‘You must think of perfumery like a dance, like you’re making love!’ Louisa Elliot said in a saucy voice and cackled high and loud. She was quite the comedienne and had us all falling about laughing most of the morning. It was nice to have a relaxed session, one where our shoulders weren’t bunched up around our necks in fear we’d make a mistake in front of one of the masters. While Louisa was indeed fiery and passionate she was helpful and articulate and had shown us a great deal already that morning.
She talked about everything from how to choose the right bottle to get our message across, to designing marketing campaigns and finally how to design a perfumery collection that marries together well.
‘Now your task is to blend me a dream… How you interpret that is up to you.’ She fluffed the black of her short curls. ‘I’ll give you an hour to mix and then we’ll see what you’ve managed to do in that time.’
An hour! This was my downfall, struggling to capture a feeling rather than aromas I knew worked well together. I’d expected perfumery at this level to be more about balancing than evocation but I was being proved wrong time and again.
Thirty minutes into it I was struggling. Dreams were hard to nail down and different for everyone. Plus my head was wooly with them, if I was thinking of my own goals. New York, perfumery, love… Since coming to Paris, I dreamt about romance a lot. I’d tossed and turned in slumber, lost in a realm where love was simple and you followed your heart, but when I awoke it was never that simple. Real life came crashing back and the knowledge I couldn’t act on the impulses that crowded my mind. So if I closed my eyes what did I dream of…
Louisa came to my bench. ‘Why the glum face?’
With a sigh I said, ‘I struggle when it comes to this kind of thing. I can fix a malady, but when it comes to bottling a feeling itself doubt creeps in.’
With her heavily kohled eyes, and shiny red lips Louisa looked every inch the sophisticated Manhattanite that she’d once been, though she now was based in France. ‘OK, so tell me what you’re trying to do here.’
‘Well, when I think of dreams, I think of my own… Love, ambition, a place to call home.’ I hastily tucked a tendril of escaped hair back. Nan’s advice flashed in my mind. Until I’d said the words I love you in three different languages, or figured out exactly what the language of love was, maybe I’d never get it. How could you bottle a feeling, an emotion?
Louisa crossed her arms, and surveyed me. ‘So why the troubled expression? It sounds exactly like you know what you’re doing and what you mean to express in fragrance, you just need to toy with it, right? What does a dream mean to you? Do you dream of light, of love?’
‘Well,’ I laughed nervously. Do I dream of love? Is love a dream or a state of being? ‘That’s just it, when I come to bottle that tenuous type of idea I lose my way, and it never quite translates. That wow gets lost somehow.’ It was easier to just pick essences and blend them rather than tie them down to an evocation. ‘If we were talking about love for instance… Love might be roses, but what else? A dash of this a splash of that, but it’s not really love is it? It’s roses, vanilla bean, you know? I find it hard to pretend it’s something that it’s not.’
Taking a moment to smell my blend she jotted some notes, and then clicked her fingers. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘You have to separate what you think from what you feel? Does that make sense to you?’
It did, but it was easier said than done. She must have seen the reluctance on my face and spoke again. ‘You’re blending elements that you think work together, that you think will balance but what you need to do is mix a perfume that makes you feel an emotion. Don’t use your head, use your heart, see?’
As I pondered, the answers came thick and fast. Perfumery should be about more than the sum of its parts.
I was thinking too literally.
Too linearly.
Had my nan been right all along?
Was I doing my perfumery a disservice by hiding behind my true feelings? By not laying myself bare?
I had to be brave.
Be bold.
So many questions buzzed around my mind but I felt I was whisper close to solving the riddle that had puzzled me for so long. The only way to know for sure was to try to bottle another emotion, one I’d felt before and see if I could make that work, then I’d have my answer. If I could capture another feeling then I knew it wasn’t that I was clueless it was that I just couldn’t capture something adequately because I hadn’t truly lived it yet.
‘Thanks, Louisa! I understand! I think…’ It would just be a matter of believing it, believing it was possible. But I wouldn’t bottle love, I’d bottle a dream, my dream. Living in a new city, discovering the world around you and delighting in it. Taking a chance on yourself!
She gave me a tiny nod. ‘I knew you would. And my advice for the future is, risk it all, you have to, to be a great perfumer. You must find that passion, extract it from every nuance of life, live with great gusto, and never, ever look back…’
I smiled a great big corker of a grin. Never ever look back seemed like great advice to me, and something my nan would have agreed with. I set to work, this time concentrating on capturing a different emotion, the joie de vivre of a new life, a new challenge. Living in the moment, grabbing joy with both hands and holding it tight to me. It was the scent of freshly cut grass. Sunshine after rain. Coffee beans. Sugar and spice. The expectation tomorrow would be even better. The sweet smell of success!
New York…
My hands flew across the bench, my heart racing because I was close, I was close to achieving my own dreams, knuckling down that theme which had alluded me for so long and that to me was the biggest win so far.
Thirty minutes later I brandished my little vial of perfume for Louisa. She wafted it under her nose, her scarlet lips breaking into a grin. ‘Ladies and gentleman, we have a winner!’ she said. ‘Del has managed to conjure big city living, the elegance of Paris! Long lazy days, wandering the boulevards, stopping for café au lait… This,’ she said solemnly, ‘is the start of great things for you.’
Wait, what? Paris!
‘Ah, Louisa, I was actually…’ My words petered off as I grappled inside my mind. I’d meant to bottle a perfume that represented my dream, my NYC dream, but somehow it had morphed into a Parisian perfume.
Had my dreams changed and I hadn’t realized until now?
Louisa stared at me, head cocked, so I hastily responded. ‘Thank you, Louisa…’ Capturing love would have to wait, it was still too hazy a notion for me, and now I had to work out why my subconscious had changed course so dramatically. I trusted in perfumery, in the magic behind it, so I just had to figure out what this all meant.
What my subconscious was telling me.
At the end of the afternoon we sat together and chatted about everyone’s hopes and dreams. Louisa must have sprinkled some kind of comradery dust over the group. We discussed what had worked and what had failed and I was beyond happy that mine had been chosen as perfume of the day. Louisa hugged me tight and told me to follow my instincts. It gave me hope for the future.
By winning, I was given use of Vincent’s studio for an entire week. I didn’t waste any time, and snatched the key and headed there and caught the sillage of Sebastien’s perfume, as if he’d just stepped out and I sort of fell in love with the damn guy on scent alone.
It was like a dream come true, being able to walk among his papa’s things, sit where he once did. Sebastien had left his papa’s notebooks out, with a handwritten message giving me permission to read them. It was an honor reserved for the winner, so I couldn’t help but feel special, as though he trusted me implicitly. I used Google translate to help me decipher the words, and was soon cast under his spell, reading the old man’s musings.
As I read through his words, one sentence jumped out at me, and I wrote it in my own notebook so I could reread it later and recite it like a mantra. ‘Compose the perfect perfume and it will live on like a song, forever.’ The old man was poetic in his scribbles, he wore his heart on his sleeve and was open and honest, almost like it was more a memoir than just perfumery notes.
In the little studio, on a floor above Leclére Parfumerie, I thought of Vincent and everything he achieved in his life. A man who was shunned by the greats at the time, told he’d never make it. And yet he’d proved them all wrong, he’d succeeded and still kept that same humble eccentricity that made people take him into their hearts. It was a lesson in perseverance and I vowed to remember it always. But also to stop and take time to enjoy the people in my life, not just perfumery.
I took a break from reading and went and stood by the window and pictured Vincent doing the same.
In his mind he’d still be blending; a dash of this, and splash of that. The fine hairs on my arms stood up, perhaps the old man was still hovering in the place he loved best. Here in his studio just off the Champs-Élysées where the hustle and bustle of city life was only footsteps away, gastronomic scents wafting upwards as if tempting the residents. Could I stay in this city, the city of love…?