Le Parfumeur débutant devant sa palette (1980, Une vie au service de parfum, E. Roudnitska)
Les conditions dans lesquelles un débutant va aborder sa première collection de produits odorants sont très important pour la bonne assimilation de ce matériel, et auront une grande influence sur la façon dont il se comportera à l’égard de ses matériaux tout au long de sa carrière. (…)
The perfumer apprentice and his palette
The conditions under which a beginner will tackle his first collection of fragrant products is very important for the internalization of these compounds. These conditions will be of great influence on the way the perfumer will develop and act with respect to these compounds all along her/his career. (…)
Roudnitska then presents a grouping of 15 scent categories (citrus, rose, orange, jasmine, violette-iris, anis, aromatic, vegetable (green), spices, wood, tobacco, fruity, balsamic animalic, leather). And he lays out how to train the nose and how to learn your scents and how they behave.
I think there is great truth in something he did not mention explicitely in his first sentence: Part of the condition is what kind of materials you start with. I find it of outmost importance for my perfumery work that I started with naturals only, got to know them and then moved on to synthetics.
-> In a sense, it is a simplification as natural scents tend to me much more complex and multifacetted.
-> Looking at the “getting to know the materials” as a creative process where inspirations are built and collected: Some of these inspirations maybe good for the rest of your life, and I personally find working with naturals a better source for inspiration.
Building a fragrance on this inspiration, however, might well involve building blocks from the lab, man made, versatile and powerful.
September 25th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Your own experience of getting to know the “naturals” first very thoroughly and then moving on to the synthetics opens up some interesting questions for the aesthetics of fragrance — for which Edmond Roudnitska’s work is a great foundation. Without being in any way “anti-synthetic” myself, I do get the feeling smelling lots of new scents that their makers are motivated by a desire to create a new “bestseller,” and that all these perfumers have been smelling lately are recent “bestsellers” — so a kind of low-level mimesis / duplication-with-slight variation is the rule, rather than the high road of invention and creativity that the best perfumers follow!
September 25th, 2006 at 7:47 pm
Dear Michael
when posting, I was primarily thinking of my way …how I became a perfumer in a sense.
I am also -for sure!- not antisynthetic. But sometimes I fear that an education as perfumer that is too much focused on synthetics will lead to perfumers who have a hard time judging and working with ….naturals.
I think, in this sense, Roudnitska was very, very wright. He was worried about what influences a perfumer in his education years. Maybe he was troubled, too?
September 27th, 2006 at 2:40 am
Dear Andy,
I know you’re in no way “anti-synthetic.” And I think you’re right to sense the worried and perhaps troubled undertones of Roudnitska’s thoughts about the crucial importance of a perfumer’s first materials in a world of increasingly synthetic scentmaking.
All the more reason to welcome the impact your fragrances are having on people’s thinking about relations between naturals and synthetics. It’s wonderful that you, like the great Roudnitska, can pursue these questions both as a creative perfumer and as someone who writes about the processes involved in the creative process itself, in such an accessible and down-to-earth way!