a very unique role.

The personal “father/son” relationship with the last surviving Guerlain forefather, Jean-Paul Guerlain, (whose sudden departure in October 2010) left a rich legacy between the two men of trusted reciprocity, invention and creativity.

We catch up with Wasser to find out how his journey has unfolded over the past three years.
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What if nine industry perfumers were told to truly unleash their personal passions? To take off their jasmine-scented gloves, so to speak? To do their dandy best to win your heart, as if they were trying to seduce you with perfume? To use the best and most advanced materials in the world, to try to impress the hell out of you? No rules. No restrictions. Just go for the gold ring.

What if?

Well, that would be pretty much what happened to this very fortunate fragrant reporter. Thanks to the scheduling conflicts of two real journalists, this slightly nutty substitute was able to get a seat at a “speed smelling” event with nine perfumers who work at International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF). Three energetic, young, rising stars. Three very honed senior perfumers. And three widely recognized perfumers who have reached the pinnacle status of Vice President Perfumer. All of them having such impressive portfolios, including so many well-known perfumes, that my eyebrows have now been raised into some kind of inverse Botox state.
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One of the thrilling things about living in London is that even when you’ve lived here for most of your life, it still offers up surprises. Greenwich, in the South East of the city, is famous as the international dateline meridian (you can stand on the actual brass line at the Royal Observatory), but the area also happens to house a couple of remarkable 18th century townhouses, home to one of the city’s most charming small museums.
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Creating perfumes based on physical locations isn’t a new idea. There is no shortage of fragrances on the market that already base their compositions on locations dear to the perfumers’ heart, but there often seems to be something missing from these formulations: an access point for your own memories to inhabit the fragrance.

The concept of capturing the fragrance of a location is fascinating; imagine smelling of that pine forest you trekked through instead of just a market standard aromatic based on a pine forest. Blending and balancing the numerous obvious, and not so obvious notes of a location is a precise science, and we’re not just assuming that by including materials that are typical of a location will result in an accurate snapshot of it. It takes a little more imagination than that.
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Tom Ford has launched Jasmin Rouge and Santal Blush to accompany his new make-up collection. Jasmin Rouge contains sambac jasmine sepals absolute, dusky clary sage and rich spices; while Santal Blush contains creamy sandalwood, exotic Eastern spices, intoxicating florals and sumptuous woods. As Basenotes knows nothing about make up, we asked someone who does, their view of the fragrance. Video below:
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For my second assignment as New York Correspondent for Basenotes, I was granted the mission of sitting through the most girly-girl, pinkrific, tulle-ified event one can imagine, and I loved every minute of it! What better way for designer Betsey Johnson to launch her new fragrance called "Too Too" than with the lovely, lovely ballerinas from the Bolshoi Ballet Academy? The launch party (and breakfast, actually) took place at a dance studio where these ballerinas were placed along the edges of the room, some against the tall windows facing the quiet downtown street in the Meatpacking District, others in the back by the "it girl DJ" booth pumpin' Whitney Houston, holding positions against a gritty backdrop of sanitation workers, trucks and a car wash behind them, and one petite, blonde prima by the entrance when you first walk in, who ushers you with her lithe splits and steely arabesques to the perfume display table - ooh la la!
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Blood is not the most marketable of products, but that hasn’t deterred Italian perfume house Blood Concept from launching a new line of fragrances inspired by the visceral substance.



“We wanted to tell a real story with the concept, not something based on fantasy,” says Antonio Zuddas, one half of Blood Concept’s creative team. The story that he’s referring to is one close to all our hearts: the story of human evolution.
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Mona Di Orio frequently refers to Edmond Roudnitska as her “master”. She’s doubtless translating from the French ‘maître’, which does technically mean ‘master’, but is much closer to ‘teacher’ when used in the pedagogic sense. However, the slight linguistic inaccuracy serves not only to render her English even more endearing than it’s made by her accent, but also to reflect the respect she has for her former tutor of six years, the man who just happens to be considered the greatest nose of the 20th century.
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Following her two-part interview transcript being posted on Basenotes (Part 1, Part 2), IFRA UK Director Lisa Hipgrave responds to the questions that arose.

LH. I am pleased to have had the opportunity to clear up some of the misperceptions surrounding IFRA UK and its policies. I’d like to thank Persolaise for taking the time to speak with me – a meeting I greatly enjoyed.

I welcome the comments made by visitors to the Basenotes forum. It was especially good to hear from people who took the time to ask questions and gain a greater understanding about IFRA UK – people like Mimi Gardenia, who wrote: “I am beginning to understand the IFRA a little bit more now” and from Saintpaulia who commented: “It does appear from this interview that some of us have been blaming the wrong organization”. And I must thank rogalal who said: “Wow, am I literally the only person in all of Basenotes who thinks that the IFRA has a valid point?” Well, rogalal, no you are not but we still have some way to go it seems in convincing some others that IFRA protects the perfume industry and is not its enemy.
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I remember that one of my favourite English Lit lectures at Uni was on the subject of ‘defamiliarisation’. For some reason, I was completely taken with the notion and walked around for days thinking about how revitalising it would be to challenge my knowledge of absolutely everything, erase it and then regain it in a different, unexpected way. It may also have been at this point that I began doing my best Yoda impression on student radio (“You must unlearn what you have learned.”) but perhaps that’s a story best left for another article…
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