The Diary of a Nose by Jean-Claude Ellena Read Free Book Online Page B

substituted for the erotic). They also included a tendency to judge a perfume’s marketable value principally by its intensity and staying power.
    It is difficult to classify a perfume nowadays. The raw materials used in perfumes, most of them chemical in origin, are moving away from references to ‘nature.’ The aesthetic approach to composition is no longer a question of adding different accords but a vision of a whole, which means perfumers can fully master its expression. Regrettably, a perfume’s performance – its diffusion and intensity – too often takes precedence over elegance, with the sole aim of making it more accessible and of gratifying an international clientele.
    Commercially speaking, old perfumes are no longer venerated, only newcomers are considered. The ten bestsellers in France are recent perfumes, with the exception of
Chanel No. 5
, Guerlain’s
Shalimar
and Yves Saint Laurent’s
Opium
. Within the industry, the future does not really lie in discovering new fragrantraw materials. On the pretext of increasingly strict legislation, of development costs and the countless compulsory safety checks, the budgets allocated to research have been reduced. Chemical manufacturers, who favor molecules with familiar smells that can be produced by the ton, contribute less and less to widening perfumers’ olfactory palette.
    In order to endure,
haute
perfumery is therefore condemned to inventing new olfactory premises, a new style of writing, to redefining quality, to finding a new form of expression and a new way of behaving towards those who still believe in it and need it. It is only if it is able to meet these exacting requirements that the craft of composing perfumes will reclaim its full meaning and value.

    Paris, Thursday 8 April 2010
    Sweet peas
    I am walking along the rue Royale. I stop by the window of the florist Lachaume. I have just spotted sweat peas in every color. I like their fragrance. I take out my mobile and call Anne, my assistant, to ask her to order some from Coquelicot, the florist in a village near Cabris.

    Paris, Friday 9 April 2010
    Leïla
    Leïla Menchari is exhibiting window displays at the Institute of the Arab World – recognition for a profession that is both beautiful and futile, and one we need because it allows us to dream, which is very important. I first came across her displays on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in 1993, at a time when I was head perfumer for a German company. My office was opposite the house of Hermès and, four times a year, members of staff would go out into the street at the end of the afternoon to watch the curtain being raised on the main window display. Later, when I was taken on by Hermès, I met up with Leïla, whom I had first encountered in her garden at Hammamet, near Tunis. She encouraged me to look at and feel leather and silk goods, objects whose value owes everything to a deep knowledge of the raw material and to the precise, measured, repeated gestures of the craftsmen who work with them. Leïla knows the colors that bring them to life and the gestures that make them enchanting.

    Paris, Saturday 10 April 2010
    Beauty
    I am making the most of this afternoon in Paris to see a Lucian Freud exhibition at the Pompidou Centre. I discovered his painting in 1995 at an exhibition at the Maeght Foundation that was dedicated to him and Francis Bacon. A large proportion of his work is devoted to nudes. The choice of life-size canvases makes them all the more immediate and alive. His models bear no relation to the aesthetic canons of ancient or classical beauty. They are like me; they are ordinary and, even though they may be disturbing at first glance, they eclipse themselves in favor of the painting itself; it is not the models that I see, but our bestiality and our humanity. Even if his work has a place in the tradition of figurative and realist painting, Lucian Freud is never one for seduction, illusion or appearances, either in his subject