Authors: Molly Birnbaum
It had been four years since I smashed the windshield of that Ford with the back of my skull. I had regained the majority of my ability to detect scent, slowly and carefully, a gift of luck alone. But could I smell everything? Was the aroma of Cyndi’s apple crisp the same as it was before? Would I ever really know? These questions had fluttered constantly in the back of my mind for months. Back in Brooklyn, worried and alone, I decided to find out. I bought a plane ticket to France.
I ARRIVED IN GRASSE,
a small hamlet in the southeast of France, late one morning in July. I hadn’t slept on the overnight flight from New York and I struggled to keep my eyes open on the bus from the airport in Nice as we rumbled past the red- and yellow-painted homes, over the cobblestone streets that littered the route through the Côte d’Azur.
Grasse is a quiet town on a hill. Vine-decked homes and squat apartment buildings boast views of the hazy blue Mediterranean miles away. It’s a flower hot spot—fields of jasmine and lavender dot its outskirts with deep purples and blues. As a result, Grasse has long been important in the history of fragrance. I had come for the perfume.
So had Grenouille, the hero-villain of Patrick Süskind’s novel
Perfume.
He arrived in Grasse in the late eighteenth century in search of new techniques to create a fragrance that he thirsted for, that he had murdered for, one that he long craved: that of young virgin girls. He arrived by foot. Of that time, Süskind wrote:
At the other end of the wide basin, perhaps two miles off, a town lay among—or better, clung to—the rising mountain. From a distance it did not make a particularly grand impression. There was no mighty cathedral towering above the houses, just a little stump of a church steeple, no commanding fortress, no magnificent edifice of note. . . . It looked as if it had no need to flaunt itself. It reigned above the fragrant basin at its feet, and that seemed to suffice.
Not much had changed in the last two hundred years. Grasse seemed small and dilapidated when I stepped off the bus into the warm country air. I rolled my suitcase behind me through the streets dotted with cafés and shops, most of which sold perfume or soap and were closed on Sundays. There was hardly anyone outside and I wondered why I had come.
But the paperwork was in my purse, and I had a map with my destination circled in ink in hand. Like Grenouille, I had traveled to Grasse—a town filled with perfume companies, and therefore perfume schools—in order to learn about the techniques of creating scent. Like thousands of hopeful perfumers in the hundreds of years before me, I had come to Grasse to train my nose. I was there to learn how to smell.
Grasse, I had been told, was the historical center of fragrance. It was the center of development and production of commercial fragrance for hundreds of years—“the cradle of perfume,” writes Celia Lyttelton in her book,
The Scent Trail
. It was “the Rome of scents, the promised land of perfumes and the man who had not earned his spurs here did not rightfully bear the title of perfumer,” writes Süskind.
It hadn’t always been that way. Grasse began with the production of leather. In the Middle Ages, this hillside town was filled with successful tanneries and, as a result, was redolent with the stink of their materials. To combat this, as well as the many other evils associated with foul smells, residents liberally perfumed their products—especially gloves, a specialty of the region. These scented hand-covers grew wildly fashionable. So fashionable, in fact, that in the sixteenth century the Earl of Oxford is said to have given a pair to Queen Elizabeth I.
But Catherine de Medici, Queen of France, was a true patron of Grasse. She loved these gloves and their fragrance so much that in 1553 she set up a laboratory in town to produce just scent, writes Lyttelton. “She wanted France to make perfumes to rival the then fashionable Arab perfumes, and
gantiers-parfumeurs
(gauntlet-perfumers), as they became known, and apothecaries sprang up everywhere. Local peasants strapped copper alembics (distilling apparatuses) to their donkeys and distilled wild herbs and flowers on the spot. Mountaineers in the Alps collected lavender and other wild aromatic plants and came down to sell their wares to the
gantiers-parfumeurs
of Grasse.”
Soon, Grasse’s fragrances became even more celebrated than the items on which they were doused. The microclimate of the elevated town located twelve miles away from the stifling heat of Cannes and Nice proved perfectly suited for the growth of such fragrant flowers as jasmine, rose, and lavender. Today, two-thirds of the natural aromas from France are produced in Grasse’s factories before being shipped around the world. Some of the old perfumeries—among them Galinard, Fragonard, and Molinard—are still in operation.
I checked in at my hotel in the center of town, a tattered affair festooned with mirrors and silver-wrapped candies in jars. That night I ate mussels fragrant in garlic sauce and
frites,
steaming and salty, piled on parchment paper to catch their grease. I breathed in the evening air—fresher, cooler than New York’s. I was ready to smell.
The Grasse Institute of Perfumery opened its doors in 2002, the brainchild of Han-Paul Bodifée, the president of Prodarom, a national association for fragrance professionals. It is one of the few schools to teach the art and science of perfumery without being connected to a larger fragrance house. The institute offers a coveted nine-month course for aspiring perfumers, selecting only a dozen of the many applicants it receives each year. But the institute also holds workshops in natural materials and in cosmetics, and every summer it offers a two-week crash course in the basics of perfume, which was the reason I had come.
I found myself sitting at a table in the bright ground-floor laboratory at the institute’s elegant building on a hill outside of town. It was a casual little lab, much smaller than the one I had seen at Citromax. There were shelves lined with small brown bottles of scent, and counters outfitted with scales for perfumers-in-training to measure the droplets of their craft. The room smelled strongly of something I couldn’t quite place—a sweet scent, but one with depth.
I eyed the eight other students around the table warily. We were a diverse and international group. There was an aromatherapist from England, two biochemistry students from India, a soap maker from Texas, a chemist from Argentina, a cosmeticist from France, a college student from Korea, and a woman who worked in publishing in Austria. They spoke of commercial fragrance companies and famous perfumes, throwing names like
Shishedo
,
L’Air du Temps
, and
Tresor
around the room. Names that, for me, had no meaning at all.
The instructor, Laurence Fauvel, was a soft-spoken female perfumer. She sat at the head of the table wearing a lavender-hued linen shirt. English, I had been told, is the language of fragrance, and she spoke it with a lovely accent.
Our lesson plan is simple, she explained. We would smell. The first step for every perfumer-to-be is the same: memorize. We wouldn’t memorize mathematical formulas or flash cards inscribed with names. We would memorize scents.
Every perfume student in every school around the world begins by memorizing the raw materials. Although there are small differences among students’ abilities to pick up on and distinguish between smells upon arrival, the genetic propensity for scent memory is minimal. All perfumers learn through training. No one is born with the ability to blindly recognize the scent of benzyl acetate, a synthetic jasmine note. The only way to understand the materials is to smell and to smell and to smell.
To effectively create a fragrance, perfumers must know every raw material. He or she must know them instinctively. This means learning each scent so well that one can blindly identify the aroma of neroli, linalyl, or triplal without pausing for thought. It means smelling a raw material with hints of rose and mint, hay and wood, and a touch of citrus and knowing immediately that it is geranium. A perfumer often knows the materials so well that he or she can imagine the scent of bergamot like the way most can easily conjure and silently sing the melody to “Happy Birthday” without humming a note.
And there are a lot of raw materials: more than two thousand of them—some made from natural substances, and many created synthetically in the lab. Each one not only carries its own distinctive scent, but also a way of relating with those around it. Some burst quickly into the nose and fade just as fast, others move slowly, lasting long in a hazy cloud above the skin. Every commercial perfume contains somewhere between twenty and hundreds of these ingredients. The creation of a masterful scent, one worn by hundreds of thousands around the world like the complex aldehyde of
Chanel No. 5
or the caramel vanilla of
Angel,
begins with raw materials. They are precisely mixed and mathematically formulated. Fragrance, like flavor, is an art form, and a science at the same time—one that begins with these bottles in the lab. Professional perfumers generally use fifteen hundred with some regularity. Of all these scents, we students in Grasse would hardly have time to reach the triple digits. But we would try.
We would begin with the naturals, which are made from fruits and flowers, leaves and roots. They come from animal glands and tree bark. They have names like opoponax, neroli, and tonka bean. They are created through means of expression, extraction, and distillation. Until the mid-1900s a technique called
enfleurage
was used, primarily in Grasse. In this, flowers or bark or leaves would be pressed into swaths of gelatinous fat—usually pork or beef—and left for days to allow the scent to seep in, later sold as was, or used to transfer its scent to an alcohol solution.
We would move on to the synthetics, or man-made scents, next. They have names like damascone, galaxolide, and heliotropin. They often imitate smells already occurring in nature, like cedryl acetate, which smells like cedarwood, or eugenol, which smells like clove, and are used in perfumes because they are more stable and less expensive. They can also create entirely new scents, ones that smell like nothing occurring in nature.
An expert can tell the difference in quality from one type of juniper to another. An expert can tell the difference between a rose from Morocco and a rose from Grasse. It takes a long time to learn to recognize and identify all of the raw materials. Some say months; others, years. To be a master perfumer, Fauvel told me, it takes decades.
We had two weeks.
I looked over at the shelves filled with small bottles behind me. There were hundreds of them, taunting me with the their labels. I wondered if I would even be able to smell them all. What if Fauvel opened a bottle of something potent, something primal, something that everyone already knew, and I would have to sit there blank and uncomprehending?
“You have to practice,” Fauvel told us.
She must have noticed my worried look. “You will have fun,” she said. “It’s not mathematics,” she added. “It’s art.”
I SAY THAT
I went to Grasse to train my nose. But, really, my decision had nothing to do with the olfactory receptors, with the scent molecules riding up my nostrils. It had nothing to do with my nose. After all, I could detect all sorts of aroma, both good and bad. I
could
smell.
I went to Grasse for something bigger, for a problem that rose much higher, one that I had begun to broach after the smell test at UPenn, after my continued inability to recognize the scented world around me. The problem was in my ability to interpret, to discriminate and label. I came to Grasse for my brain.
After all, the brain is plastic. It has the ability to change.
Though the concept is simple, this revelation is relatively recent. For hundreds of years scientists believed the ribbed entity in our heads to be static, to be what it was and nothing more. They believed the brain to be a machine in stasis.
A scientist named Paul Bach-y-Rita became interested in the possible changing nature of the brain when he watched his father, at age sixty-eight, recover his ability to function after a debilitating stroke. When his father passed away, years later, an autopsy was performed and Bach-y-Rita discovered that his father’s brain still had huge lesions from the stroke, ones that had never healed. The brain, he realized, had the power to reorganize itself.
He published an article in the science journal
Nature
in 1969 about the work this experience inspired. In it, he described a machine that he had invented to help people who had been blind from birth. This machine used a camera and a computer that turned the visual world into a complex system of vibrating stimulators placed on the patient’s skin. With practice, these patients were able to use the tactile information and translate it into a visual understanding of their environment. In essence, they learned to “see.”
“The now forgotten machine was one of the first and boldest applications of neuroplasticity—an attempt to use one sense to replace another—and it worked,” wrote Norman Doidge in his book
The Brain That Changes Itself
.
The brain, as Bach-y-Rita and a growing group of scientists realized, isn’t a machine. It is capable of change, wildly so. It can bypass a damaged area to make use of what is still functional, even going so far as to replace one sense with another. It can also operate on a level much more specific, one much more attainable; for example, on the level of an American child speaking French, or regularly practicing the piano. Learning can change the structure of the brain.
“The idea that the brain can change its own structure and function through thought and activity is, I believe, the most important alteration in our view of the brain since we first sketched out its basic anatomy and the workings of its basic component, the neuron,” Doidge wrote.
Though I have spoken with anosmics who are sure that they can “smell” through other senses, like Bach-y-Rita’s patients could “see,” I needed nothing so serious as a replacement for sight. But I knew that my inability to recognize and identify smells was not static.