A blog about smells and fragrances, notes and accords, brands and marketing...

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Conference "What pedagogy for the perfume?", Paris-Sorbonne, the 1st of February 2010

A conference dealing with the olfactory language was held Monday, the 1st of February, at the Sorbonne, under the artistic direction of the musicologist Marie- Anouch Sarkissian.
On this occasion, Barbara Le Portz, founder of the company Fragrance Intelligence, shared her experience, lived through perfumers companies such as IFF, Quest (now Givaudan) or Créations Aromatiques (now Symrise), and presented her vision of the various languages used to talk about perfume, and the need to confront the olfactory language to other arts.

But what is the olfactory language? It is true that, unlike other arts, perfume has a few words to express itself, and needs sometimes to pick vocabulary from other spheres. Here is a little rundown on the different "fragrance speaking" that can be heard.
- The ‘brand’ language often makes analogies or uses images, which provides a framework for perfumers in a brief.
- The language of the perfumer is a technical, chemical and descriptive language, speaking of aldehydes or esters.
- The language of evaluation involves 3 steps in olfaction: the sensation, then the assessment to finally translate it into emotion.
The sensation picks words from the sensory vocabulary, whether of taste (sweet, sparkling ..), touch (sticky, fresh, silky...), sight (luminous, dark, transparent...) or hearing (sharp, squeaky, dissonant...).
The assessment introduces a judgement. For example, an exotic smell will refer to the smell of mango or passion fruit for Europeans, through its cultural references.
Finally, the language of emotion simply stakes the feeling: a perfume of serenity, of joy, energetic, tonic, etc. ...

Barbara Le Portz also presented some projects held during her career, where she introduced perfumers to various artists such as Patrick Veillet (designer who recently created the packs of the new Angel body range by Thierry Mugler), Alnoor, Claudine Drai... Various meetings between fragrance and design that gave new ideas to the head and the nose of some perfumers, fueled their creativity and gave birth to fragrances somewhat unusual.
Beautiful projects that unfortunately require a little time... a valuable time to manage to work on many different projects in parallel, in a market devoted to the logic of profitability. But in a saturated market like perfumery, isn’t it sometimes necessary to find different sources of inspiration to bring something new?

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