Every ingredient in perfumery is a letter, a syllable, a word, an image. It has everything that characterizes a special ideogram as I said several years ago (a logogram). Its meaning is contained in "the alphabet of scents" and "the dictionary of odors" - their purpose for the perfumer is to offer definitions, etymology, history and various other elements of the Codex, they help the Work. In linguistics, a syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence, it is the phonological building blocks of words and their writing, considered the crucial shift from pictograms, began before the writing of first letters, in the Sumerian cities. If this writing system, meant to encode the scent and not the formula is not used today, it doesn't mean it will not appear in the next future. For the moment I do not speak about the notation system in perfumes, I use only the metaphor of "letters" to explain some features of scent.
A collection of ingredients has all the typographical characteristics known as typeface or more common as "font" if you work on computer. For this reason, the same text (the perfume formula), can be written in as many ways as you want, once you know how it works, great perfumers know their love formulae by heart. In front of a huge variety of similar molecules, most of them with complex and unknown chemistry for the inexperienced eye, the temptation to use everything is great. This chaotic freedom is similar to the first texts written when the software "Word" was launched by Microsoft Office many years ago. People were tempted to use as many fonts and sizes as they could to make a beautiful text. Few mastered the visual composition, a technique which can be applied no matter what visual ingredients are under your nose. Jean Cocteau wrote in 1919 a small text on a portrait which tells everything about this signature - "Ecrivez lisiblement". But do not forget that a collection of letters, belonging to the same Latin alphabet, let's say the letter "C" written with several typefaces, can produce either a mess or something visually new. Many graphic artists know and use this technique, they use both the meaning of a text and its visual appearance to generate enhanced meaning.
Once the perfumer has access and masters the visual arts he has infinite powers, but visual arts have never been taught in any perfumery school. The power of scent, the power of image and the power of word, taught as they are taught today in very different academic systems, simply means infinite freedom for the perfumer in the i-Perfumer era. This is not taught today in Paris. Chinese have the power of the word and of the image in their culture and brain because of their writing system. Once they will learn how to make perfumes, it will be chess-mate for Paris, but that's not my business anymore. After all, Paris is just a Greek character who once made a choice of love.
The chemistry produced a huge variety of "fonts", they are variations around similar odors, and if somebody looks inside a list with thousands of names he would certainly get lost. But all these 4000+ molecules are not necessarily different. It's like writing the letter "O" with all the typefaces you have in Photoshop, then writing all the other letters of our Latin alphabet, and then mixing this visual soup in a basic vocabulary. What you get looks at first impressive and scary, but the information contained is not as huge as it seems.
In graphic design, a typeface is the visual representation or interpretation of a set of characters, it is their appearance. Besides its functionality to build words (some tailored for special applications) and besides its basic construction from lines and curves, it has a wholeness. It can be sharp, round, elongated, flat and so on. The sign has its own visual existence as a symbol. A Western eye looks at the beauty of ideograms without having a clue about a Chinese text and appreciates only the "design", the shape of things. Unlike us, Chinese and Japanese have a very different approach when they write.
The same can be done inside a collection of similar molecules, once you start to compare them. This notion, or the typographical dimension of a single molecule, can be used to make selections according to given principles. The standard alphabet of basic odors can be "re-designed" with other molecules that share a particular feature - roundness, sharpness - without any relation to their precise olfactory definition. You select things that go well with all the rest without considering any scent family in the beginning as if you were decorating your home with old objects without organizing the house into a museum according to theme, age, author, name. You act as if you knew only one thing, the Harmony of shapes.
However, one should not consider roundness, sharpness or any other characteristic as something standard. These rules, expressed by the typographical metaphor, are born in a context where you are able to compare and to select inside the same class and across the elements you are working with. This dimension is also part of a style of a given period when several molecules are used more than other molecules giving a "touch". It is like the visual dimension of any European decorative style when you consider just the line and the shape and not the morphological details or themes (think later French rococo panels and early floral Art Nouveau).
Is styrallyle acetate sharp and round? If you compare it with IsoESuper yes, if you compare it with other green leafy - rhubarb bitter notes, not necessarily.
Let's have a look at the following Seth of 16 molecules:
Splendione, Kharismal, methyl jasmonate, dihydroisojasmonate
Javanol, Bacdanol, Sandalore, Polysantol
Muscone, Muscenone, Nirvanolide, Cosmone
Irone a, Isoraldeine, Koavone, dihydrobetaionone
Every molecule has its own chemistry, odor, facets, details, properties, price and years of work in the lab, plus an entire family of optic isomers. But each of them says the main thing in its own row - a transparent jasmine, a sandalwood, a musky note, an orris note. The same combination can be written in other ways and it is a very precise mathematical number. When you combine, you are in the world of numbers, a concept I explored in previous articles. Of course, when you start to build a 4 elements scent idea, the same accord looks new. It is like a "word" written first in Arial, then in Times New Roman and later in Helvetica. If you want "English Vivace" (a very calligraphic typeface) I should add several other materials in each row, like the natural sandalwood Mysore oil or the orris concrete 25 % irone DM. "What goes better with what" is a question of detail and choice. It is applied to the whole selection of ingredients used inside a formula as if each formula had its own appropriate "typeface" to better express the meaning of the text (the mental image of the perfume) obtained with words (the ingredients).
A romantic love poem can be written with an art deco sharp font, with a more elegant Nicolas Cochin or handwritten with a scented ink and a special cachet. There is no need to say which works better, the eye knows what is appropriate to the meaning of the text to make a coherent message.
Some perfumers use the same technique, including new molecules inside their known formulae as if they were writing the text in a new way without necessarily updating the content. Once you know the rules of the art, how to generate words and put them in sentences with meaning, written in many ways, there are thousands of perfumes which can be built in the shortest amount of time, depending only on the time needed for maceration, evaluation and correction.
I use the Latin word ODOR to explain through its simple permutation, ORDO, that the immensity of scents and the great variety of ingredients that can be used today, is not a chaotic universe. It is something which can be mastered with grace like ages ago, when the writing systems were invented and with it the written literature as a reflection of life and the universe.
All the "microscopic" details of a molecule are necessary, but it is important to know that you can write texts with new fonts without necessarily knowing how they were built by type designers. The artist knows how to use them and how to study the visual universe. Is it important to know all the molecules of a perfume lab? I'd rather say it is important to know those which are crucial because they represent a class, a character. It is very similar to the process of teaching a foreign language.
Thanks to graphic artists, we have all the signs of an alphabet designed together in a coherent system, a writer doesn't need to think about it. Perfumery is somehow different. The available letters are bigger and you have typefaces from all styles - the A is from Arial, the C is from Book Antiqua, the Z is from Calligrapher, and so on - but not yet a complete set from the same style. However, some perfumers managed to build their own small selection of things which share common features - there is a Firmenich touch in the past 30 years and no matter how different are the themes of their perfumes, there is often a common vibe, the font is Helvetica, of course.
Perfume houses selling molecules should present Scent Specimens, a broadsheet with examples of typefaces and fonts available in a design studio, in their case examples of harmonies from their molecules.
Why should I sell two new molecules to a perfumer when I could sell 10 molecules that go extremely well together allowing many different combinations?
Why should I demonstrate the qualities of a molecules in a given perfume when I could show how original and versatile it can be inside a 10 molecules set?
This is the Scent Specimen, a concept I borrowed from typography, because the only thing that matters is Harmony. Once you have a tailored selection you can do endlessly play and this is a reason why many amateurs can hardly build anything - their selection of raw materials is not tailored - it is the entire set of typefaces from Word.
The modern perfumer is like an old Guttenberg who has to chose the letters inside a studio where his cat played at midnight night with all the symbols and stole some of the signs. No set is complete in the house of the old men. He cannot design new letters for the printing machine and has a short time to print the new book which should be visually pleasant with an intelligible text.
A special formula is needed for the perfume lover.
One exercise is to take the structure of a famous perfume and update several ingredients preserving the spirit of the composition. A new formula is born and if you add to this the right word (a new material or accord) which did not exist at the time when the original "text" was created you have something totally new. Once you have the right collection, the good memory, the software and the organized encyclopedia (the scents or accords from various times) creation is the most beautiful daily game. Everything is under the nose of the perfumer to be reinvented. The rules exist and are crucial, but these rules are common to any art practiced by mankind - they are the rules that show how the mind works and can be applied in any context of human activity once you master them.
When you write a basic lily of the valley sketch, two things are crucial. First, the perfect reproduction of the symbol (what this flower is in terms of scent) and then the perfect coherence of the ingredients (the internal harmony of the medium) which is achieved first by selection, then by proportion. When there is a perfect match between the mental image - the natural flower and the ingredients available at that time in the labs, the new harmony, or the new definition of the flower, will stay on the market as long as a better molecule will be created by chemists allowing a better re-definition. For the modern perfumer this allows a crucial thing: a creation can evolve to better express its own initial idea. It is a living masterpiece and it adapts not to the market but to History. You can have Kadine (Guerlain) v.1.0, Kadine v.2.0, Kadine v.3.0 and so on, adapted to the evolution of the human intelligence and not to its decay (regulation, price, etc).
Now, as the old Guttenberg is extremely well organized, he devised a technique to clean the mess made by his cat in his studio with a Swiss cuckoo clock, in order to print the book about the Old Buddha. In his studio, he devised 2 tables and started the selection among all the 4000+ bottles.
Because this year Helvetolide, Cosmone, Serenolide, Splendione, Javanol and norLimbanol have something of the old Helvetica font, he made a selection to see what goes with them and what not. One table the new family, on the other the less fortunate bottles. From the "exclusion table" he devised two parts - "special characters", because he did not find anything else which harmonized with his first selection, and the "old characters", a huge list he will not use this time. He took them to the basement where he banished the cat until the work is finished.
From the table called "Helvetica re-invented", he started to devise everything, according to the symbols of the alphabet he needed to print the "Old Buddha Book Of Serenity". Of course, some bottles said the same thing, this allows him to make a pleasant variation inside the text. Some symbols were missing in the new harmony. He will try to avoid them and, if impossible, he will use some of the special characters, but not many. As he expected, there were some strange bottles on his table because once he printed an Egyptian book who used a special type of logograms. They harmoniously blended with the rest.
He finished the book in time and received the special Swiss prize for the new visual masterpiece, which allowed him to … buy another cat. This time it was Persian, majestic like the Foo Dogs protecting the Old Buddha in the Serene Garden called Splendione when the night stars cast their brightness in Cosmone. The scent on his letter was Subtilité, also a special type of invisible Swiss ink.
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Fragrance is the 8th Art - Octavian Coifan - Le Parfum est le 8ème Art
