The biggest myth of perfumery

From my house in lefke

The biggest of all perfumery myths is that making perfumes is complicated, technical, and time-consuming. It is not true, making perfumes is easy, instinctive, and fast. I have never spent more than 2 hours on any of my perfumes.

In all arts, there is 99% of work and 1% of inspiration. In perfume making, the work is 1% and 99% is inspiration.

The claim that perfumers have to work for years on a fragrance before it can be released on the market is a carefully cultivated myth.

If ever a perfumer takes more than a few hours on a perfume, it has nothing to do with real difficulty to make a good fragrance. Rather it is because composing something acceptable to the human nose out of the cheap chemical ingredients that perfumers are forced to use is a real “tour de force”.

Time-consuming work, when any, has nothing to do with composing the fragrance, but with successive changes imposed by boards of evaluators, commercials and marketers, in order to erase any originality and personality from the original fragrance so that the new perfume will be in line with the existing crap.

This is because the amount invested in a new perfume is such that no risk can be taken. For corporations, producing perfumes is to be conceived only as a hit and run business, a “one season” hit sales in which you get your money back with profit, before passing to a new business, that is to a new fragrance and to a new launch.

Crap selling is a profitable business, as the Chinese know, because you will always produce new things, letting people hope that the new one will be better than the last one. Hope is the last to die, the Italians say. Crap selling is an endless production scheme, based on delusion and wishful hope.

People are no more looking for perfume, they just want “The new perfume”.

Making perfume is so easy that children in my perfume classes make fragrances far better than most of what is sold in perfumery shops. Holding these classes, it became evident to me that the ability to make good perfumes depends only on character and personality, not on nose sensibility or “technical” knowledge.

Some children just go straight to their choice of ingredients, straight to the right blending proportions, and just stop when they are satisfied with the result. That’s the way to do it, in 10 minutes.

This is the way I do it myself, in five minutes.  After that, in the following days, I can smell the fragrance, evaluate and control it, then eventually adjust it.

Some people instead, in the children or in the adult classes, have difficulty to choose their ingredients. They are in doubt at every step and never manage to finish their fragrance, because they never reach a result that they want.

Making perfumes is done with a mental attitude, not with a special olfactory ability.

If you have the right mental attitude, making perfumes will be very easy for you. If you don’t, don’t even try making perfumes, unless you are young, open to change, and willing to better yourself. Then you could learn the right mental attitude for your whole life, in all its aspects, through perfume making.