A night with “the nose”
The night and perfume: a matter of sex, seduction, fleetingness and illusion. A night with perfumer Guillaume Flavigny also reveals that music has a scent, and tastes are an expression of our attitude.
By Hannes Grassegger
It’s a matter of life and death for Guillaume Flavigny: “If you had the choice,” I ask after spending a few hours with him on a spring night in Paris, “of being either blind or having no sense of smell or taste, which would you choose?” Flavigny’s small, beady eyes narrow behind his black-framed glasses, and the nostrils of his long, narrow nose flare. He leans forward slowly, his gaze fixed on me: “Most people believe that your sense of smell is less important. They’re wrong! Without your sense of taste, you wouldn’t be able to smell the spring air, taste different foods or love or sex…”. Life itself would become as a film, a play experienced from behind a veil: “It would be terrible. Without taste, you would have no life at all.”
Flavigny is a master “nose”, or nez as perfumers and oenologists are known in France. As one of the chosen sixteen at Givaudan, the world’s leading producer of fragrances and flavours, he develops scents for houses including Gucci, Dior and Lacoste, as well as niche brands, at the company’s distinguished Avenue Kléber address in Paris. Givaudan estimates that it creates thirty percent of all perfumes, although the company’s own name appears on its products as rarely as perfumers appear in public; few people know Flavigny “the nose” – but almost everyone knows one of his fragrances.
Vol de Nuit (“night flight”) is one of the longest-produced fragrances. Like Gainsbourg and Bardot, night and perfume are a perfect combination. It’s a matter of sex, seduction, fleetingness and illusion. Around ninety percent of aromas are synthetic. Naturalness is an illusion in this world, where everything takes place in the mind. What about the concept of fragrances as an “invisible second dress”, as the adverts promise? “On a summer night in Paris, you can smell the fragrances worn by both men and women on their way to the opera or the theatre. But the smell of the city is sweetest two or three hours before dawn, when the night becomes clean and the noise has faded away,” says Flavigny.
Our nights have become clearer with the deodorisation of public areas, since the stench in Berlin, London and Paris was tackled in the mid-18th century. In those days, fragrances were often used to combat disease. Before that, incense was burned in praise of gods: the word perfume is derived from the Latin per fumum (“through smoke”). Today, artists such as New Zealand-born Dane Mitchell create “fleeting sculptures” with fragrances, while others even understand them as a means of reconciling the major religions, as in the case of Berlin-based Daniel Josefsohn and Susanne Raupach with their scent MoslBuddJewChristHinDao.
And the cultural shift hasn’t spared the final bastion of collective natural bodily odours: discos and clubs. Since the introduction of the smoking ban, these venues, which once had a uniform scent of cigarette butts, sweat and alcohol, have become a veritable cacophony of fragrances. Clubbers now smell the aroma of dry ice mixed with a strawberry fragrance, the often perfumed flyers, and themselves. It’s become normal amongst clubbers to deride other people’s body odour. The “second dress”, which was previously a luxury, has become a must. This is a triumph for perfumers such as Flavigny, who are able to play on our illusions and bestow us with a particular aura.
At only 35, Guillaume Flavigny is a comparative adolescent in his field. He started working at “Kléber” aged a mere 26, having graduated from the only state-run perfumery school in the world, ISIPCA in Versailles. His award-winning final fragrance composition can still be examined at the Osmothèque in Versailles, the centre of the perfumery world. This opened the gates for Flavigny to the Givaudan Perfumery School, which admits only three applicants each year. There are thought to be around two hundred leading perfumers worldwide. Precise figures are not available; the industry keeps its secrets closely guarded.
A language of music and fragrances
When I arrive, Flavigny is listening to the Beastie Boys. He is lean, in his mid-thirties, with short, slightly ruffled hair and designer stubble. He is in the process of dripping a tincture onto one of the test strips he is holding, fanned out between the fingers of his right hand. Flavigny can create fragrances based on music. This is a unique skill. The language of fragrances resembles that of music, but the fragrance scale has almost four-thousand notes.
Givaudan’s students learn to describe these notes, to bring together similar notes to create scales, to combine notes to form chords, and to join together chords to produce harmonies. When composing a perfume, the flow of the fragrance is what counts, how the top, middle and base notes accord – to create a symphony. A fragrance consists of between 15 and 150 tones, orchestrated in all three registers. But while musical harmonies can be described in technical terms using acoustic vibrations, olfactory harmonies are left to perception.
Guillaume Flavigny’s great skill is translating music into fragrance. He describes his Azarro Duo Men as soul-pop with a retro feel; it originated from the Amy Winehouse track Back to Black. “Her song is warm and sensual, like tonka beans, vanilla, benzoin resin, figs; fresh like green leaves and pepper,” he says. “It resonates, like when cedar wood is combined with earthy, bitter vetiver grass.” For Flavigny, music is the starting point.
Every morning at 8.30 a.m., he launches the music player on his computer. The files range from Erik Satie to Jill Scott to Arcade Fire. He starts with two hours of Mozart. Unlike his colleagues, who often travel far and wide to gain inspiration (for example, the well-tanned Christophe Raynaud, co-composer of what is currently the most successful male fragrance, One Million by Paco Rabanne, who is setting off on a trip to Africa), Flavigny discovers the world in music. It was the relaxed jazz of pianist Laurent Assoulen that first persuaded him to translate music into fragrances in 2009. Since then, they have co-composed five fragrances. Flavigny fetches the resulting fragrance album and plays the CD. He expresses his perceptions enthusiastically, using a wide range of characteristics.
It’s getting dark outside. The lights in the corridor have been dimmed. Our plan had been to go to a restaurant an hour ago, then on to a concert. The most sacred, most secret item is wide open in front of me, alongside Flavigny’s music files: the formula for a perfume. It looks just like an Excel spreadsheet, with the substances in the left-hand column, quantities on the right, and the total cost at the bottom. I discover the Concierto de Aranjuez amongst Flavigny’s files. I decide to test him, asking, “Can you translate this into scents?” The lament of the adagio resonates, carried by the cor anglais and violins. The famous second movement of the piece by Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo, who was blind from an early age, evokes sorrow and pain, letting go of life after the miscarriage of his first son and a plea for the health of his wife. Flavigny’s eyes glaze over, he becomes perfectly calm: “The vibration of the violin evokes heavily smoothed musk with cedar wood. But it is swathed in vanilla, yearning, sweet, faint.” The lament begins: “Those are particularly woody notes; that creates strength. There is tension here, it’s almost nostalgic, but still considerably more sombre. It’s extremely powerful, quite dramatic, theatrical”, he says. “It would be great to compose a scent based on it. It’s dark, moving; there are a great number of contrasts, it’s very extreme, I see a scent.”
Flavigny translates the music into words, describes feelings, colours, even textures of materials that he then relates to aromas. This gives a certain structure to the associations he makes. He has created a language that combines music and fragrances. “I had never worked on something like this, but it works right away. I have to internalise the music, to understand it. I was frequently in contact with the musicians during the jazz project. Assoulen didn’t always agree with me right away.” The musicians and Flavigny then went on tour together, giving “fragrance concerts”, including an appearance at the Vienna jazz festival. Assoulen played piano on the stage, while Flavigny distributed appropriately perfumed test strips among the audience. “Visitors told me that it enhanced the information.” He adds that music helps people to understand ideas afresh. “A perfume creation is enriched by this understanding, people start out with genuine emotions.”
I put on Bonnie Prince Billy’s Wolf among wolves, the soundtrack to the paradigm shift in the US during the 2000s. Billy’s melancholy, fragile vocals are accompanied by a soft Western guitar. Flavigny is listening to Billy for the first time. “I like it. It’s pure, simple. It’s clear, like a modern sculpture. But it also has something romantic, something sweet about it. I see a woody aroma, with a little musk. Everything is very simple, but only quality ingredients. The sound is extremely coherent, beautiful, almost happy. I like the slowness. It would be a scent you applied before going to sleep, something that develops slowly. A sweet flower that fades slowly; a wood, slow, sweet, something that triggers gentle sleepiness. Sweet cedar, white cedar, slowly melting away. Creamy, floral, but not heady, and absolutely no spice notes, but something that wafts over you. It would be quite a rounded fragrance. Not too complicated. I have something similar here.” Flavigny picks up a vial from the table and sniffs it. “No, that’s not right,” he says, “too sunny, too much light.” It’s late. We have to leave.
“What is that? Garlic?”
The night watchman has locked us in. We try doors, run along empty corridors, Flavigny dressed in heavy biker gear; he avoids the metro and its odours. He loves jazz. And rap. He makes fragrances for Sisley and Balmain. I ask myself what makes up his world. Jean Guichard, Director of the Givaudan Perfumery School, explained to me earlier that afternoon that he didn’t select his students according to their technical abilities, but their creativity. He stressed that the most important thing is that “A perfumer must, above all, live in and with his time.” Perfumes should describe the emotions of an era. Naturally, Givaudan also employs trend researchers to hunt out the zeitgeist. The night watchman lets us out.
The windows of my taxi are rolled down; the spring night smells of rubber on tar. Paris seems cleaner, but the social structure is the same as it was a decade ago – with little future.
Flavigny’s take on what the future will hold becomes clear over the first glass of wine. He has reserved a table by the window at Saturne in the 2nd arrondissement; the atmosphere is more like Copenhagen than its status as the new place to be seen would suggest. Sommelier Ewen Lemoigne proudly uncorks a bottle of Canon Primeur table wine. Flavigny raises the glass to his nose. Canon Primeur is a rare Muscat-Trollinger by Hirotake Ooka, a young Japanese winemaker who presses French wines as they were made in the old days. He moved to Saint-Péray in the Rhône region, bought caves and recultivated fields, and treads the grapes by foot. Ooka doesn’t even add sulphites. It’s a technological adventure.
“Floral, like peony, fresh violet rose, fruity, sour apple.” Flavigny is impressed: “This wine is the exact opposite of what wine advocate Robert Parker recommends. Always nothing but wood and vanilla. Wines no longer have any resonance or any acidity!” Flavigny is incensed. “Everything is so artificial. It kills the wine! It’s the same in the majority of restaurants, for every wine in Paris. Winemakers are damaging wine, damaging life. That’s why I like Saturne – because it respects nature, people, the earth.”
The cuisine of 24-year-old chef Sven Chartier is extremely local, and is generating much debate in Paris due to its puritanical purity and simplicity. It is as if Chartier wants to make a feature of the complexity of tastes of his ingredients – preferably unaltered. Many people find that this radical aspiration is going too far. We are served dishes comprising only the most intense herbs and blossoms, with suckling lamb from the Pyrenees, humus made from black lentils, and a smoked milk foam. My taste buds have been sensitised by the hours spent with Flavigny. Never before have I been staggered by fennel blossoms. At once animated and rapt, Flavigny analyses the rigidity of a spear of green asparagus, then his eyes fall on a white blossom the size of a pinhead. He sniffs it. “What is that? Garlic?” A woman at the next table says that it’s a garlic chive blossom. This results in a fifteen minute discussion on whether it might have come from the garden of Joël Thiébault, the “vegetable king” who has a stall at the Palais de Tokyo. “Organic doesn’t always mean the same thing. It depends on a number of factors,” says the woman at the next table. A waiter is summoned and explains that the herbs come from the restaurant’s own garden.
I ask Flavigny where this desire to check everything comes from. “I think it’s extremely interesting to find out about the entire value chain. When I buy bread, I want to try it first. Then I can say whether it’s good, or whether it contains unnecessary chemicals.” And how does he know that? “You can smell it!” Flavigny holds up a piece of bread: “They bake with honey and chestnut flour. It’s outstanding. No chemicals. I smell it: it smells alive! I don’t shop in supermarkets – for political reasons. Quantity kills quality.” He says it’s difficult to apply this type of idea in your working life.
Flavigny is involved in pitches for client orders. Even within Givaudan, a number of perfumers will compete with their concept; the best is then submitted. If the client is persuaded, this is just the beginning of months or even years of back-and-forth. Flavigny is currently working on around a dozen projects. “I have to be quick, think strategically, understand the target group, bear sociodemographic and cultural factors in mind, take the planned marketing and the allergy guidelines into consideration, and then minimise the costs.” He says there are two parallel trends in the world of fragrances: the mass market and chemicals, and exclusive lines made from expensive natural ingredients that exist based on the story of their product. However, originality is something that Flavigny could spend a long time searching for in the world of fragrances. The allergy guidelines have changed perfumes radically. They also affect a large number of natural ingredients, which now need to be replaced.
We order another bottle of wine. For Flavigny, it evokes a world of red sulphur, strawberries, a hint of gunpowder, and pepper. The son of an architect and a museum director, Flavigny recognised his gift for identifying tastes and smells at around age 14. When someone was cooking rice a hundred metres down the street, he could smell it as clearly as others saw the steam. Flavigny recognises people by their smell. When someone is afraid, it smells like sour ham to him. “I could smell it when Laurent Assoulen split up with his girlfriend.” Flavigny himself wears a cedar wood fragrance. Without it, he says he would feel naked. His nose is constantly becoming more refined. Nowadays, when hiking, he can smell what is over the next hill. If he takes the metro, with its typical smell, he has to make himself think about something else. But his sharp sense also enables him to enjoy the aroma of the early light when he goes jogging at sunrise in the Bois de Boulogne. Flavigny delights in the smell of unopened cigars, the aroma of whisky, and his passion for collecting. His strange and secret favourite smell is black wax crayons.
Smell changes the way you hear
We step out of the restaurant into the night. At the nearby Social Club, Paris house-artist Kavinsky is DJ-ing. My nose feels like a sharpened pencil. The crowd are from a range of backgrounds. The Middle Eastern contingent prefer natural aromas: saffron, rose, sandalwood, heavy and powerful. A group of Asians in subtle, clean, fresh tones head to the bar where two Latin Americans are smooching, floral with woody notes. They could be Germans, but they lack the comfortable tones of vanilla and sandalwood. Russians are not so easy to pick out, and intensely floral in general.
The dance floors writhe with people in their mid-20s, but it’s not the bass lines we feel: sweat levels have increased. Smoke from the smoking room gradually masks the sweat as the door opens and closes. “Clubs actually used to smell worse than this; the mix of alcohol and cigarette ash,” remarks Flavigny. Nonetheless, he finds the smell of sweat repellent. He draws back from a cloud of garlic. I complain that the music is bad. “The music hasn’t changed at all,” replies Flavigny, “it’s the smell that’s changed your perception of it.” He can’t stay any longer: “I can smell the men.”
It’s 3.30 a.m. Flavigny climbs onto his motorbike and heads home through the cool summer night. Shortly before hitting the road, he says that he often dreams of fragrances. He sees them as sculptures that change over time. In his dreams, he approaches them, moulds them, and in the morning writes down the formula. For Flavigny, fragrances are feelings. Even in his dreams, he works in this world that is beyond logic. Surreal, I think, taking another deep breath of night air, and flag down a taxi. The roar of the air streaming by and the smell of the leather seats merge to form a symphony.
Hannes Grassegger (b. 1980) writes on culture and industry for newspapers including Die Zeit, the Financial Times Deutschland and the Tages-Anzeiger.
By Hannes Grassegger
It’s a matter of life and death for Guillaume Flavigny: “If you had the choice,” I ask after spending a few hours with him on a spring night in Paris, “of being either blind or having no sense of smell or taste, which would you choose?” Flavigny’s small, beady eyes narrow behind his black-framed glasses, and the nostrils of his long, narrow nose flare. He leans forward slowly, his gaze fixed on me: “Most people believe that your sense of smell is less important. They’re wrong! Without your sense of taste, you wouldn’t be able to smell the spring air, taste different foods or love or sex…”. Life itself would become as a film, a play experienced from behind a veil: “It would be terrible. Without taste, you would have no life at all.”
Flavigny is a master “nose”, or nez as perfumers and oenologists are known in France. As one of the chosen sixteen at Givaudan, the world’s leading producer of fragrances and flavours, he develops scents for houses including Gucci, Dior and Lacoste, as well as niche brands, at the company’s distinguished Avenue Kléber address in Paris. Givaudan estimates that it creates thirty percent of all perfumes, although the company’s own name appears on its products as rarely as perfumers appear in public; few people know Flavigny “the nose” – but almost everyone knows one of his fragrances.
Vol de Nuit (“night flight”) is one of the longest-produced fragrances. Like Gainsbourg and Bardot, night and perfume are a perfect combination. It’s a matter of sex, seduction, fleetingness and illusion. Around ninety percent of aromas are synthetic. Naturalness is an illusion in this world, where everything takes place in the mind. What about the concept of fragrances as an “invisible second dress”, as the adverts promise? “On a summer night in Paris, you can smell the fragrances worn by both men and women on their way to the opera or the theatre. But the smell of the city is sweetest two or three hours before dawn, when the night becomes clean and the noise has faded away,” says Flavigny.
Our nights have become clearer with the deodorisation of public areas, since the stench in Berlin, London and Paris was tackled in the mid-18th century. In those days, fragrances were often used to combat disease. Before that, incense was burned in praise of gods: the word perfume is derived from the Latin per fumum (“through smoke”). Today, artists such as New Zealand-born Dane Mitchell create “fleeting sculptures” with fragrances, while others even understand them as a means of reconciling the major religions, as in the case of Berlin-based Daniel Josefsohn and Susanne Raupach with their scent MoslBuddJewChristHinDao.
And the cultural shift hasn’t spared the final bastion of collective natural bodily odours: discos and clubs. Since the introduction of the smoking ban, these venues, which once had a uniform scent of cigarette butts, sweat and alcohol, have become a veritable cacophony of fragrances. Clubbers now smell the aroma of dry ice mixed with a strawberry fragrance, the often perfumed flyers, and themselves. It’s become normal amongst clubbers to deride other people’s body odour. The “second dress”, which was previously a luxury, has become a must. This is a triumph for perfumers such as Flavigny, who are able to play on our illusions and bestow us with a particular aura.
At only 35, Guillaume Flavigny is a comparative adolescent in his field. He started working at “Kléber” aged a mere 26, having graduated from the only state-run perfumery school in the world, ISIPCA in Versailles. His award-winning final fragrance composition can still be examined at the Osmothèque in Versailles, the centre of the perfumery world. This opened the gates for Flavigny to the Givaudan Perfumery School, which admits only three applicants each year. There are thought to be around two hundred leading perfumers worldwide. Precise figures are not available; the industry keeps its secrets closely guarded.
A language of music and fragrances
When I arrive, Flavigny is listening to the Beastie Boys. He is lean, in his mid-thirties, with short, slightly ruffled hair and designer stubble. He is in the process of dripping a tincture onto one of the test strips he is holding, fanned out between the fingers of his right hand. Flavigny can create fragrances based on music. This is a unique skill. The language of fragrances resembles that of music, but the fragrance scale has almost four-thousand notes.
Givaudan’s students learn to describe these notes, to bring together similar notes to create scales, to combine notes to form chords, and to join together chords to produce harmonies. When composing a perfume, the flow of the fragrance is what counts, how the top, middle and base notes accord – to create a symphony. A fragrance consists of between 15 and 150 tones, orchestrated in all three registers. But while musical harmonies can be described in technical terms using acoustic vibrations, olfactory harmonies are left to perception.
Guillaume Flavigny’s great skill is translating music into fragrance. He describes his Azarro Duo Men as soul-pop with a retro feel; it originated from the Amy Winehouse track Back to Black. “Her song is warm and sensual, like tonka beans, vanilla, benzoin resin, figs; fresh like green leaves and pepper,” he says. “It resonates, like when cedar wood is combined with earthy, bitter vetiver grass.” For Flavigny, music is the starting point.
Every morning at 8.30 a.m., he launches the music player on his computer. The files range from Erik Satie to Jill Scott to Arcade Fire. He starts with two hours of Mozart. Unlike his colleagues, who often travel far and wide to gain inspiration (for example, the well-tanned Christophe Raynaud, co-composer of what is currently the most successful male fragrance, One Million by Paco Rabanne, who is setting off on a trip to Africa), Flavigny discovers the world in music. It was the relaxed jazz of pianist Laurent Assoulen that first persuaded him to translate music into fragrances in 2009. Since then, they have co-composed five fragrances. Flavigny fetches the resulting fragrance album and plays the CD. He expresses his perceptions enthusiastically, using a wide range of characteristics.
It’s getting dark outside. The lights in the corridor have been dimmed. Our plan had been to go to a restaurant an hour ago, then on to a concert. The most sacred, most secret item is wide open in front of me, alongside Flavigny’s music files: the formula for a perfume. It looks just like an Excel spreadsheet, with the substances in the left-hand column, quantities on the right, and the total cost at the bottom. I discover the Concierto de Aranjuez amongst Flavigny’s files. I decide to test him, asking, “Can you translate this into scents?” The lament of the adagio resonates, carried by the cor anglais and violins. The famous second movement of the piece by Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo, who was blind from an early age, evokes sorrow and pain, letting go of life after the miscarriage of his first son and a plea for the health of his wife. Flavigny’s eyes glaze over, he becomes perfectly calm: “The vibration of the violin evokes heavily smoothed musk with cedar wood. But it is swathed in vanilla, yearning, sweet, faint.” The lament begins: “Those are particularly woody notes; that creates strength. There is tension here, it’s almost nostalgic, but still considerably more sombre. It’s extremely powerful, quite dramatic, theatrical”, he says. “It would be great to compose a scent based on it. It’s dark, moving; there are a great number of contrasts, it’s very extreme, I see a scent.”
Flavigny translates the music into words, describes feelings, colours, even textures of materials that he then relates to aromas. This gives a certain structure to the associations he makes. He has created a language that combines music and fragrances. “I had never worked on something like this, but it works right away. I have to internalise the music, to understand it. I was frequently in contact with the musicians during the jazz project. Assoulen didn’t always agree with me right away.” The musicians and Flavigny then went on tour together, giving “fragrance concerts”, including an appearance at the Vienna jazz festival. Assoulen played piano on the stage, while Flavigny distributed appropriately perfumed test strips among the audience. “Visitors told me that it enhanced the information.” He adds that music helps people to understand ideas afresh. “A perfume creation is enriched by this understanding, people start out with genuine emotions.”
I put on Bonnie Prince Billy’s Wolf among wolves, the soundtrack to the paradigm shift in the US during the 2000s. Billy’s melancholy, fragile vocals are accompanied by a soft Western guitar. Flavigny is listening to Billy for the first time. “I like it. It’s pure, simple. It’s clear, like a modern sculpture. But it also has something romantic, something sweet about it. I see a woody aroma, with a little musk. Everything is very simple, but only quality ingredients. The sound is extremely coherent, beautiful, almost happy. I like the slowness. It would be a scent you applied before going to sleep, something that develops slowly. A sweet flower that fades slowly; a wood, slow, sweet, something that triggers gentle sleepiness. Sweet cedar, white cedar, slowly melting away. Creamy, floral, but not heady, and absolutely no spice notes, but something that wafts over you. It would be quite a rounded fragrance. Not too complicated. I have something similar here.” Flavigny picks up a vial from the table and sniffs it. “No, that’s not right,” he says, “too sunny, too much light.” It’s late. We have to leave.
“What is that? Garlic?”
The night watchman has locked us in. We try doors, run along empty corridors, Flavigny dressed in heavy biker gear; he avoids the metro and its odours. He loves jazz. And rap. He makes fragrances for Sisley and Balmain. I ask myself what makes up his world. Jean Guichard, Director of the Givaudan Perfumery School, explained to me earlier that afternoon that he didn’t select his students according to their technical abilities, but their creativity. He stressed that the most important thing is that “A perfumer must, above all, live in and with his time.” Perfumes should describe the emotions of an era. Naturally, Givaudan also employs trend researchers to hunt out the zeitgeist. The night watchman lets us out.
The windows of my taxi are rolled down; the spring night smells of rubber on tar. Paris seems cleaner, but the social structure is the same as it was a decade ago – with little future.
Flavigny’s take on what the future will hold becomes clear over the first glass of wine. He has reserved a table by the window at Saturne in the 2nd arrondissement; the atmosphere is more like Copenhagen than its status as the new place to be seen would suggest. Sommelier Ewen Lemoigne proudly uncorks a bottle of Canon Primeur table wine. Flavigny raises the glass to his nose. Canon Primeur is a rare Muscat-Trollinger by Hirotake Ooka, a young Japanese winemaker who presses French wines as they were made in the old days. He moved to Saint-Péray in the Rhône region, bought caves and recultivated fields, and treads the grapes by foot. Ooka doesn’t even add sulphites. It’s a technological adventure.
“Floral, like peony, fresh violet rose, fruity, sour apple.” Flavigny is impressed: “This wine is the exact opposite of what wine advocate Robert Parker recommends. Always nothing but wood and vanilla. Wines no longer have any resonance or any acidity!” Flavigny is incensed. “Everything is so artificial. It kills the wine! It’s the same in the majority of restaurants, for every wine in Paris. Winemakers are damaging wine, damaging life. That’s why I like Saturne – because it respects nature, people, the earth.”
The cuisine of 24-year-old chef Sven Chartier is extremely local, and is generating much debate in Paris due to its puritanical purity and simplicity. It is as if Chartier wants to make a feature of the complexity of tastes of his ingredients – preferably unaltered. Many people find that this radical aspiration is going too far. We are served dishes comprising only the most intense herbs and blossoms, with suckling lamb from the Pyrenees, humus made from black lentils, and a smoked milk foam. My taste buds have been sensitised by the hours spent with Flavigny. Never before have I been staggered by fennel blossoms. At once animated and rapt, Flavigny analyses the rigidity of a spear of green asparagus, then his eyes fall on a white blossom the size of a pinhead. He sniffs it. “What is that? Garlic?” A woman at the next table says that it’s a garlic chive blossom. This results in a fifteen minute discussion on whether it might have come from the garden of Joël Thiébault, the “vegetable king” who has a stall at the Palais de Tokyo. “Organic doesn’t always mean the same thing. It depends on a number of factors,” says the woman at the next table. A waiter is summoned and explains that the herbs come from the restaurant’s own garden.
I ask Flavigny where this desire to check everything comes from. “I think it’s extremely interesting to find out about the entire value chain. When I buy bread, I want to try it first. Then I can say whether it’s good, or whether it contains unnecessary chemicals.” And how does he know that? “You can smell it!” Flavigny holds up a piece of bread: “They bake with honey and chestnut flour. It’s outstanding. No chemicals. I smell it: it smells alive! I don’t shop in supermarkets – for political reasons. Quantity kills quality.” He says it’s difficult to apply this type of idea in your working life.
Flavigny is involved in pitches for client orders. Even within Givaudan, a number of perfumers will compete with their concept; the best is then submitted. If the client is persuaded, this is just the beginning of months or even years of back-and-forth. Flavigny is currently working on around a dozen projects. “I have to be quick, think strategically, understand the target group, bear sociodemographic and cultural factors in mind, take the planned marketing and the allergy guidelines into consideration, and then minimise the costs.” He says there are two parallel trends in the world of fragrances: the mass market and chemicals, and exclusive lines made from expensive natural ingredients that exist based on the story of their product. However, originality is something that Flavigny could spend a long time searching for in the world of fragrances. The allergy guidelines have changed perfumes radically. They also affect a large number of natural ingredients, which now need to be replaced.
We order another bottle of wine. For Flavigny, it evokes a world of red sulphur, strawberries, a hint of gunpowder, and pepper. The son of an architect and a museum director, Flavigny recognised his gift for identifying tastes and smells at around age 14. When someone was cooking rice a hundred metres down the street, he could smell it as clearly as others saw the steam. Flavigny recognises people by their smell. When someone is afraid, it smells like sour ham to him. “I could smell it when Laurent Assoulen split up with his girlfriend.” Flavigny himself wears a cedar wood fragrance. Without it, he says he would feel naked. His nose is constantly becoming more refined. Nowadays, when hiking, he can smell what is over the next hill. If he takes the metro, with its typical smell, he has to make himself think about something else. But his sharp sense also enables him to enjoy the aroma of the early light when he goes jogging at sunrise in the Bois de Boulogne. Flavigny delights in the smell of unopened cigars, the aroma of whisky, and his passion for collecting. His strange and secret favourite smell is black wax crayons.
Smell changes the way you hear
We step out of the restaurant into the night. At the nearby Social Club, Paris house-artist Kavinsky is DJ-ing. My nose feels like a sharpened pencil. The crowd are from a range of backgrounds. The Middle Eastern contingent prefer natural aromas: saffron, rose, sandalwood, heavy and powerful. A group of Asians in subtle, clean, fresh tones head to the bar where two Latin Americans are smooching, floral with woody notes. They could be Germans, but they lack the comfortable tones of vanilla and sandalwood. Russians are not so easy to pick out, and intensely floral in general.
The dance floors writhe with people in their mid-20s, but it’s not the bass lines we feel: sweat levels have increased. Smoke from the smoking room gradually masks the sweat as the door opens and closes. “Clubs actually used to smell worse than this; the mix of alcohol and cigarette ash,” remarks Flavigny. Nonetheless, he finds the smell of sweat repellent. He draws back from a cloud of garlic. I complain that the music is bad. “The music hasn’t changed at all,” replies Flavigny, “it’s the smell that’s changed your perception of it.” He can’t stay any longer: “I can smell the men.”
It’s 3.30 a.m. Flavigny climbs onto his motorbike and heads home through the cool summer night. Shortly before hitting the road, he says that he often dreams of fragrances. He sees them as sculptures that change over time. In his dreams, he approaches them, moulds them, and in the morning writes down the formula. For Flavigny, fragrances are feelings. Even in his dreams, he works in this world that is beyond logic. Surreal, I think, taking another deep breath of night air, and flag down a taxi. The roar of the air streaming by and the smell of the leather seats merge to form a symphony.
Hannes Grassegger (b. 1980) writes on culture and industry for newspapers including Die Zeit, the Financial Times Deutschland and the Tages-Anzeiger.
hannes1 - 5. Aug, 22:40