Authors: Molly Birnbaum
“Why there?”
“It’s where he had been injured,” she said. He was an American, a soldier, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. She used neroli oil, she explained, “because it’s good for trauma.”
I had told her, then, somewhat awkwardly, that I had a boyfriend in Afghanistan.
“I can’t believe I just told you that story,” she said, looking aghast.
“It’s okay,” I said. I didn’t want to hide from the realities of war, or its aftermath. But part of me did want to keep this strange, insular world of fragrance and the troubles I was experiencing hidden from Matt, who was in Gardez, stuck in the smells of baking sand and human waste. I hadn’t spoken with him since I arrived in France. He had been angry with me before I left. An anger that was out of his control, and out of mine, one that stemmed from his jealousy and my guilt. He was trapped and I was free. Neither of us knew how to cope. But I felt rejuvenated by the sight of his familiar face, the man I loved, someone who didn’t know the difference between aldehyde and opoponax, between Yves Saint Laurent and Frederic Malle. Over the dim, pixilated connection on our computers, I told Matt about the vetiver, which smelled deep and woody, like balsam. I told him about the violet, which had a hint of cucumber on the exhale. I told him I was afraid I would never train myself to be better, that I was afraid I would never be okay.
“I’ll never trust myself in the kitchen again,” I said, the words sprung unbidden to my lips. I hadn’t been thinking about the kitchen. But then suddenly it made sense.
“Yes you will,” Matt said, leaning in closer toward the camera. “You can cook. And you can smell. You just need to relax.” I could see maps of Afghanistan hanging on the wall behind him. Here he was in one of the most dangerous places on earth, and I in one of the superb—and yet he managed to soothe my fears.
That night for dinner I met a classmate at a restaurant downtown. I ordered a Niçoise salad: fresh lettuce, hard-boiled egg, tuna, green beans, radish, tomato, and anchovy. It was fresh and flavorful, washed down with a glass of white wine, which was sweet with honey and fruit and cleared my palate of those lingering vestiges of scent. We watched the tourists and the locals walk by, the faint kiss of cigarette smoke hanging in the air. For dessert, we shared an
il flottante,
or “floating island,” a light meringue nestled in a cloud of crème anglaise. The air smelled of lemon, and of salt. Later, I slept deeply, without dreams.
I walked from town to school the following Monday morning—up a long hill dotted with stucco-topped homes, past the bakery’s aroma of espresso and warm butter croissants—feeling renewed. When I arrived at the lab, I sat down and began to study my notes. I was ready, once again, to smell, and I tucked into the day’s materials with newfound enthusiasm. I smelled the raw scents over and over, drilling them into my brain with repetition and a rejuvenated desire to learn.
I would relax. I couldn’t let two measly weeks at perfume school carry so much weight. Instead of giving in to my panic when unable to place word to scent, I consciously relaxed my shoulders, closed my eyes. I reminded myself: smells do not come with words. Just let the letters go.
After lunch that afternoon, while milling about outside the lab as we waited to resume work, one of my classmates, a voluptuous woman who worked in cosmetics and wore layers of makeup so thick I wondered that if I touched her face it would dent, told me that it would help to think in “triggers.”
“Triggers?”
“Yes,” she said, speaking slowly in her limited English. Using triggers to memorize smell was a technique she used when she trained as a cosmeticist. “I use them to remember. Sometimes the triggers relate to the smell.”
“Like the dentist and clove?”
“Yes,” she said, gesturing into the air as she grasped at her words. “And sometimes they don’t relate. Ylang-ylang, to me, is sausage. Jasmine is butter.” She shrugged and then laughed. “Try it,” she said.
I did. With each new scent, I began to consciously assign associations. I used colors and sounds. I resurrected memories both vaporous and fine. I assigned them to the smells that conjured them, bringing them back again and again, hoping to glue them together as the odor molecules sent their signals to my brain. It didn’t always work. But sometimes it did. And once I began, I couldn’t stop.
As I smelled, I often thought of synesthesia, the neurological condition in which the perception of separate senses become combined. In his memoir
Speak, Memory,
Vladimir Nabokov writes about hearing the sounds of the letters of the alphabet as colors. “The long
a
of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated) has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French
a
evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard
g
(vulcanized rubber) and
r
(a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal
n,
noodle-limp
l,
and the ivory-backed hand mirror of
o
take care of the whites. I am puzzled by my French
on
which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass,” he wrote. There are those who taste shapes, see sound, or smell color. It comes in many different forms, and in many different levels. Matt, for example, sees numbers and letters as colors, as well as days of the week. He told me this for the first time when we were on a walk around Central Park. “You see the days of the week as colors?” I asked, floored. “Yes,” he said. “The words for the days of the week are always in color. They always have been. I didn’t realize this was strange until I was a teenager.” Monday, he said, is blue. “Tuesday is a goldish brown or a brownish gold. Hard to describe. Wednesday is decidedly green. Thursday is light brown. Friday is purpleish. Saturday is matte gold. Sunday is red. Dark red.” In synesthestes, it is believed that the barriers between the senses are significantly reduced. At perfume school I found that forcing myself to lessen the barriers—as much as I physically was able—helped me to remember each scent.
Geranium smelled floral and sour, minty and fresh. To me, it became the image of a shimmering green-blue swimming pool. Neroli was a long gray line, hovering again behind my eyelids, a few golden pinpricks of light above. Cedarwood became the closet in the basement of my childhood home. It was a closet filled with mothballs and plastic containers of clothes, but a closet lined in the light wood that smelled of pencil shavings, the one where I would sometimes go to hide. Ylang-ylang, the delicate tropical flower that grows on trees in the Philippines with its overpowering floral with a slight animalistic edge, took me to Hawaii, where I visited my aunt often as a kid. Cystus, with its soft, warm balsamic notes, became the Boston Flower and Garden show, the massive indoor plant expo my father took me to each year. It was housed in a huge warehouse that smelled of dirt and plants, of green and brown. Once, he bought me a miniature cactus in a tiny earthenware pot, which I watched every day on the kitchen counter, as it slowly grew toward the sun.
We continued to smell eight hours a day. We smelled naturals: bergamot, petitgrain, galbanum. We smelled synthetics: benzoin, cedryl acetate, ambroxan, eugenol, phenylethyl aldehyde. Some were familiar, like patchouli and nutmeg. Others were strange: civet, isobutyl quinoline. But all, I felt, were beautiful. I repeated the names to myself on my walk home like poetry: opoponax, coumarin, labdanum.
When I inhaled over unlabeled blotters during a test the second week, I closed my eyes and recognized cedarwood by its closet, its pencil-shaving dream. I found the Hawaii of ylang-ylang and the flowers of cystus. I distinguished between mandarin and orange, because one looked more pink, and the other yellow, somewhere in the recesses of my mind. I was certainly not as successful as my classmates, who could complete Fauvel’s tests with perfect scores, but I was improving.
One day I found the small note of cucumber in the raw material violet. I got the mushroom to myrrh oil. Smell had never been so alive as it was around that table that final week. It changed and grew every day, with every scent, inviting colors and sounds and emotion with each breath. Is this why so many are intoxicated by perfume? I wondered. Is this what inspires? Is this why fragrance is considered an art?
By the final day, when I detected the bitter orange peel of neroli with the long gray line, the sun-speckled dots above, I felt the underpinnings of something that had long been foreign: confidence
.
BACK IN NEW YORK,
I made an appointment to visit Ron Winnegrad, director of the in-house perfume school at International Flavors and Fragrances. I wanted to witness another school in action, one with professionals and not in France. I wanted a glimpse into this world, which, like flavor, is shrouded in secrecy, an opaque trade, whispers abound.
I walked into Winnegrad’s office one morning in August, accompanied by a member of the company’s PR team. I shook hands with Winnegrad, who is a tall, thin man with a shock of gray hair and a tiny silver hoop earring in each ear. I fumbled for words for a moment, distracted by the thick stack of wood bracelets running up each of his arms, his loud-colored tie, and the mismatched, primary-hued socks, which I could see peeking from beneath the cuffs of his pants. And then there were the teddy bears. His office was filled with stuffed animal bears big and small, brown and purple and blue. There were dozens of them lining shelves and tables across the large room.
We sat at a table near the window. A teddy bear named Gris—“for Grisly Bear,” Winnegrad explained—sat between us, wearing a vest covered in small pins.
“What have you got?” he asked, sitting back almost shyly in his chair.
I began by asking about the school, which he opened in 2002 and from which only sixteen students had graduated seven years later. But Winnegrad wouldn’t tell me much. He couldn’t. The secrecy enveloping much of the industry is fierce, and perfumers are often wary of press. His teaching methods, he said, were proprietary. There were only a few things he would share.
He told me that he concentrates on teaching only three hundred of the fifteen hundred raw materials frequently used in perfume, a small percentage compared with Fauvel’s techniques in Grasse. His students work less with triggers to enhance memory, and instead rely on the repetition of smelling and smelling and smelling again.
I wondered if he had noticed that some of his students had a greater propensity to smell. “Or is it all training?” I asked.
“It’s passion,” he told me, simply. Passion and training, that is. “You can have all the passion in the world, but if you don’t have the basic skills, it’s not going to get you to do what you should be doing. And it’s the reverse also: you can have great skills but if you don’t have the passion . . .” He trailed off.
“Have you always had the passion?”
“Yeah, I think so,” he said, speaking louder. “I still have it.”
Winnegrad had a vibrant career creating fragrances for the mass market before he began teaching full-time. He was mentored by the now legendary Jean-Claude Ellena, who is the head perfumer at Hermès and today lives in the hills near Grasse.
Winnegrad, who grew up in Brooklyn, loves to teach. He loves the way his students’ eyes light up when they suddenly understand a scent or a concept. He loves to have fun in the classroom, combining the other senses into exercises involving such things as watercolor paint. For him, color is big. I could see that in his own paintings—mainly of bears—framed and hung around his office. Emotion is big, too. But that doesn’t mean he’s soft. When Winnegrad really likes a student, he told me with a laugh, “I tell them that they’re full of shit. It’s my highest form of compliment.”
Intrigued by his synesthetic approach, I asked him how his other senses worked when he made perfume. He gave me an example.
Once, he explained, there was a customer who wanted a fragrance. She knew what kind of fragrance she wanted and had described it in the formal manner, which is through a brief, a memo handed out to perfumers willing to try, a competition of sorts. This particular customer knew Winnegrad, though. She knew he didn’t work in words. So she took him aside.
“I want you to forget everything I said,” she told him. “All I want is this: if you held a piece of marble in your hand, you know how cold it feels?”
He said yeah.
“You know how it gets warm from your body temperature?” she asked.
He nodded.
“I want that transition,” she said. “That’s what I want.”
Winnegrad smiled, and said: “To me, that made much more sense than any of the words.”
He had an assistant bring out a sample of that stone-warming fragrance. He dipped a blotter within and handed it to me. I inhaled. I could smell it—fresh and cool to start. I nodded, breathing in and out. He had used juniper and pepper, he said, among many other things. I put down the blotter for a moment, to let it rest. A few minutes later I smelled again. Indeed, it was warm. The transition, as Fauvel would say, was magic.
“I can see the stone,” I said.
Winnegrad looked at me, inquisitively. “How much can you smell?” he asked, already knowing my story of loss and regain.
“Well, I’m not sure,” I said, immediately nervous. I began to speak too quickly. “I’m pretty sure I can smell. Everything? Yes. I can smell everything. But recognition is still a problem.”
He sat up straight in his chair and nodded.
“Well, let’s see,” he said.
He picked up a small brown bottle from a box on the table, and then a blotter from a jar nearby. My heart began to race. It had been at least a month since I returned from Grasse, no longer a practiced student of perfume. What if I failed? What if I had lost it all? I wanted to slink out of my seat, melt into a puddle on the floor.
Winnegrad handed me the white paper strip. “Now tell me what you smell,” he said.
I inhaled over the strip, my mind racing. I could smell it. The scent was familiar. But I was immediately devoid of words.