Making perfume

 

Here is the long awaited story of how we went to Grasse, France, perfume capital of the world, and made our own signature scents!

What's that? 

"Who was awaiting this?" You want to know?

A PERSON CAN WAIT FOR SOMETHING EVEN IF THEY DON'T KNOW THAT THEY ARE!

Let me set the scene:

Back before our France adventure, when it was still just a glimmering dream in our eyes, we were watching the Japanese dating show I recently told you about, Offline Love, where young Japanese people go to the city I live in now and let fate and a few contrivences of the production staff guide them to each other. In this show each person got sent on one special little trip and was able to invite one of the other "contestants" to come with them. One of these adventures was a trip to Grasse, where they would make their own personal scents!

This very much captured my wife's imagination. So after we were in this area of the Cote D'Azur for a few months we booked our own perfume experience!

Grasse is a beautiful old hill town that we were even able to glimpse a bit of from our first apartment here in Theoule Sur Mer, though it was farther up towards the mountains than it looked. I find that pretty much everything around here is farther than it looks, but maybe that's because we walk so much. We took a very handy train to Grasse from what amounts to the backyard of where we live now. The train follows the coast into Cannes, where we have been many times, but then deviates from the main coastal train route up into the hills, wandering through the countryside and a couple of small cities. We had never been on this train route and it was mildly pretty and interesting. The famous mimosa bloom, already started then and still going now, was showing off with some glimpses of amazing floods of yellow flowers. After a little over an hour our train ended its route in the medium sized town of Grasse.

Hmm, well maybe not in the town of Grasse.

It was more like a place surrounded by roads. And then all around that was something a bit like suburbs, semi rural suburbs I guess, or maybe like Bloomington, MN, or the San Fernando Valley. Up the hill, way up the hill, was what turns out to be a richly historic and pretty large ancient city and modern tourist attraction known as Grasse. We did go there later, but only briefly because we had to go home at that point and it was rainy. It was not particularly walkable from the train and required a slow bus on a winding road.

But never mind that, our perfumery was not located in the tourist wonder and charming hilltown of Grasse, even if surely, dating back as it did to the 1700's, it started out there. It was located out in the general and not historic or particularly nice sprawling remainder of Grasse. We walked there without much joy along sidewalks next to large roads. We looked for a place to lunch and failed utterly.

But I am not here to rain on your lovely story of us making our own perfumes! Or on my story for that matter. So let's just move on from our wandering the roads futilely looking for food and leave us waiting in the parking lot of our perfume showroom. 

They were closed for lunch. Perhaps the staff went out to eat at the local McDonalds? 

But we were not alone waiting for our exciting perfume experience! Other people waited with us.

Most of them were Japanese. Offline Love was very popular!

But fear not, the worst part of the whole perfume experience is over now, thank god, because the perfume making was pretty neat. 

We had a sceduled appointment and it cost, well, a lot; a bit over 100 euros each! There were probably about 12 people doing this perfume thing, and each person got their own special mad scientist carol in the perfume laboratory.

I think I even have a picture!

Yes, yes, this is in the main room:

 And here is my work space:

See all those little bottles everywhere? Those were the scents we worked with. We each got the same 120, in three rows of 40. These were the base scents, which were the strong undertones of the pyramid of scent we were building. This would be the most lasting and powerful scent. The next row of 40 was the midtones, and they rounded out the base scent and were more floral I think. And then the top row of 40 were the top notes of the perfume, mostly fruit and some flower, fresher, lighter smells, what you smelled most of initially with a final perfume, but which were also more ephemeral and didn't last so long.

We were shown how best to smell the bottles (take it easy and don't overwhelm the nose. It is a lot of smelling) and set to work testing out the bottom row of 40 scents. Our job was to choose five or so that we liked, just going on our immediate preference, and then rank those five. When we were done the perfume people came around to us individually and gave us the portions we should use of our five base notes, based on harmonious blending and our preferences. We poured them out porportionately into our beakers.

You can see my full perfume beaker in front of some scents, below:

We went through the same process more or less with each of the next two rows of scents, though we were to test those scents against the base we started with to make sure we liked how they worked together. I picked a lot of woods smells in my base notes with a bit of rose and ocean in my midtones, and all the citrus I could in the topnotes.

They took our beakers away when we were done, and our recipes, to keep on file in case we want to order more of it later. We had to name our scent as well. I called mine "Underwood". Then, shortly, we got our bespoke perfume back very prettily packaged in our own perfume bottle with its name on it and everything.

So do I positively reek of "underwood" now? You wonder.

No! 

Now it has to mature for three weeks!

But that's more like two weeks now from when I'm writing this, and I am very much looking forward to trying it out.

And as soon as the AI can figure out how to share scents online you can smell it too!