What makes a perfume so memorable, intoxicating and irresistible? Well the answer lies in the ingredients and more importantly how those ingredients are combined.
Designing a perfume is a skill reserved for a very select few. These fragrance wizards who combine aromas to deliver your favourite scent are affectionately called Noses due to their fine sense of smell and skill in producing olfactory fragrance cocktails.
You’ll probably be surprised to learn that there are only around 600 Noses in the World and as such they command both great respect and salaries due to their unique abilities and intense training in their art. A Nose receives many years of training to develop the knowledge of a huge selection of fragrance ingredients and their smells, as well as understand how the ingredients change over time and also how ingredients may be altered when combined with other ingredients.
One of the World’s most famous Noses, Calice Becker, is probably unknown to the millions who use Marc Jacobs Lola, Dior J’adore, Tom Ford Velvet Orchid and Mandarino Di Amalfi every morning.
Similarly, industry renowned Perfumer Alberto Morillas may not be a name known to many but he recently opened his own perfume house called Mizensir, in Dubai and is the genius behind CK One, Giorgio Armani Acqua di Gio, Marc Jacobs Daisy and Gucci Bloom.
It is fairly common for a Nose to spend months if not years perfecting a new fragrance. A formula that can take over 500 trials to perfect is quite normal proving that Noses are indeed extremely patient folk.
Right now, in a lab in France, someone is making minute adjustments to the ratio of oud to vanilla to orange for the 100th time, remembering a smell from a walk in the woods, or freshly made marmalade or the scent of the sea on a cold morning. Noses are trained chemists but, somehow, they are more artists than scientists.
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