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Before he became the famous industrialist, Coty began as a pharmacy assistant in Paris. He was set to work compounding formulae for cosmetics and colognes, and soon having got the hang of it, started making his own versions. The owner, seeing Coty had talent, advised him to go to Grasse to be trained, but Coty wasn't content to be an apprentice and struck out on his own. He made up a batch of product, put it in the cheapest bottles he could find, labelled them Cologne Coty, and sold it to pharmacies in Marseilles. Having some left over, he hired a donkey and cart and went out to the surrounding villages. Knowing that people would be working in the fields, in the cafés, or sitting at home, Coty devised a plan. Before entering a village...

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Rosemary-lavender. Vanilla-sandal. Pour un Homme is barely more than that. Two accords - carefully balanced - unfold in a stately dance that blends cool and warm, chewy and hard, beige and blue. Pour un Homme is an old fashioned scent and could be misunderstood. But, to reject it - just because it doesn't grab you by the nose - would be a mistake. It takes time to get to know this one, and - in the end - it pays off. When it was released in 1934, men were used to nothing more than a splash of aftershave – usually citrus and herbs that soon faded away; a type of odour completely different from women’s perfume. Caron's aim was to replace this splash of after-shave with their ‘toilet water for a man’. To make this new fangled product...

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1947 Miss Dior was a brown leather chypre, with an olfactory hue that set it apart from that great congener and wartime rival - Bandit. If Bandit (1944) is a black leather handbag filled with odds and ends, belonging to a woman in occupied Paris, Miss Dior could be the perfumed saddle of Epona. She is the Celtic goddess of horses, who - in Apuleius's bawdy and picaresque novel The Golden Ass - has a shrine adorned with roses in a stable. I chose this archaic metaphor because, like Miss Dior, she is a thing of the past. There has been a slippage in our olfactory conventions over the last seventy years, and Miss Dior is a good example of how things have changed in a lifetime. After World War Two, when women had to deal with shortage...

Quartz: Like Tchaikovsky, who used a folk tune in his bombastic piano concerto, Chaillan picks up Diorella's ripe melon and moulds it to his own needs. He sets it to a dry spicy carnation, smooth white citric honeysuckle and sharp hyacinth, softened with peachy rose and amber. Although the melon - unlike Tchaikovsky's quotation - is more conventional that the avant-garde experiment by Roudnitska (less fruit market trash but still a bit queasy and very musky) it shows that Chaillan was no Yes man; and with Opium, YSL pour Homme, Anaïs Anaïs and Givenchy III to his name (not to mention Ho Hang, Monsieur Carven and the ground breaking Bleu Marine) no one would think of this obscure talent as just another nose. Quartz is not a famous...

Love it or loathe it, the behemoth that is Sauvage didn't spring from nowhere, it was a long time coming. I've been tracing the origins of Sauvage and I've found another footprint on the trail. Using the (none too reliable) note listings, it's possible to pick out the features that give Del Mar and the all pervasive blockbuster their family resemblance. Breaking it down into categories - to make comparisons easier - we find a number of similar notes, and this also works for Chanel's bid for the Spiky Woods crown, Bleu. First of all there's citrus : which works if you allow bergamot as citrus (it's also aromatic and resiny) - Del Mar; mandarin - Bleu; and elemi -Sauvage (which isn't strictly a citrus but it smells like one). The second...

There's a tradition in certain parts of the perfume world to use difficult or even unpleasant notes in a composition. This is more than just adding a bit of civet to smooth out a profile, it's when a perfume becomes weird or consciously repellant in some way, as well as being attractive. This tendency goes back at least as far as Roudnitska, with his use of cumin and over ripe melon; you could also include Jicky and Mouchoir de Monsieur in this category. We aren't talking mistakes here; it's an attempt to create dynamic perfumes by contrasting 'nice' and 'nasty' odours, something Mathilde Laurent has written about and you can feel it her work too. The downside to this, is a certain overthinking which can intrude and spoil the beauty of...

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/dogs-really-can-tell-when-we-are-stressed-by-smelling-it-in-our-sweat-and-breath/

Perfumes tend to have a limited number of messages. Broadly speaking: the floral says pretty, the Amber sensual, the chypre domineering, the aldehydics are haughty, the fougère is elegant and the incense mystical. The gourmand is mostly a categorical error, the spiky woods are antisocial and the fruity-floral derisable. And the aquatic? You decide... Perfume is often - but not always - described as a tool of seduction, and sex is a serious business - there's no place for humour in its vocabulary. But there are a few exceptions and Kyoto is one of them. A wacky mix of incense and lemon curd, it doesn't take itself too seriously. When I smell it, it makes me smile. Not exactly manna from heaven but it's maybe the nearest we'll get in...

An olfactory exhibition is currently running in Norway. Based on the story the Three Little Pigs, children follow a trail through the exhibition where scent boxes are used to illustrate different parts of the narrative. It begins with a mini pig farm, where the first box holds the realistic smell of pigs, pee, mud, and poop. The children, who are kindergarten age, can open and close the boxes as they like, and are free to decide how much and how long they want to smell each odor. Then they come to the first pig's house - the house of straw, which is pink and furnished with mirrors and soft cushions. Inside is a scent box that holds the smell of berries and fruit. The second is a wooden house, which is is green and scented with pine...

In The Shock of the New, critic Robert Hughes wrote In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity. For the Green Chypre, the seventies was a period of high intensity. After Y appeared in 1964 nothing much happened. But then, in 1970, two important works appeared; Givenchy III, which many people know and love, and Eau Folle, which almost nobody knows. It's possible to see them as starting with Y and going in different directions. Where Givenchy III was a tweedy and green mossy chypre, Eau Folle took a different route; a woody, sparkling Bitter Lemon with a touch of green leather. They both have restrained bouquets but, despite being classified as women's scents, neither feels very feminine by today's standards. From...

Podcast about pongs: Two presenters, two scientists ... no perfumers. Warning: contains the word fart. Now available as a download: The Suspicious Smell an episode in the BBC Radio 4 series The curious cases of Rutherford & Fry https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001bkrr

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Coty was a perfumer of great genius. He single handedly created the chypre and amassed a huge fortune from his capacity for creative vision and hard work. But he had blind spots. He once complained that ‘when Jacques Guerlain does vanilla he comes up with Shalimar, but when I do it I get crème anglaise - custard’. He had the same problem with Lily of the Valley. His Eau de Muguet is a bright lemony note thats waxy with a pale pink rosiness and a woody-green herbaceous quality; a distant likeness to the real thing. Where the best Coty perfumes are subtle portraits, Eau de Muguet is little better than a sketch. I think the reasons for this are twofold: Coty was a pioneer, and a transitional figure, who - with his bold use of...

Knowing that Jean-Paul Guerlain liked horses, and he composed Habit Rouge - which means the foxhunter’s ‘red jacket’ - it’s easy to guess that Derby wasn’t inspired by a grubby little town in England but the horse racing event at Epsom. Habit Rouge and Derby weren’t the only horse perfumes by Guerlain though, there was also Jockey Club, composed by Pierre-François Pascal Guerlain in 1879. Jockey Club perfumes were a craze in the nineteenth century and several old formulae still exist. By the look of it they were pretty much the same; a masculine floral, based around tuberose and cassie - and usually rose, and often with jasmine and other things. Knowing that the formula still existed in the Guerlain archive, it’s likely that Jean-Paul...

Victoria's Secret would seem to be unlikely market leaders but their new perfume Bare is just that. It's the first perfume to contain Cryptosym, a transparent odourless base that protects a perfume from being copied by chemically encrypting its formula. New perfumes are routinely subjected to chemical analysis by a process known as gcms: gas chromatography - mass spectrometry. A perfume is vapourised and mixed with an inert gas, which then passes down a sticky pipe which is slowly heated. The most volatile molecules stick very little and come out first, and as it gets hotter and hotter, the larger and more inert molecules move along until they come out the end of the pipe - where they are chemically analysed. The user can also sniff...

https://www.perfumerflavorist.com/flavor/sweet-applications/news/22314689/salt-straw-launches-edible-perfumes-to-spritz-on-ice-cream

30% of your DNA is actually made for your sense of taste and your sense of smell; like 30% of your whole existence goes towards your taste and your smell - sense, that's a really good indication that it's a good idea to trust your nose; your nose knows. You don't wanna eat rotten Bunya nuts... David Trood - The Weedy Garden : YouTube