The Nose behind the Scents: Secrets of Perfume Making
June 1, 2009
I close my eyes and suddenly I am lying in a dark and dense cypress forest, surrounded by the scent of a man's body and the strong smell of dry wood. I open my eyes; I am standing in a department store. My nose has just taken me on a trip after I smelled the Tom Ford fragrance "Italian Cypress." My travel agent is Mehdi Lisi.
Lisi is a fragrance development manager, whose job is to translate the scents we crave into the fragrances we buy in stores.
He works for International Flavors and Fragrances, one of the world's most prominent makers of fragrances. Teams at the company can replicate the smells of skin – human or animal -- of wood, of a Moroccan spice market, and even the sensual scent that lingers when a woman walks by.
Lisi works at the IFF office on West 57th street in Manhattan. The company takes up three floors of the building. Chemists work in labs, and perfumers and salesmen work together to create and then sell the scents.
In a typical workday, Lisi samples dozens of scents. Companies like Estee Lauder, L’Oreal and Elizabeth Arden approach him with a fragrance idea and he then collaborates with them and the perfumers to create a final product. Lisi’s work consists in artistic direction and it leads him to work for a large spectrum of brands from luxurious companies such as Jo Malone to working for celebrities like Mariah Carey.
When he first met with representatives of an Italian designer, whose name he is not allowed to disclose, he was given specific directions about what they wanted IFF to create.
The designer’s representative showed him pictures of Tuscany in Italy. “The designer wants you to create a smell that evokes his house in Tuscany. The sea, the unspoiled nature, the walks he takes in the pine forest,” he said.
During the brief, Lisi did not speak much. He listened carefully and at times asked for a few precision, if needed.
“Do we have to stay in line with the "citrus" signature of the previous smells?” Lisi asked.
“Freshness is definitely important but we want to take a step towards more sensuality and depth, “the client replied.
Lisi, who is 32, is from Morocco and moved to New York two years ago. He directs a fragrance project in the same way a filmmaker directs a movie, with artfulness and by bringing together a team of artists and marketing specialists.
“It all starts with the story a brand wants to tell,” Lisi said.
Based on their demands, he works with perfumers to convey the story by mixing all kinds of molecules and scents. It takes weeks to months of work--marketing, strategizing and mostly smelling until the final product is ready.
After the meeting with the representatives of the Italian designer finished, Lisi walked through the white hallways of IFF to meet with a perfumer to explain to him what their client was expecting from them.
“They spoke of more sensuality. I like the idea of the pine forest in the summer, and working around dry woods, heated resin.” Lisi said. “But it's a spring launch so freshness is definitely a requirement.”
The perfumer pulls out a few scents contained in 5 ounces spray bottles and tells Lisi:
“What do you think of this? It is an accord I just created around a new, very powerful basil we have. Smells pretty Mediterranean to me!”
“I like it. It's green, citrus, aromatic; the designer likes these notes. And you also had that great "white thyme" smell that could work well. We have about 2 weeks to submit,” Lisi responded.
A couple of days after the initial meeting, the perfumer typically comes up with a formula for a fragrance and checks back with Lisi.
A week after Lisi gave the directions, one of the IFF perfumers walked into his office and showed him two samples of a perfume.
“I have worked on these two ideas,” the perfumer said.
They both smell the creations.
“This one is quite powerful; it really reminds me of a pine forest. It is very woody, balsamic, almost incense-like. I feel it is a great creative direction, but now we should look for much more freshness,” Lisi said.
“It is still a very short formula, I just wanted to know how you felt about this idea,” The perfumer replied.
“You should make it much fresher. We need a strong statement for this brand. We need a strong idea that catches the designer's attention,“ Lisi said.
After months and weeks of back and forth, their goal is to construct a product that satisfies a large range of people, not only the client. It must also pass the ultimate consumer test: 1000 people try the perfume and their reaction to the product determines whether it is marketable. IFF competes on every fragrance project with other major companies and the client gets to pick their favorite fragrance. Many perfumers work on a same project in order to optimize the chances to win the project.
Lisi said that he likes to work with the smells that inspire him the most, like orange flower and green tea, both reminders of his home country that evoke his cultural roots. "Whenever, there is a problem with a perfume, I tell the perfumer to add orange flower," he says with amusement. "It is a familiar smell that I love and I feel like any perfume that has it, will smell good."
After he completed business school, he had his first experience with perfume making at 22, as a marketing intern for L’Oreal in Paris. He knew nothing about the perfume industry but his creative mind was immediately seduced by the process of making perfumes. L’Oreal trained him to work as a fragrance evaluator. He calls perfume-making "a mixture of an olfactory and emotional experience." He says that the perfume world is a very exclusive one and he feels privileged to get the chance to express himself at the heart of it by contributing to the making of the fragrances.
His career changed several times but every job had a creative edge. After going to film school in Prague at the age of 24, he moved back to Paris, where he worked for a year for Firminich -- another major global fragrance maker – where for the first time he worked on finding ideas for perfumes. After he quit Firminich, he moved to Morocco where he directed and produced a television show, films and documentaries. In the meantime, he spent four years writing and producing a musical called "1001 Nights." When he moved to New York in 2007 to conquer Broadway, he instead got a job offer with IFF and he jumped once again in the perfume world.
Lisi has worked with some of the legendary world perfumers. It is an industry dominated by French creators because for centuries the formulas were secretly passed on from father to son and the first perfumers were French. He worked with Carlos Benaim, who, like Lisi, is from Morocco and has a passion for orange flower and the creator or Polo by Ralph Lauren, Sophia Grojman, who created Tresor by Dior, and Dominique Ropion among many.
One of the perfumers he works with closely is Clement Gavarry, who is 32 years old, and one of the youngest perfumers in the world. He was born in Paris, and he grew up in the world of perfume creation. His father, Max Gavarry, a world-renowned perfumer who worked for IFF his whole life, passed on to Clement his passion for scent creation. He learned from his father many things about distillation and gas chromatography when he was very young but was never pressured to follow the same path as his father. At university, he first studied chemistry to become an engineer.
In 1998, he interned at IFF's New York office, which is when he decided to become a perfumer. Being a chemist was not enough; he had to become an expert in scents, so he commenced study at a school that specializes in perfume making, the Superior International School of Perfume, ISIPCA in Paris. He completed his fragrance training at IFF's Perfumery School in 2004 and then started creating his own perfumes.
His favorite place to create is in his office, which he calls his “personal universe.” He describes it as quiet haven where he likes to sit and come up with formulas in a peaceful atmosphere. On his office’s pink walls, there are posters of his creations along with a shelf with the packaged versions of every fragrance that was marketed.
“The perfumes always smell better when they are in a real bottle,” he said while smelling his favorite scents off little bottles: flowery musk and lavender.
After a meeting with Lisi, Gavarry sits in his office and starts thinking about a formula. His experience enables him to know what different combinations will smell like. He then enters into a form a list of ingredients with specific dosages that he thinks mixed together, may create the perfume the client is looking for.
“I know the classical smells and when I come up with a formula I hope that it works. With experience, it takes less time to find the right one,” he said.
Formulas differ in their concentrations and the variety of ingredients used. They can be short, with only 10 or 15 ingredients – or complex with over 200 different scents.
In the lab, he weighs each ingredient and adds them together in a vial. When I visit, he is making a solution with cut grass, peach, violet, apple, plum and musk that he says brings olfactory long lasting and diffusion quality.
Then, he puts everything in a machine that mixes the oil-based ingredients to obtain a solution to which he adds a large amount of alcohol in order to obtain a perfume.
There are 16 perfumers at IFF in New York. Each on of them has their own section in the main lab where they work. All day, they test different formulas, for different concepts, different bases. In their workspace, there are scales and computers, on which they write or revise formulas.
Each perfumer has an individual perfume library; thousands of bottles are lined up one next to the other, classified by alphabetical order. They are all different colors. There are synthetic scents, like musk and calone that reproduces the smell of the sea, and natural ones such as lavender and jasmine. In the middle of the lab is a fridge that contains products that are sensitive to light and temperature, such as citrus products - lime and orange - and flowery products such as jasmine, that tend to be a lot more expensive.
According to Gavarry, they mostly use synthetic products because they are less expensive to produce but also because the usage of natural ones is legally restricted for ecological and toxicological reasons. IFF also has chemists that work to reproduce smells that cannot be extracted from flowers or plants. They are contained in a different set of bottles are located in one of the corners of the lab. They are not transparent like the others, but blue. Gavarry explains that they are able to capture the smell of tropical plants that the company grows in a greenhouse in New Jersey. They analyze and recreate them. The technique is called “head space.” That way, they are able to get the smell or Indian tea flowers, pink lotus, tulips, ginger lilies, and they are even able to extract the smell of a stallion to get an animalistic smell without hurting any specie.
For formulas that are commonly used, a big machine sits in a separate room. It has large bottles containing these oils, and it weight and mixes huge quantities of perfume under the supervision of chemists.
In a room by the lab where the scents are created there, there is an application lab is what is called the fragrance stability department, a place where the perfumes are watched and colored to see if they last well with time. In a large oven, chemists put the perfumes at a 50 Celsius temperature for three days, in order to obtain a perfume that is six months old, to see if the smell needs to be changed and also, to make sure that visually the color of the perfume stays the same.
Gavarry’s creations show both his sensitivity to smell and his knowledge of techniques, which have allowed him to accumulate an impressive list of fragrances that were chosen by IFF’s clients, such as Lovely by Sarah Jessica Parker, (his favorite creation), Prada by Prada, which he created in collaboration with his father, and Eternity Summer by Calvin Klein.
Gavarry, who grew up in France, said that his work is influenced by the memories of visiting his grandfather in the country side and walking in fields that smelled like rose and jasmine.
His favorite project was the fruity fragrance, Lovely by Sarah Jessica Parker, not only for the quality of the fragrance but because he enjoyed working with the actress. “She was amazing to work with. It is rare for someone who does not have experience in perfume creation to have such a good vocabulary and she closely worked with me in making her fragrance.”
Lisi and Gavarry most recent collaborative creation is Always by Alfred Sung.
“The greatest part of the process is when finally the work you have done for months is picked,” Lisi said. “Then we have to start all over again, fighting for a new one.”