Welcome to a perfumer's blog on perfumery

Every morning I pass by some concrete walls, freshly built up in Zurich’s ever growing main train station. Looking closely at the surface, one can detect the negative pattern of tree structures, that sometimes make the concrete wall look like a grey patchwork of petrified wood pieces. These traces are the negative image of the wood boards used to hold things together when building it all up. Fascinating.Ā  A little bit like a palimpsest. We see the negative traces of wood on concrete conserved for half an eternity (like 50 years or so…and then the concrete starts to fall apart),Ā  and what was used earlier as key structural element has become a preliminary tool to hold things together for a day or two.
In a sense, this is true for perfumery, too. Modern perfumery has seen a lot of change; change in the way perfumes are built. And many of the key structural building elements have become negligible. Is this change a pity? No, not really. Some natural resources are just too scarce to use them by the tons. With new molecules we have new opportunities and as always, the question is what we do with them. This changeĀ  has given us the choice between building skyscrapers, highways or country houses with swimming pools….

Modern technology has also allowed us to get new wonderful oils for instance by CO2 extraction, a rather gentle process, offering new natural starting materials to build perfumes upon.
At the very end, all these opportunities given to us by clever engineers and chemists should allow us to build wonderful perfumes. In a sense, modern perfumers are almost spoilt. We have such a lot of opportunities.
Pix: Fir bark, seen in southern France

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 at 8:21 am and is filed under Uncategorized. Your comment is highly welcome, please join the discussion!