The molecules in the Escentric Molecules fragrances are in a special category. Most aroma-molecules are great for special effects, but they have a linear scent-profile. This means they lack the complexity and beauty of a natural extract. A natural extract is like a fully-formed fragrance designed by nature. It can have anywhere from two to a hundred or so different molecules in it, all contributing to its scent-profile. The molecules I choose for Escentric Molecules are nuanced and complex, and in this way, more like natural extracts. They are rare, which is why I have always said that the Escentric Molecules series won't go on forever.

The molecules I choose for Escentric Molecules are nuanced and complex – this is rare

Iso E Super is in a class of its own. This is partly down to its radiance, the way it warms up with your natural body chemistry and hovers around you the whole day. It’s pretty unique in the palette of perfumery ingredients, and inspires intense devotion in those who can smell it (some people can’t).

Ambroxan (Molecule 02) is a little less complex than Iso E but it has this special touch - an enormous mineral freshness. Ambroxan is nature-identical, which means it is created in the lab but is identical to a molecule found in nature, in this case a molecule found in ambergris, which is a substance produced in the gut of sperm whales and found floating in the ocean or washed up on beaches. Ambergris is no longer used in mainstream commercial perfumery. There’s simply not enough of it to guarantee supply, so you find it today only in niche fragrances. It is an unusual animal ingredient because its sensuality is very refined, very elegant. Ambroxan is by far the most beautiful of the aroma-molecules that make up ambergris, that's why I chose it for Molecule 02.

Molecule 03 has the necessary complexity to stand alone because it is half-natural to start with. It is vetiver oil which has been acetylized to take away the leathery, bitter aspect of vetiver. The acetic acid also gifts something new to the vetiver in the process, a grapefruit note. This I love, especially in the way the grapefruit blends with the woody, warm character of the vetiver itself.

Javanol is a remarkable molecule – fresh, radiant, powerful, rosy and creamy

What’s outstanding about Javanol (Molecule 04) is its almost psychedelic freshness. Natural sandalwood is heavy, a base note, whereas Javanol is a sandalwood-type molecule that acts like a topnote yet is super-longlasting. It’s fresh, powerful, radiant, and with so many facets to it: a rosy aspect, a unique grapefruit freshness, and then this creamy sandalwood thing as well. It’s a remarkable molecule.

Polina
When I was a little girl at ballet school in Russia we were sometimes called upon to dance at the Bolshoi, an experience I will never forget. To get from the stage to the dressing-rooms we had to pass through the understage. As I ran under the stage where all my heroes and heroines had danced I would close my eyes and say to myself, 'Aaaah, now you are breathing the perfume of the Bolshoi, the perfume of ballet itself.' It was only fifteen years later that I discovered what this perfume actually was.

Christiane
What was it?

Polina
Cats. They had moved into the Bolshoi during the war. Ever since they have made the theatre their home and paid their rent by catching mice.

Geza
When you told me that story I knew I had to put something catty into your fragrance so I added cassis, which is made from blackcurrant buds. Cassis smells like cat's pee.

Polina
Mmmmm!

Through you I could feel the power of scent to unlock very strong memories

Christiane
Geza, how did you find Polina? Did you see her dance at Berlin Staatsballett?

Geza
Uh … no. I was lying on the sofa late one night, zapping through TV channels and there she was in a documentary on some weird arts channel. I contacted her manager, and he told Polina ‘hey some guy has an idea about making a fragrance with you.’

Polina
And I knew immediately ‘yes, I will do this’. To dive into this world of perfume, I never imagined that this would happen to me.

Geza
We met at my laboratory here in Berlin and began to smell the primary materials together. I would give Polina a natural extract or a synthetic molecule and she would go ‘oh this one reminds me of my grandmother’s little house in the country’ or ‘this reminds me of the earth after rain’. Through Polina I could feel the power of scent to unlock very strong memories.

Polina
What was wonderful for me was discovering that the smells of my memories each had a name or a formula.

She’s the opposite of Paris Hilton so why not create a fragrance with someone like this?

Christiane
For me too, Geza’s invitation came out of the blue. I was 19 and I knew nothing about perfume.

Geza
It was when Paris Hilton had just brought out her first fragrance. I was pissed off that someone famous for doing nothing was launching a perfume as a money-making machine. Then I picked up a copy of Zeit Wissen, the science magazine. On the cover was the youngest ever junior world champion in memory-training: Christiane. I thought ‘here is a woman doing something extraordinary with her brain. She’s the opposite of Paris Hilton. So why not create a fragrance with someone like this?’

Polina
How do you train yourself to have this huge memory, Christiane?

Christiane
I connect each thing I want to remember to a picture. Then, in my mind, I place these pictures round a room or a building that I know well, forming a route from, say, the door to the table to the window. At the door I put one memory-picture, at the table another memory-picture, and so on. With practise you can memorise everything.

Polina
Everything?

Christiane
Everything. The more fantastical you make the picture that goes with the memory, the easier it is to remember. That’s why the fragrance is called Intelligence and Fantasy. The fantasy part is important. How do you remember the sequence of movements in a ballet like Swan Lake, the one you were dancing last night?

For 3 weeks we got together every day all day to smell the raw materials in his laboratory

Polina
Swan Lake is easy because in classical ballet every movement has a name. A modern ballet, where the movements have no name, that’s tough. So I make up names for them myself. I name one movement ‘box’, another ‘flower’ and I string them together in a story.

Christiane
It’s not so different from the technique that I use.

Polina
When you are on stage there is a lot going on in your head. All the corrections your teacher has told you to make. Adjusting to the layout of each different stage. The conductor playing too slow or too fast. But the best is when you don’t think. That’s what I believe our art is about - those moments when you are not you, when you fly.

That’s what I believe our art is about - those moments when you are not you, when you fly

Christiane
I was so happy when Geza told me you would make Beautiful Minds No. 2. I remember you in the Herbert Groenemeyer video. That was one of the first things that made you famous in Germany outside of ballet circles. You look so beautiful and free...

Polina
Tell me more about how you made Intelligence & Fantasy.

Christiane
I had been offered an apartment in Berlin for the summer. So when Geza got in touch, I said, ‘why not?’. I came to Berlin and for three weeks we got together every day, all day, to assess the raw materials in his lab. It was crazy to see how quickly the sense of smell becomes educated. Soon I could smell a fragrance and say ‘oh yeah there’s sandalwood in there’, or ‘that’s osmanthus’.

I came to realise that when I love a note it is because there is a connection to my memories, conscious or unconscious.

Polina
Which ingredients did you love?

Christiane
I was fascinated by the mysterious ingredients such as Iso E Super and hedione, which is very very light but has so many nuances to it. Immediately when Geza gave me something to smell, a picture would form in my mind .. the ocean.. a plant... a fantasy animal. It’s because of the way I trained my mind to memorise things through pictures. And it worked particularly well because it’s hard to describe smells in words.

Polina
What’s the picture you have when you smell Intelligence & Fantasy?

Christiane
A fluffy kugel.

Polina
Kugel?

Christiane
In English it’s a ball, or sphere. So what I see is an orange-yellow sphere, like a little sun, that has a buttery, fluffy centre.

Geza
I know exactly what she is talking about. This fluffy effect comes from –

Christiane
Cashmeran.

Geza
Yeah. Cashmeran. And the yellow-orange is from the bergamot. Intelligence & Fantasy has a huge freshness, but it’s a soft fragrance.

I was fascinated by the mysterious ingredients such as Iso E Super

Christiane
What picture do you get when you smell Precision & Grace, Polina?

Polina
I get a memory... in the forest, in summer, picking pears and plums and placing them in my basket.

Geza
For me Precision & Grace is a smell-image of you dancing. The transparent layers of the classical ballet costume, and then underneath, the warmth of the body in motion.

Christiane
Do you ever wear fragrance when you are dancing?

Polina
Yes, I like to wear Precision & Grace when I am dancing - but only in a performance. I want the fragrance to remain special, exciting.

I like to wear Precision & Grace when I am dancing - but only in a performance. I want the fragrance to remain special, exciting.

Geza
What was really different about this process was that both of you learnt to recognise and assess the primary materials. After we had smelt hundreds of ingredients, I asked both of you to write down your association for each one, so I could have an insight into your olfactory brains.

Christiane
Then we made the first base. It had just six ingredients: cashmeran, bergamot, Iso E Super, mandarin, hedione... and what was the sixth thing?

Geza
Muscenone. And the thing is, while each of these ingredients in itself is nothing unusual, the combination of these six had never been done before.

Polina
No really. Never?

Geza
Not in this way. It’s like six words. Depending on how you place them in a sentence, the sentence will be different.

I wanted to have an insight into your olfactory brains

Christiane
Towards the end, Geza added something special, a gardenia from Tahiti, tiare absolue.

Geza
Ah yes, amazing stuff. That extract wasn’t available until we were working on base 20 of Intelligence and Fantasy. Tiare absolue has this quality of being exotic and fresh at the same time, something I have never encountered in a flower before. I have some right here in my pocket. Would you like to smell it?

Christiane
Mmm. It reminds me of that thing I always search for at the airport… wintergreen.

Geza
Yeah you’re right. Wintergreen is basically methyl salicylate and this molecule is in natural tiare as well.

Polina
It’s not like a flower. More earthy than I expected. Did the tiare change Intelligence & Fantasy?

It reminds me of that thing I always search for at the airport

Geza
Tiare melts into the fragrance, giving it an exotic allure.

Christiane
How did you choose the ingredients for Precision & Grace, Polina?

Polina
We would meet and I would say 'Oh I like powder' and he would say, ‘Ok we go with powder’. We would meet again and I would say ‘oh but I also love plum’. And he would say, ‘OK lets go with plum’.

Geza
Both powdery and plum notes made it into the final formula for Precision & Grace. It’s very transparent and, in the base notes, warm and kind of yummy.

It’s as if that’s what fragrance really is –bottled memories

Christiane
In the end, did you choose notes because they smelt so good or because you had a special memory associated with them?

Polina
I came to realise that when I love a note it is because there is a connection to it in my memories. The note that I felt had to be in Precision & Grace was plum. When I was a child in Russia we had plum trees in the garden. This is the heart of the fragrance for me.

Geza
I was happy when you chose plum over other fruits. Plum is something you can use in a sophisticated way and it gets a push from the pink pepper, which has a berry note to it.

Polina
I would never have thought of pepper. But when you gave it to me I thought, ‘wow’. And then I love the woody notes. I love the forest. I love the smells of the earth so much. When rain is coming, I can smell it.

With smell, you feel the memory with your whole body

Christiane
I think you were more connected to smells through your childhood in nature. Funny that we had the same impression - that it was about memories. It’s as if that’s what fragrance really is –bottled memories.

Polina
With smell, you feel the memory with your whole body.

Geza
What I loved was that we tried to combine my experience with your memories and perceptions. Usually when someone brings out a perfume, there’s not much of them in there, it's just about the use of their name. We did the opposite, we tried to make fragrances full of soul.

We did the opposite, we tried to make fragrances full of soul

Visit thebeautifulmindseries.com for our series of short, insightful interviews with women about what shapes their thinking and work.

 

 

 

 

Deconstruction of a molecule: The day kicked off with a session smelling molecules from Geza Schoen’s lab in Berlin.

Geza explained how he deconstructed the olfactory profile of Javanol, the molecule in Molecule 04, in order to create the fragrance for Escentric 04. “If you smell Javanol carefully you can detect three aspects. A sheer, transparent sandalwood note, a creamy rose, and a touch of grapefruit.”

Using this trio as the template for Escentric 04, Geza decided to warp the rose with a psychedelic metallic edge and max-out the grapefruit topnote. He showed how he created this hyper-real grapefruit with methyl pamplemousse for freshness, a flavour industry ingredient for juiciness, and sinensal, a fraction of orange oil which extends the freshness of grapefruit into the drydown.

“Fractionising is shaping up as the future of fragrance,“ says Geza. Watch this space.

Full body immersion with The Feelies: Aware that the chemical senses - smell and taste – can’t be replicated by VR, Grace Boyle, founder of The Feelies, works with perfumer Nadjib Achaibou to bring these elements to the experience. “Our 'immersive' digital stories so often communicate only with our eyes and ears,” says Grace. “But we are multi-sensory creatures, and if we leave it there, audiences are missing out.”

Grace and Nadjib focused on one particular project, Munduruku, to explain their work. The Munduruku people of the Brazilian Amazon live in an area threatened by a massive dam. Commissioned by Greenpeace, Grace and Nadjib headed to the Amazon to perform a sensory-mapping of the environment that would help viewers plunge into the world of the Munduruku.

Nadjib brought the scents he created to Mortimer House for us to sample, including the powerful aroma of the Munduruku’s manioc harvest. Grace explained how she uses cues such as humidity, haptics and heat and wind to create feelings of foreboding or ease.

“It’s not just about applying wind or heat to match what the visitor is seeing in the video. It’s more about using our body’s instinctive reaction to sensory cues to enhance emotional responses to a story. So when we want the audience to feel foreboding, for example, we let them experience the rough, jagged wind that comes before a storm, and a temperature that builds to a point of discomfort."

Can a smell be listed like a building? This was the question asked by Sissel Tolaas, the smell researcher and artist, who arrived at our Frieze event straight from Detroit where she had been collaborating with UNESCO to collect ‘world heritage smells’.

Sissel took us on a rollercoaster tour of her work, from creating the ‘smell of the anthropocene’, to making cheese from celebrities’ sweat, to designing smell memory kits which use abstract smell-molecules to fix current memorable moments for future recall.

And as we discovered later, Sissel was also in London for another reason. A few days later, artist and activist Tania Bruguera’s takeover of the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, 10,143,493*, opened. A series of interventions around the building, it includes a room that emits a smell which induces visitors to cry. The smell was concocted for Bruguera by Sissel using natural compounds. The point of this ‘forced empathy’ is to highlight the plight of migrants round the world and our often less than sincere expressions of feeling for them.

Using smells for political causes, such as with The Feelies’ Munduruku project, and Sissel’s contribution to Bruguera’s art-activism, is a whole new area.

The day ended with two smell-journeys: First, a journey to the centre of the nose, via fibre-optic footage of the hair-raising interior of our nostrils, with rhinologist, Simon Gane. And a rather more relaxing trip back to the nineteenth century by way of three scents originally created for a nocturnal, candlelit evening at the Sir John Soane Museum by olfactory artist and musician, Paul Schütze.

Ending the day with the homely natural aromas found in Sir John Soane’s floor polish felt surreal in a good way, reminding us that the sense of smell’s most extraordinary super-power is this ability to teleport us to other times and places with a vividness no other sense can match.

*The changing number that is the title of the piece is drawn from data from the IOM’s Missing Migrants Project.

As human beings we have a profound feeling that nature is best. With food, for example. We don’t eat concrete or plastic for good reason. And while we do eat highly processed foods, we know they aren’t good for us.

It would seem logical that natural = good would hold true for perfumery too. But it isn’t that simple. Some fragrance ingredients can be reactive, particularly for people with sensitive skin. This is the kind of issue that IFRA (the International Fragrance Association) was set up to deal with. Over the last few decades, IFRA have been testing the raw materials of perfumery.

Nowadays perfumers are allowed to use only 3 parts per 1000 of natural lime oil.

What they found was that naturals can be particularly reactive. As a result they have restricted ingredients that most of us would assume were super-benign. Citrus oils for example. Nowadays perfumers are allowed to use only 3 parts per 1000 of lime oil (at a 20% dosage) because it is photo-sensitising. At that concentration the effect of lime oil is zero. If you smell lime in a fragrance, you will be smelling lemon oil with some added sweet notes or else a furocoumarin-stripped lime oil which has nothing to do anymore with the lime peel we all love.

For centuries we had dozens of mosses for per- fumery, now we are down to three or four.

Some of the most beautiful natural materials are now banned. Real musk was banned in the early nineties. I am 100% supportive of this one, because the animal has to be killed for the musk to be extracted, and there aren’t that many musk deer out there. When you see ‘musk’ listed as a fragrance ingredient, it’s not real musk, it’s a synthetic equivalent. The truth though is that there is no exact equivalent of musk. It is irreplaceable. And probably the best thing I have ever smelt.

Costus root is a natural ingredient with a weird and sexy smell like nothing else out there. It was banned around the same time as musk. After that, IFRA started in on the mosses. For centuries we had dozens of mosses available for perfumery. Now we are down to three or four, and we can use them only in small amounts. This has had a huge effect on most classic men’s fragrances and some women’s too, where moss has been a major part of their character.

Just like chefs who need the full range of seasonings to make exquisite dishes, perfumers need the full palette of materials.

And there are important synthetics which have gone too, like Lyral and Lilial. Lyral and Lilial are radiant, stable, beautiful, inexpensive to produce, and so unique that perfumers are scratching their heads over how to replace them.

What about when it comes to aesthetics - Are natural ingredients superior to synthetics there? For me, the answer is a definite no. Fragrances that are made of all-natural ingredients miss the radiance that only synthetics can give. On the other hand, all-synthetic perfumes usually smell pretty awful. They miss the complexity and beauty of the naturals. This is why only very few molecules would work for Escentric Molecules, where we foreground a single molecule. They are the rare molecules which have a complex character, closer in this way to a natural.

Fragrances made of all-natural ingredients miss the radiance that only synthetics can give.

Here’s the other thing, many synthetic molecules are identical to molecules found in naturals anyway. These are isolates, the first of which was coumarin, which smells of new-mown hay, and was isolated from tonka beans 150 years ago. Whether isolates are isolated from a natural source or today created in the lab, the molecule that results is the same.

Lets take the example of eucalyptus oil, which is 80-90% eucalyptol. We can produce eucalyptol easily in the laboratory. But because eucalyptus exists in such vast quantities it is normally extracted from the natural oil.

We are lucky that most flowers did not evolve to smell like the titan arum of Indonesia.

Linalool is found in a million flowers and fruits. It’s the most basic floral ingredient there is. It too can be isolated from nature, from bergamot for example. Bergamot oil costs around €100 per kilo, and linalool is about 30% of bergamot, which means linalool extracted this way costs €300 per kilo. But you can also produce linalool in the lab for €10 per kilo. It’s the self-same molecule, of the self-same quality – a no-brainer. Tens of thousands of tons of linalool are produced every year for perfumed products. Making it in the lab means you don’t have to exhaust natural resources to produce it.

Nature has been kind to us humans when it comes to perfumery. We are lucky that most flowers did not evolve to smell like the titan arum of Indonesia. It is pollinated by insects that feed on rotting flesh, and it smells disgusting. Instead, most flowers evolved to smell sweet and delicious to bees and other airborne pollinators, but also, coincidentally, to humans. The evolution of flowers worked out well for us.

I love the richness of the natural materials in perfumery, and I love the different, purer scent profile of synthetics. To my mind, naturals and synthetics complement each other beautifully. Just like chefs who need the full range of spices, herbs, oils and seasonings to make exquisite dishes, perfumers need the full palette of materials to produce the best perfumes.

Nowadays every Tom, Dick and Harry wants to do a niche fragrance but most of them have nothing new to say. My passion is for the small houses who are not afraid to stick out their necks. Places like Elternhaus – it means ‘your parents’ house’. I did a fragrance for them called ‘Dreckig bleiben’ or ‘stay dirty’. And then there’s WienerBlut (‘Viennese Blood’), House of Sillage, Parfums d’Elmar, places like that. These are true niche.

They took it to Comme des Garçons anyway. Rei Kawakubo smelt it and said ‘this is my drug’

That’s why Comme des Garçons is so important: they have never been afraid to say something radically new. When the brief for Comme’s first fragrance arrived at the fragrance company where I worked back then, we were told it was for the most creative designer in the world. No name. The brief was ‘make something unique’. That was all. I put forward an idea and the marketing guys sniffed it and said ‘too eccentric’. So I gave them something else, and they took it to Comme, and the Comme people said: ‘this is bullshit, we asked for something unique’. Back to the drawing-board.

I had just come back from Morocco, and I’d scribbled an accord in my scrapbook for the smell of the souq ... amber... sandalwood... vanilla... heliotrope... spices... I measured it out and gave it to the marketing guys. They grouched. They said, ‘this is just a base. It’s not a fragrance’. But they took it to Comme anyway. Rei Kawakubo smelt it and said ‘this is my drug’. She fell in love with it and I’m told she still wears it.

... a big skunk marijuana note that gives it a green bitterness.

People still connect me with the Comme des Garçons fragrances. Especially that first one, Eau de Parfum, and Comme 2, the one that smells like black ink. My Project Renegades mate, Bertrand Duchaufour, makes scents for a Vietnamese artist called Phuong Dang who has her own line. She told him that Comme 2 was her all-time favourite fragrance. Bertrand said, ‘oh yeah? I know the guy who made it’. Next thing I was collaborating with Bertrand on Phuong Dang’s new scent, Artist. I’d never worked on a jus with another perfumer like that before. I’d modify it... then he’d modify it... The result is interesting. The main accord is orris with real ambergris. Quite special.

That’s what Renegades is for. Saddling the horse backwards. Being true niche.

The accord I created for my Project Renegades fragrance is probably the most ‘out there’ I’ve ever made. It’s got a totally surprising topnote with lots of basil, cassis-flower (not the usual cassis bud), grapefruit and a big skunk marijuana note that gives it the green bitterness. Then it’s got a really creamy, heavy sandalwood body with Javanol, rich and long-lasting.

At the root of the Project Renegades fragrance is MoslBuddJewChristHinDao, the smell of the 6 major religions – what they smell like to me anyway. It had the aroma of black bread and leather suitcases that I associate with Jewishness, for example. Only 200 bottles of it were ever made, so I got the formula out and started to play around with it again for Renegades. I made it dirtier, more leathery, and more modern. It’s green, but it’s also smoky and it’s got a touch of sweaty saddle. The heart is a mystical rose. I’m crazy about it. That’s what Renegades is for. Saddling the horse backwards. Doing things exactly the way you want... Being out there. Being true niche.

Project Renegades fragrances are available at www.luckyscent.com