'Noses' hone senses at Paris perfume school
ARGENTEUIL, France - Bent over strips of blotting paper, senses primed and notebooks in hand: this is how generations of "noses" have honed their art at the world-famous Givaudan perfumery school near Paris.
Fully one third of all fine fragrances created worldwide owe their existence to alumni of the school, which has been training young men and women in the subtle art since 1946 in the bland suburb of Argenteuil.
In the "vanilla building," five perfumers in the making - a Frenchman, two Brazilians, a young woman from Japan and another from Morocco - are hard at work, studying test strips imbibed with various scents.
"This is the room where 'Opium' was created, and over there is where they invented 'Poison'," said the school's director Jean Guichard, reeling off mythical names from the history of perfume.
Givaudan's former students include Jean-Claude Ellena, master perfumer at Hermes, Guerlain's in-house "nose" Thierry Wasseur, and Jacques Polge, Chanel's head perfumer since 1978 and the creator of both "Coco" and "Allure."
Guichard himself was the nose behind two well-known Cacharel perfumes, "Eden" and "Loulou," for which he blended "vanilla, a powdery something and hibiscus flowers inspired by a Gauguin painting."
Right now, 26-year-old Leandro Petit is concerned with Lily of the Valley, a flower whose fragrance cannot be extracted, and which is therefore synthesised for perfumers from a mix of natural and chemical components.
"I'm discovering all the different aspects of the substance," he enthused. "It's fascinating."
On another table, 27-year-old Nisrine Grillie, a chemist by training, talked AFP through the basics of chromatography, the molecule-by-molecule analysis of a perfume.
