Completely absorbed by her work, the woman is working with her fingers a precious lace of an infinite beauty and delicacy, placing a pin in the pillow on which she is making her bobbin lace. Her small work can be appreciated only by the expert eye and from a small distance. The Lacemaker, the painting by Johannes Vermeer held in the Louvre (Paris), the smallest, his most abstract and unusual for the style of the era, is an allegory of art - Form and Meaning, the Artist and the Work, a return to the essence through craftsmanship. The blurring of the threads suggests a liquid form and contrasts with the precision of the lace. With 2 threads, than 4, than 8, the woman with humble origins generates beauty as she loops and twists the threads. The thoughts are her threads, her torments are the flowers transposed in a precise and regular order, with grace and delicacy.
Like the lacemaking presented by Vermeer in his very small painting, the perfume creation is a science of complexity capturing the ephemeral nature of existence. Like the lacemaker, the perfumer is thinking through his craft, the workmanship in front of his organ is crucial.
The rule of division which I have previously exposed in an article (I am One, that becomes Two, that becomes Four, that becomes Eight, ad infinitum, than I am One again) is fundamental in the Art of Perfumes and the basis to construct Complexity.
Following this rule, one can divide all the ingredients used in contemporary perfumes in two main categories - new and old. With 1000 formulae of perfumes created since 2000 (each on a time / success scale) a statistical analysis will reveal that some ingredients start to be used more and other less in a dynamic evolution, where the "novelty" factor (what has not beet available previously) plays also a major role. At their turn, these 2 classes can be further divided in two (What is New, What is in Use) + (What goes Out, What is Forgotten) and once more. It can be observed that the first category reveals the Avant-garde surprise and the last one represents the Relics of the Past. Each is treasured for a particular reason being an anchor of the present Illusion in the Sands of Time.
We'll consider only the first class for the moment, what is new and contemporary, and we'll make a basic selection of ingredients, no more than 16. These ingredients are selected following the principle of sameness and distinctiveness. For instance they are all floral notes (same family), but not the same flower (different subfamily). These fragrant ingredients are the threads of the lace. Before being able to work, as I showed in another article, their concentrations should be balanced. You cannot create a Chantilly lace when the threads are not similar in size, neither can you imagine accords with extremely different levels of intensity, unless you are highly skilled.
During the creation of an openwork fabric like the bobbin lace you will loop, twist or braid a thread to other threads and later in the needle lace type more complex techniques are used. Perfume is an openwork too and the same is done for the floral 16 ingredients. You will combine them until you exhaust the basic floral accords which can be built using the Major / Minor principle. In other words, it means generating "isolated flower" which will be later combined, twisted and linked to each other with Method.
There are rules, mechanisms and patterns inherent to every new structure, but these patterns cannot be known before. They MUST be experienced, tried, and only after, the rules can be established and the lace type improved.
Of course, this lacemaking can be done partially without actually preparing a great variety of trials, by smelling what others did in perfumes. The huge amount of perfumes today, which should be considered a blessing for the creative perfumer, allows to combine mental exercises with practical tests. The best however is to design yourself the trials. Like in any art, Olfactory Culture is essential in perfume, there is NO excuse for not smelling the present and the past when it is available. Before seeing the ART an Artist is blind, but only ART, major or minor, is not sufficient to cure the relative blindness of the ordinary eye.
Small trials can be perfected once the "sketches" have been done and smelled, they can even be improved by computer if you consider a simple blend as function. Each accord is also a small "equation": best proportion of X and Y for a specific result over a set of n-trials each being quantified by your own critique.
Small trials can be perfected once the "sketches" have been done and smelled, they can even be improved by computer if you consider a simple blend as function. Each accord is also a small "equation": best proportion of X and Y for a specific result over a set of n-trials each being quantified by your own critique.
In a lace you don't really see the thread, you see a design, a pattern, an image of transparency. The threads are there, their "size" and "number" will determine the type of lace. You will not feel the "ingredient", the horrible minimalism which produces extremely poor perfumes turning around the same "threads" because of its laziness. Perfume is an art of complexity with a highly elegant and essential solution and it is important to start working with basic key ingredients.
Once the pattern of the lace has been devised, in other words the scent shape, endless new variations can be performed inside the initial structure playing now with the principle of sameness and distinctiveness. For instance, consider that each thread is actually made from 4 threads, carefully twisted around each other. Not a lily of the valley molecule but 4 molecules carefully selected and united into one to bring variety inside the unity of the original pattern, enriching the idea without destroying its pure meaning. More delicate and intricate the lace, more precise the threads (molecular beauty).
The molecules for this selection can be combined to generate floral accords up to 4 levels of complexity and consequently increasing levels of stability inside further combinations (accords which cannot be "broken").
In the new paradigm of Scent complexity the laboratory and the archive, the near future and the distant past, coexists. Now, after the first exercise, which consists in exploring the newness of contemporary ingredients, you can consider the following major four cases within the specific floral family of the singular studied case and based on the 1000 formulae database:
The new accord based on very new ingredients, never used before;
The known accord or scent shape from the market, or the best scent shape which can be summarized from the available perfumes and extracted from the database;
The outdated accord to avoid, or the combination that has been used too much in that decade and anchors the perfume too much in the recent past;
The forgotten accord or a lost combination from the past which will reaper in the cycle of odors and you should choose the best example from a very distant past.
A Perfume must be projected to the future, naturally evolving from the present, extracted from the recent past and linked to the remote past, all in an Organic Evolution based on Unity and Variety where the Sameness & Distinctiveness of its Ingredients and Ideas are united through Form and Meaning by a Science of Complexity with the most elegant Solution of Order.
Completely absorbed by his work, the perfumer is working with his mind a precious invisible lace of an infinite beauty and delicacy. The Perfumer generates in his infinite network of odors an allegory of COSMOS, an eternal and ephemeral beauty kept in a broken crystal hourglass. This Beauty is Distilled Reality, his Reality.. Like the visible lace, the Invisible Perfume is the most intricate "oeuvre d'esprit". In his dialogue with the invisible, the perfumer achieves what other arts had rarely achieved - the closest intimacy with the human soul and its deep questions, those which are rarely expressed because they are forbidden, the Question before the "censorship" of the language or culture. The scent is the language of the unconscious, the Perfume, if well made, is often the Answer. This time, Oedip the perfumer Confronts the Sphinx with the essence of an hourglass in front of the temple mirrored gate: Can you tell me what it is without breaking the crystal of time? It is YOU before becoming the Sphinx, but DO YOU remember yourself being Oedip in front of the scented mirror? A Scent is a descent in the labyrinth of time.
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Fragrance is the 8th Art - Octavian Coifan - Le Parfum est le 8ème Art
