Composing a natural fragrance

Composing a natural fragrance is a totally different approach from “writing” a synthetic one.

It is important to understand that a natural perfume is not constructed with the nose, but with smells that have meanings in the olfactory language.

The perfumer who uses natural materials is handling olfactory archetypes. Smells are manifestations of the archetypes from which they originate and which they represent. For example, pine scent is the olfactory archetype of all trees, rose of flowers, and cinnamon of spices. Each of these odors belongs to our lives and has been recorded in our olfactory memory in association with emotions that we have experienced or inherited congenitally from our ancestors.

Natural ingredients are the real archetype, they have the maximum emotional impact.

In literature, the Odyssey, the Little Prince, or the Old Man and the Sea are based on archetypes. In order to make perfumes with olfactory archetypes the same rules as those of literature must be followed. It is necessary to build a very simplified structure for the story, which must remain visible from the beginning to the end.

In “writing” a natural perfume, where the notes themselves are so much more complex than the single molecules used in commercial perfumery and are so laden with an evocative power, the first error to avoid absolutely is to drown the main accord, the structure in details until they hide it.

However, the worst thing of all would be to start without a clear idea, that is without a main accord and without a structure. The structure of a natural fragrance is the main accord.
The simplest natural fragrance will always consist of a larger number of aromatic molecules than any commercial perfume.

This complexity inherent to natural materials makes it necessary to pay major attention to discipline in their composition. The presence of each ingredient must make sense in the realm of olfactory language because each odor will participate in the story we want to write, in the idea we want to manifest.

Otherwise, we shall make an incoherent soup, very nutritious certainly, but unattractive except to a very hungry person. Simplification, purification, structuration, not losing sight of the original idea, not cheating truth to please the ignorant or the ego, and finally knowing when it is time to stop. That is when you are satisfied that it is good.
This is the method.

Method means discipline and discipline must necessarily preside over the composition of a natural perfume, or else inspiration will be misled. In the same way, life is like composing a perfume, without inner discipline presiding over one’s own life, our aspirations will be misled.