ARGENTEUIL Chanel
Purse Forum – Bent over strips of blotting paper, senses primed and
notebooks in hand: this is how generations of “noses” have honed their art at
the world-famous Givaudan perfumery school near Paris.Fully one-third of all
fine fragrances created worldwide owe their existence to alumni of the school,
which has been training young men and women in the subtle art since 1946 in the
bland suburb of Argenteuil.In the “vanilla building,” 5 perfumers in the making
— a Frenchman, two Brazilians, a young woman from Japan and another from Morocco
— are hard at work, studying test strips imbibed with various scents.“This is
the room where ‘Opium' was created, and over there is where they invented
‘Poison',” said the school's director Jean Guichard, reeling off mythical names
from the history of perfume.Givaudan's former students include Jean- Chanel Purse
Forum Ellena, master perfumer at Hermes, Guerlain's in-house “nose” Thierry
Wasseur, and Jacques Polge, Chanel's head perfumer since 1978 and the creator of
both “Coco” and “Allure.”Guichard himself was the nose behind two well-known
Cacharel perfumes, “Eden” and “Loulou,” for which he blended “vanilla, a powdery
something and hibiscus flowers inspired by a Gauguin painting.”
Right now, 26-year-old Leandro Petit is concerned with Lily of the Valley, a
flower whose fragrance cannot Chanel Purse
Forum be extracted, and which is therefore synthesized for perfumers from a
mix of natural and chemical components.“I'm discovering all the different
aspects of the substance,” he enthused. “It's fascinating.”On another table,
27-year-old Nisrine Grillie, a chemist by training, talked AFP through the
basics of chromatography, the molecule-by-molecule analysis of a perfume.“Each
period has its great perfumes.”Both she and Leandro belong to a tiny elite,
cherry-picked by the Givaudan group, the world's biggest fragrance and
flavouring company which creates perfumes for the top luxury brands right down
to shampoos and detergents.Of the 200 to 250 applicants each year, Guichard
selects an average of just 3. Chanel Purse
Forum “Our students are chosen for their academic profile and personality,
but especially for their ability to understand their times, to be open to the
world around them,” he said.“Each period has its great perfumes, its great
filmmakers, its great musicians and its fashions. A great perfumer should be
able to express the spirit of his age, to embody an era while doing what he
loves.”While there is theoretically no age limit, most of the students here are
between 25 and 30, with 4 to 5 years of university education behind them, when
they embark on the 3-year Chanel Purse
Forum course.
New graduates owe their first 5 years of work to Givaudan, which Chanel Purse
Forum runs 6 creative studios in Paris, New York, Sao Paulo, Shanghai,
Singapore and Dubai.Whatever their background, in science or humanities, a
future nose needs technical training to get to grips with the vast field.Whether
designing for a fragrance or a laundry powder, “there is a necessary
apprenticeship — which they then have to put to one side in order to be able to
create,” Guichard said.He leads the way towards the laboratory containing the
1,300 raw materials used at Givaudan, and the meticulously labelled bottles
containing the mixes, simple or complex, produced from them.Students here are
expected to master 500 of these substances “like the letters of the
alphabet.”Then come the “chords,” as the combinations of materials are known,
and last the “phrases,” families of scents as defined by the school founder Jean
Carle — citrus, floral, woody, fern, oriental and “Chanel Purse
Forum” — a mix of citrus and moss.“But real skill is not about memorising
ingredients,” Guichard says. “It's about invention, and that always involves a
degree of chance.”Legend has it that Coco Chanel's iconic “Number 5″
was born of one such happy accident: a mix-up in the use of aldehydes, chemical
compounds that act as aroma boosters and were new to perfumery at the time.While
the perfumer Ernest Beaux was working on the recipe in 1920, a lab assistant is
said to have used a full-strength aldehyde instead of a 10 percent dilution,
combining with rose and jasmine to produce just the result Chanel Purse
Forum was looking for.
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