I will give you an example and constant headache for me: let's say you have a generic composition/formula harmonious (nothing stands out) with about 20 ingredients. More or less you have all the facets: woody, floral, fruity, sweet, etc.
You have than a versatile molecule, let's say a ionone. They have floral, woody, orris, fruity facets.
My question is simple…which side of that ionone will show up and why, what to do if I want to show another side that one that appears obviously?. Except for the experience (because I did similar accords, contexts in the past) I have no logical answer. Then, as Ellena once said, some ingredients would inevitably go together, like rose and orris. It happens all the time when you have a lot of floral ingredients that would tend to "remake" the flower and that could be a total chaos inside the formula. So the question would be… why X ingredient would go more to Y and how can I control that?. Why nonadienol could do a nice melon or a nice violet but melon + violet + rose is not easy. Why aldehydes can do "aldehydic", "clean laundry" or orange/orris/etc effects ?.
Jean Claude Ellena also said he does not arrange his formula top/heart/bottom and that he believes that in a perfume ingredients work as a whole, not one after another after another.
For me it's quite hard to accept that perfumery would be that empirical and only after 40 years you will start to understand something. And I'm not talking about being creative, which is totally another subject. :)
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1 commentaires:
Very interesting question. Maybe you think too much in terms of single materials. If a single material is combined with another material it interacts with the other material into something complete different. You have to think of the result of certain combinations of materials. It's like painting; if blue will be combined with yellow you can't distinguish the two different colors, it will become a complete new color; green. We know that green is a combination of yellow and blue, this is because we learned this.
In perfumery it's the same, we know by experience or learned from the perfumers before us, that certain combinations will give a certain scent result. About the why and how, I can't answer. I can't answer why the combination of the color blue and yellow will turn into the color green either.
If I'm making a perfume I'm not starting from base notes to top notes, I start with an accord. I want to know before hand how the combination of these materials will smell, and work further from there. If I would build it from base to top notes, so if I would build up a perfume with only single notes, I wouldn't have any idea how the end result would smell like.
I could use woody, musky, floral and fruity notes, but that doesn't mean that the result (the combination of these notes) would smell woody, musky, floral and fruity as well. The combination of these notes can turn into something complete different. I could smell a green note for example, or a total different fruity note than I had in mind, because the combined notes gives a different result, it turns into something complete new.
In the case of Ionone, I don't think that one side of the Ionone will show up, if it's combined with another material, it's combined into something complete different. Scent from different flowers, fruit etc is a combination of different aromatic chemicals, if the combination of these chemicals is a bit similar like something we know, we recognize it as were the smell of this combination fruity, floral, woody etc.
I would like to bring this question up in my Yahoo group as well, it's very interesting. It's what perfumery is about, the combination of scents. I think you would like the group, you could ask questions like these, you are very welcome to join.
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