Crossovers between fragrance and food are as old as
the spice roads, but over the past 20 years perfumers have mostly been raiding
pastry and candy shops. Lately, they seem to be looking for ways to climb out
of the caramel vat – or to find more subtle ways of expressing what the
industry now prefers to call “addictive” or “gustative” rather than “gourmand”
notes.
Coming up on foody notes isn’t quite as simple as
crossing the hall into the flavorists’ lab. For one, flavor compositions are
meant to be fleeting: having them linger too long in the mouth would be
counter-productive. They’re also conceived to be perceived through
retro-olfaction (i.e. what hits the olfactory bulb from inside the mouth). So
you can’t just shift a formula from yogurt to a perfume bottle. Still, there’s a
world of inspiration to be drawn from cocktails, sweets and condiments since
their particular balance of aromas are already quite close to the way perfumes
are conceived.
In the presentations perfume and flavor companies
organize for their clients and the press in to showcase their new materials and
their perfumers with blue-sky-thinking compositions, food or drink-inspired have
been popping up quite a lot. At the 2012 edition of IFF Speed-smelling, notes
of aquavit and Swedish spicy breads, salty nut mixes and snapped peapods popped
up – I’ll be completing my write-up of the event quite soon, since the limited
edition coffret containing the scents will be commercially available.
For its own presentation, the Grasse-based Mane
decided to base all of its 20 scents on drinks and food. Mane is the company
that produces Thierry Mugler’s Womanity,
notable for its extractions of fig and caviar, carried out with a patented
method called Jungle Essence (click here for the technical explanation).
This method can be applied to various foodstuffs, from gingerbread to passion
fruit or hazelnut, an obvious reason for Mane to go foody this year with Delicatesscent, a “restaurant of
perfumes”.
Since no samples were given out, I only experienced these briefly on
blotters and therefore won’t attempt to review them. But I thought it would be
fun to list them and ask you to “vote” for the one(s) you’d most like to
experience in a fragrance…
Refreshments
Smooth Talk by Olivier Paget dips a sprig of mint leaves in a pineapple
smoothie, while Ralf
Schwieger derives a masculine “milky oriental” from horchata de chufa, a Spanish drink made of ground tigernuts (actually a
tuber known since Ancient Egypt both as a food and perfumery ingredient) whose
almondy flavor is enhanced by tonka bean.
Cocktails
Playmate by Cécile Matton is a variation on chypre that plays on the fruity
notes of carrot fired up by rum.
Violaine Collas plays on 007’s cocktail of choice in Quantum of Solace with Oh
James! a “Vesper
Martini” accord (the
accord, but not the drink, is made of absinth absolute with juniper, cassis and
lemon thyme). Massilia by Cécile
Matton bears the Latin name of Marseille and matches a typical drink of the
South of France, the Mauresque (pastis and the almond-based orgeat syrup) with a coffee chaser.
Snacks
Peanutty by Claudia Carolina, is inspired by the pacoça, a peanut-based sweet from her native Brazil. Macadamia
Cowboy by Mathilde Bijaoui stays in the nutty register, with hazelnut in a spicy accord of nutmeg, ginger and fenugreek. Irina
Burlakova also strays from sweetness with Street
Scene conjuring the hot pretzels sold on New York streets. Jim Krivda bathes
his caramel popcorn accord in wafts of orange blossom and magnolia for an
evening in a deep-South Drive-in. Finally,
Christine Nagel spares a thought for dieters and health food junkies with À Plein Régime, a puffed
rice cake accord in a
cloud of powdery musk and heliotrope.
Salad
Lance-roquette by Julie Massé explores an unusual, bitter green note
with an aragula (“roquette” in French) accord created with galbanum, tarragon and a
rhubarb-smelling molecule).
Condiments
Up Up and Away! by Mathilde
Bijaoui draws its inspiration from an even odder source : ketchup. Sweet, salty, spicy and tart, it matches raspberry
and Indian long pepper with celery, tarragon and rose. Harissa-pristi by Christine Nagel is inspired by the fiery North
African condiment.
Desserts
Pain des Lys by Serge Majoullier matches a Jungle Essence™
extraction of gingerbread with a lily note via spices. Mademoiselle Abricot by Violaine Collas uses an apricot
meringue pie accord as
the lactonic fruit accord in a neo-fruity chypre. La Passion Selon Le Fruit, again by Serge Majoullier, is based on
passion fruit and blue hemlock (which isn’t the poisonous plant
that ended Socrates’s days but a conifer). Sophie Truitard, French but based in
Mane’s Brazilian branch, exploits the country’s exotic flavors in The Girl from Ipanema with a jaboticaba, the fruit of the Brazilian grape tree.
From the New York office, Cécile Hua has obviously
taken a page from a Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation study stating that sniffing a combination of pumpkin
pie and lavender arouses
men, because that’s exactly what her Pump-Kin-Up
smells of (though oddly – or not? – it’s intended to be a masculine fragrance).
As for Vincent Kuczinski, he pays tribute to a cherished childhood memory with Junior’s
Cheesecake.
Coffee
While coffee notes sometimes pop up in masculine
scents (Yojhi Homme, A*Men), Julie Massé has played Starbucks
barista with Jungle Fever, a moccachino accord of coffee, hazelnut, milk froth, cocoa and
fenugreek topped off with magnolia and freesia.
And now, on to you: which of these foody notes would
you be most curious to spritz on your skin?
Illustration: Foodscape by Erró (1964)
I'd pass on every one of these.
RépondreSupprimerThe last thing I want from a fragrance is for it to remind me of things I eat or drink.
Never been a huge fan of gourmands to begin with; what my taste buds enjoy isn't what my nose might.
Ooh I'll take one of each please! Wow the fun and joy of this extravaganza was as usual conveyed superbly by you Denyse!
RépondreSupprimerMarion
Australia
Stefush, there are so many crossovers between food and fragrance that it's hard to avoid food-related notes entirely (if even just spices)... As I said, I couldn't properly test these, but there were interesting proposals since the foodie accords were set in other notes.
RépondreSupprimerMarion, looks like the polar opposite of Stefush above!
RépondreSupprimerHow fun! That must have been a great event to attend. Did you eat immediately after, or just feel like you had?
RépondreSupprimerI'm not a big food note person, either. But I can see being very interested in horchata de chufa (mmmm, tonka). Also oddly intrigued by the rice cake one, since I have lately fallen tush-over-teakettle for heliotrope (who AM I?). And the pretzel one - I love the doughy, salty smell of hot pretzels, I can see that being a drydown I would really adore.
Amy, two of your picks were actually the ones I chose to dab on my skin: the horchata really intrigued me, but it had an ozonic note (more "crackling blue electricity" than watery) that jarred me. The rice cake was very girly and powdery, with a slight roasted aspect I enjoyed.
RépondreSupprimerAs for your question, the Mane offices are actually 45 minutes away from my place, so by the time I got home I'd settled into garden-variety hungry...
I love this idea. It would be fantastic to do series of perfumes around holiday meals, like Thanksgiving dinner, Chinese New Year, Bastille Day... CB I Hate Perfume has many food accords like Roast Beef and Turkey Dinner that are amazing to smell but difficult to wear.
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