conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Herms, perfumeur, Grasse with the genre: Business & Money, Industries?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Diary of a Nose'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first five paragraphs for this book. End with the sentence ' Over time, I allowed myself to believe that my emotion derived from an intuitive feel for how the hand had worked, the choreography of gestures, which was an extension of the body and of thought.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Diary of a Nose
  I like his writing, his inventiveness, his sensuality; and, when he talks about smells, I admire him. His passages about literature resonate with the way that I 'write' perfumes. I think that smells are signs, and that a perfume enthusiast interprets these signs as the perfume develops on his skin or on the fine sliver of a test blotter. He smells it, pursues it, abandons it, comes back to it; I can't say whether it is the perfume or the enthusiast who is beholden to the other.
  I was back in the workshop this morning. An architect's house, it was built in the late 1960s in the spirit of concrete architecture, which strives to link buildings with their natural environment. Here, the outside is inside, and the inside extends outside, each conditioning the other. The house clings to grey rocks and is surrounded by a wild garden planted with Salzmann's pines. It could feel austere, yet is anything but. The sun filtering through the pine trees floods the workshop with soothing light. Time passes more slowly here, the seasons more noticeably. I love this place. I feel in tune with it.
  A visitor looking at my desk would find it littered with dozens of tightly sealed little bottles, test-blotter-holders shaped like windmills, a worn file filled with a hundred formulae, a pot of coloring pencils, boxes of junk, a photo frame. Still, it can't be called a mess so long as I know where to find the formula for the draft I stopped working on a few months back, the grey crayon that I need, the box with the worn pencil eraser and the paper clips, not to mention my glasses – the ones for reading and the ones for distances. For me this 'mess' is connected to memory. When everything is organized, I forget.
  I emerge exhausted after creating a perfume. The decision is made at last. An international launch is planned for next April. There were a substantial number of trials and drafts – several hundred – which is an indication of how difficult it is to find a guiding line, a form that expresses the concept. The project is bold and demanding; the bottle a technical feat. Then comes the fear that it won't find an audience. Each new olfactory story is a gamble.
  The apartment we had been allocated by the Ministry of Industry had plain 1930s furniture; the floor was covered by a thick silk carpet with a colorful pattern. Calligraphies in simple frames hung on the walls. I was especially taken with one of them, so much so that my eyes clouded with emotion. Although I couldn't hope to understand its meaning, given that I couldn't read the symbols, I was drawn to its blackness, to the upstrokes and downstrokes, to the sequence of shapes, but also to their rhythmic patterns. The experience is still vivid. Over time, I allowed myself to believe that my emotion derived from an intuitive feel for how the hand had worked, the choreography of gestures, which was an extension of the body and of thought.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Green is the only color that makes sense as a smell. In my collection of raw materials, which is not arranged in a discriminating way with better ones and worse ones, I have different kinds of green: gentle, harsh, smooth, sharp, dense, etc. I have greens that smell of beans, fig leaves, syringa, ivy, seaweed, elder, boxwood, hyacinths, lawns and peas. Although I may not know of yellow, red or blue smells, I do know the characteristic smells of white and yellow flowers and those of red fruits.
  In the space of five years every single person involved in developing the perfume collections has been replaced. These people, with whom I shared a vision, and who were in charge of our work strategy, have all left their jobs. I find this disconcerting. Within a company employees don't stay long in a particular job. It is true that a position can, by its nature, foster a need for change because, after a while and despite the variety of the work, tasks become repetitive, producing a feeling of boredom and a loss of interest.
  Apart from the economic problems relating to salaries, changes produced by the constant remixing of personalities are probably a simple way of taking a fresh look at things. Without wishing to negate this, I do think that such a quasi-quantitative vision should be replaced by a more qualitative approach based on improving the value of the job; based, in other words, on apprenticeship and skill development.
  As a perfumer, I do not have an actual job, but I practice a craft, one that involves knowledge, know-how and skill. And yet that in itself is not enough: in order to continue to exist and to practice my craft, I have to keep re-inventing it and not just repeat any old recipes.
  Unlike a 'proper' job, which is quantifiable, a craft is always extending its field of operations, pushing the boundaries of the craftsman's abilities ever further. Inventing means renewing, growing.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I remember that when the painter Émile Bernard described how Paul Cézanne approached watercolors, he came up with this idea: 'His method was unique, quite outside the usual technique and excessively complicated. He started with painting shadows and with an area of color that he covered with a second, larger one, then a third, until all these colors screening each other modeled the object by coloring it.' If you look closely at Cézanne's watercolors you can see that the areas of color do not completely cover each other, but are mostly juxtaposed. Their interplay creates a remarkable harmony.
  I proceed in a similar fashion when 'modeling' a perfume, by freeing myself from the mind-set of proportions that I could have chosen – the wiser from previous experience – and by thinking only about the raw materials. It is the raw materials that shape a perfume; when they are juxtaposed, they set up resonances. When I try to establish harmony, the proportions establish themselves.
  I have sought freedom in composing perfumes, and I have been a slave to smells. I cannot stop myself smelling and thinking about smells, for fear of losing the ability to compose. As with all artistic work, I need to work physically with the material and to have an understanding of it. That is the price I pay for being a composer of perfumes, and that sometimes worries me.
  When smell is no longer linked to memory, when it no longer evokes flowers or fruits, when it is stripped of all feeling and affect, then it becomes material for a perfume.
  When I can no longer describe it, when it has consistency, depth, breadth and density, when it becomes tactile, when the only representation I have of it is physical, then I can bring it to life and create.