A Glimpse into the Société Française des Parfumeurs' International Exhibition of Raw Materials, 15/16 June 2011

Sniffing. Talking. Or, more usually, doing both at the same time...
Like any other trade fair – or, for that matter, any private view – the International Exhibition of Raw Materials in Perfumery organized by the Société Française des Parfumeurs is, as much as the opportunity to discover new things, an intensely social occasion. You can’t walk three feet without either bumping into an acquaintance or being introduced to someone, which makes progress both extremely pleasant and rather slow. In fact, I didn’t even make it past the first booth (Firmenich) before I was greeted by Olivier Maure, one of the sweetest, warmest people in the industry, who I'd met for my book. Olivier heads Art et parfum, Edmond Roudnitska’s company where he’d been working since the age of nineteen. He has also founded Accords et Parfums, a fast-growing production facility for independent perfumers founded on quality, artistic integrity and the sheer pleasure of working with like-minded people who carry on Mr. Roudnitska’s fight for le beau parfum. Standing next to him was another of Edmond and Thérèse Roudnitska’s alumnae, the wonderful Sandrine Videault, who’d flown 20,000 km from Nouméa: a remarkable, intensely intelligent, articulate, visionary perfumer and artist as well as a beautiful person. We’ll be hearing a lot more about her in the coming months.

From then on it all just went uphill, as I ran into practically all of my favourite perfumers: Isabelle Doyen, Mathilde Laurent, Bertrand Duchaufour, Patricia de Nicolaï, Marc-Antoine Corticchiato, Mathilde Bijaoui, Dominique Ropion were all in attendance. Jean-Marie Martin-Hattemberg, the witty, erudite perfume heritage expert whose auction sales feature some of the most covetable flacons in history, regaled Annick Le Guérer and I with the incredible story of the six-times-married Polish opera singer Ganna Walska, whose voice was so terrible people had to be paid to attend her concerts, and who is thought by many to be the inspiration for the character of Susan Alexander in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. Walska capitalized on her colourful marital history by putting out a perfume called Divorçons (Let’s divorce) in 1927.

I also had a long conversation with Raymond Chaillan, who created no less than Yves Saint Laurent pour Homme, Anaïs Anaïs, Opium and Givenchy III, who is considering the idea of expanding his refreshingly outspoken February 10 conference at the SFP into a book, something I encouraged him to do: the industry is in urgent, dire need of preserving its heritage and memory.

Of course, the Salon wasn’t all about champagne, canapés and great talk: we were there to smell what the 40-odd exhibitors from all over the world had to offer. I sat in on a few sniffing sessions with perfumers, but as I didn’t ask them for permission to quote them, I can’t report on their comments. What I can do, though, is summarize the general impression I derived from these short sessions and our subsequent discussions.

Several things struck me. First off, there seems to be as much pressure to put out new things on the raw mats front as there is to launch new fragrances. In many cases, “new”, at least as far as naturals go, seems to be all about putting out “couture” essences tailored to suit particular markets: vanilla, for instance, had been shorn of its animalic, medicinal notes in view of products geared for the US. You got patchouli without earthiness, cardamom that skewed into citrus, and so forth. In other words, naturals are being cleaned up. IFRA is partly responsible for the cosmetic surgery as allergenic molecules are excised, but not entirely. It seems naturals are being shorn of some of their trickier facets to make them easier to handle: if you don’t have to grapple with the full complexity of an essence, you can work more quickly, with fewer surprises. The result might be what I’ve dubbed the iFrags: skinnier and “cleaner”. 

Another striking feature was the fact that the new mats were pitched by on-staff perfumers rather than “sales reps”, and that the pitch went on as you were smelling, so that you were more or less called on to react rather than focus.  Notable exceptions were two of my favourite stands, Arômes du Maroc which offered stellar verbena and lentiscus concretes, and Cedarome which wafted the salubrious aromas of the Canadian forests with fir and black and blue hemlock spruce absolutes and concretes: Christmas in a bottle.

It was almost impossible to access Mane’s booth, and when I finally made it minutes before the Salon closed down, I could understand why. The dynamic Grasse company – who recently nabbed two French Fragrance Foundation awards with Womanity and Tilda Swinton Like This – made by far the most entertaining presentation. Pink pepper essence was encapsulated in tiny pink beads in a mango-flavoured drink, to wash down vanilla-flavoured jelly pyramids – the slightly animalic tinge of the vanilla even conjured the camels. The ginger was presented in a lipstick. Another essence was incorporated in a fizzy froth that crackled when you rubbed it into your skin. It was so much fun that you sometimes lost track of the actual products that were being pitched. At any rate, what perfumers do is order samples before they leave each booth.

Finally, it dawned on me just how surrealistic the whole business is as an on-staff perfumer for one of the companies described a product as being part mandarin, part rose oxide, and I got a vision of an impossible combination of fruit and flower. This is, literally, the translation of the poet Lautréamont’s “beautiful like the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table”, a phrase which inspired the Surrealist Manifesto…

Ultimately, for all the intense business dealings and networking that went on at the Salon des Matières Premières, at the core was the insane, marvellous poetry of it all: a romp through the Looking-Glass, complete with perfumers as Mad Hatters, March Hares and Cheshire Cats. And it just kept getting curiouser and curiouser.

Illustration: still from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland