#now l’artisan parfumeur is my best friend

[imanes]

Proof that I was in Paris today

[toddrogersfl]

Anima Vinci’s Centifolia rose harvest

When you take time out to slow down for a moment and appreciate the better things in life, we describe it as ‘stopping to smell the roses,’ so when Nathalie Vinciguerra – founder and CEO of fragrance house Anima Vinci – invited me to join them at their annual Centifolia rose (sometimes called Rose de Mai or May rose) harvest in Grasse, I leapt at this opportunity to appreciate, what many perfumers consider, the best-smelling roses in the world…

You can actually smell the roses in Grasse before you see them. I had been driven from Nice airport to the fields by renowned (and now independent) perfumer, Thomas Fontaine. He’d hired the car and been upgraded to a sports model, and I have to admit that, as we cruised along the motorway with the steeply exotic looking hills of Grasse surrounding us, I felt like I was (as the young people say these days) living my best life. ‘The rose fields are over there, you can’t see them yet but you’ll smell them very soon…’ he promised, and as I opened the car door a wall of fragrance greeted me, an all-pervading scent that at times was tantilisingly sheer, carried away by a sudden breeze; but mostly hovered like an olfactory canopy, a ceiling of scent.

How to describe the fragrance? This is where mere words cannot hope to do justice to what basically smells like heaven must surely do, but I’ll give it a go. Centifolia roses are the epitomy of dewy freshness, gathered in the early morning before the sun can evaporate the precious oils, and with a delicate ripe raspberry note flickering through a green, graceful core. Probably the best way I can describe it is to say they smell like their colour, but nothing can quite do justice to the experience of closing your eyes and breathing in that smell for yourself.

Left-right: perfumer Thomas Fontaine, Nathalie Vinciguerra, Mr. Joubert

We were visiting the rose fields owned by a farmer called Mr Joubert, who looks exactly as you hope a French rose-field farmer would – frayed flannel shirt and skin long-tanned by his lifetime of hard work in those fields. In fact, I later learned that his family had owned them for centuries, his strong, careful hands expertly cupping the pale pink petals and quickly, so-gently, twisting them to come away as a full bloom. The buds are left on the bush and tomorrow, their time will come, a process repeated until every petal has been safely gathered and taken in hessian sacks to what basically amounts to Mr Joubert’s garage – piled en-masse, weighed and transported within two hours to the place that processes them in to ‘concrete’, a solid (or sometimes semi-solid) product resulting from solvent extraction. When the concrete is washed with alcohol, it finally becomes what we know as an ‘absolute’.

  Incredibly, it takes around 12 tonnes of fresh flowers to produce just one kilogram of rose absolute, the harvest season for Centifolia roses is only a few days – and what has been gathered represents that entire year’s crop. The back-breaking highly skilled work, the sheer amount of petals it takes to produce the final product and the risk of bad weather or disease affecting the quality explains why Centifolia rose absolute is one of the most expensive materials known in perfumery – currently, the price is between 15 000 / 20 000 euros per kilo.

Nathalie Vinciguerra is a woman glowing with happiness at inspecting the roses, and passion for an industry she’s so well versed in. Originally form Corsica, she has ‘…always been passionate about scents. I started my career in Paris in the International Marketing of L’Oreal where over a period of 7 years, I acquired in-depth expertise in fragrance development and international launches.’ From 2006 to 2015, Nathalie was the Head of Fragrance Development for Penhaligon’s and L’Artisan Parfumeur – creating briefs and working directly with perfumers to create award-winning fragrances you’ll definitely have worn, including absolute classics like Penhaligon’s Juniper Sling.

Nathalie’s fingerprints are all over the perfume world, but she had always wanted to start her own business, where she could ensure the quality – and very importantly for her, the authenticity and sustainibility – through every single stage of a perfume’s production. Launching last year with an initial offering of five fragrances, over the years, Nathalie has gathered a group of friends and colleagues who just happen to be some of the best perfumers and producers in the world – choosing Thomas Fontaine, Christian Provenzano, Randa Hammami and Michel Roudnitska as the perfumers for Anima Vinci. Every year she makes sure to personally visit the rose fields to assess the quality, to make sure the farmer is happy and to continue to build these vital relationships that, ultimately, shape the way we smell when we purchase that final bottle of perfume.

‘Mr Joubert works closely with a company called Art & Parfums and independent Perfumer Thomas Fontaine, to keep the authenticity from producer to consumer and share the beautiful story of this very precious and rare flower. Art & Parfums is the Grasse Fragrance House we are using which guarantee the best quality of sustainable raw ingredients,’ Nathalie explains. And where, exactly, will the petals end up? Anima Vinci have exclusive use of these fields, and the absolute is for their fragrance Rose Prana. ‘It was a such dream developing Rose Prana with perfumer Randa Hammami,’ she enthuses,  ‘where we tried to capture in the heart of the perfumer, the breath of the centifolia rose: this divine moment when you enter the roses fields and get intoxicated by this extraordinary freshness and lightness of this delicate pink petals, sweet, fruity and incredibly addictive.’

Wearing it now, I can be transported back to those sun-baked fields in a flash, and really that’s the power of perfume, isn’t it? To capture a moment for eternity, to gift us the experience of travelling back there with every eager spritz, to allow us to dream. But what does the future hold for precious, labour-intensive fragrant crops such as these? Some farming families in Grasse used to own jasmine fields, too, Nathalie tells me, but the majority were forced to abandon them when companies found they could buy (lesser quality) jasmine elsewhere. ‘And sadly their children didn’t want to take on such work with such risk – they could make far more money through selling the land for property or even for “glamping”, or you know, they go and work in IT…’ Nathalie tells me.

Visiting these fields – meeting the producers first-hand – cannot help but drum home to anyone with even a fleeting interest in fragrance how vital it is to support these sustainable companies who genuinely care about that future. And so, the next time you reach for a bottle of what purports to be a ‘rose perfume’, do you know exactly where those petals grew? I guarantee that if you do, your pleasure at wearing it can only increase. And with such a heavenly scent, I’m not sure how that’s humanly possible… but know for a fact that it’s true.

Anima Vinci Rose Prana £150 for 100ml eau de parfum

Buy it at animavinci.com or Les Senteurs

Written by Suzy Nightingale

The post Anima Vinci’s Centifolia rose harvest appeared first on The Perfume Society.

from The Perfume Society https://perfumesociety.org/anima-vincis-centifolia-rose-harvest/

[skincare-us-blog]

Meet The Perfumers Behind Glossier You

New Post has been published on http://skincareee.com/meet-the-perfumers-behind-glossier-you/

Meet The Perfumers Behind Glossier You

As we gear up to launch our debut fragrance, Glossier You, into the world, it seemed like a good opportunity to lift the curtain a little—both on fragrance development in general, and the perfumers behind You. The art of perfume making is a difficult one, and we worked with some of the best in the business. Fun fact: They’re already the noses behind some of your favorite scents (Santal, anyone?). But fragrance is about more than just smelling. Read on, if only to put a face to the smell…

Frank Voelkl: There’s not really one way to start becoming a perfumer. For me, I started when I was a teenager in Paris. Paris is very fragrant. There were smells everywhere—a little more so than there are today. I just started to collect fragrances because I was interested. Then a friend of my parents told me about a school in Versailles, so I went there and they explained to me that there are actual people creating fragrances. It was something you could go to school for.

Dora Baghriche: The school is called ISIPCA. We both went there. When you discover the school, you do everything to get in—but you don’t know that you will be good at creating perfumes. So it’s actually quite terrifying. You start because you want to reach this big thing that is creation but you still don’t know if you’re able to do it.

Frank: It’s a great school to learn the basics. As a perfumer, the first thing you have to do is learn the ingredients—recognize them, know how to use them, and eventually, how to put them together.

Dora: It’s a lot about testing yourself and a lot of work, learning every day.

Frank: Through that, you learn what you like. We have 1300 ingredients here at the lab, and maybe I’ll use 400 or something on a regular basis. I have my favorites that I like working with and that I’m good at working with. To develop that takes quite some time.

Dora: When you first start building your own accords, it’s a very big emotion because it’s the beginning of your story—when you start building your connection and your style. But it takes a lot of time. Even now, every day I come into the lab and smell 10 different raw materials. When you smell blind, you have many more ideas then when you know what you’re smelling and have ready-made ideas. Ten by 10 every day, you gradually learn the ingredients.

Frank: In a way, fragrance is something that is not necessary but does something for your soul and your well-being. Fragrance can make you feel good, can make you feel comfortable, can you make you feel sexy–whatever you’re looking for. I have to say, I do enjoy wearing Santal 33 quite a bit. I’ve been quite involved in Le Labo and helped develop Santal, along with some other fragrances for that brand. It’s kind of exciting to walk into an elevator and smell that fragrance on somebody. It’s very recognizable and very diffusive. When somebody does wear it, it’s almost impossible not to notice it. It was almost a surprise in a way, and I’m still trying to figure out what makes Santal, Santal.

Dora: One of my latest fragrances is Mon Paris by Yves Saint Laurent. Then I’ve worked on more niche fragrances for Kiehls–I’ve made the Vanilla and Cedarwood, and Black Tea and Vetiver. For L’Artisan Parfumeur, I made Caligna–very Mediterranean, thick and jasmine. I have worked with Kenzo, Versace, Cacharel, Viktor & Rolf… Nowadays, I still don’t like to say that I have one style. I think I’m too young to be in a category and I’m very curious about a lot different smells. It really depends on who I meet in terms of clients and projects.

Frank: I’ve also had a lot of fun working on Axe—we developed a lot of the scents when my oldest son was about 13 or 14. He was the target audience, and working on something that would be worn by my son was particularly motivating. To have people across the world wearing your fragrances–if you manage to make them feel good with the products that you touch them with, that’s certainly very gratifying.

Dora: That’s something we talked a lot about when I started work on Glossier You. We were working with ingredients that were meant to smell really close to skin.

Frank: Something that was the ultimate comfort. How you want to feel day and night, every day.

Dora: It was always linked to being human, which, to me, is very strong and very emotional. But also very simple. We started by exploring this woody, musky side of the spectrum.

Frank: As much as the idea was to have a singular, linear scent, you want to have something in the fragrance that surprises people every once in awhile. Bring some kind of tension. Something that is too harmonious could be boring in the end. You want to find a way to bring texture and movement to the fragrance.

Dora: It doesn’t mean that it was boring from the beginning! Not at all. [Laughs] It takes time to add vibration and things like that. I think that’s the beauty of sharing. I share with Frank a certain love of raw materials.

Frank: When you collaborate you discover ingredients in the person you work with and wonder why they used certain materials to achieve a certain goal. I like to work with woods, so I think somehow in a lot of fragrances, there will always be something about woods. Iris is something I like to work with. Definitely the ambrox as well.

Dora: Ambrox is a synthetic molecule that mimics the smell of ambergris [ed. note: read up on that here]. It’s a very special scent. It’s woody but it also has a musky effect. It’s neither feminine nor masculine, so it’s kind of universal. Some say it’s dry, others say it’s soft. And that’s how we very quickly found the way to bring it to life.

Frank: The fragrance was almost like a raw diamond, and you want to shape the facets so it comes to life.

Dora: That’s a technical thing and a creative thing. In perfume school, you take chemistry courses because of the nature of our raw materials. You do have to be careful of the dosage of everything, and the temperature. There are technical things when you build any sort of artwork. So that’s our case too.

Frank: A good perfumer has good technical skills and a good sense of imagination.

Dora: And you need to have an idea of volatility. Because chemistry can also be poetry.

—as told to ITG

Photographed by Tom Newton.

Learn more about Glossier You here.