A Conversation with Our Perfumer

"You don't choose to become a perfumer," Marie-Claire says, pouring coffee in her atelier above Grasse. "Your nose chooses for you. By the time I was twelve, I could identify forty raw materials blindfolded. My mother thought it was a party trick. My teacher at ISIPCA thought it was a gift."

Marie-Claire Dupont has been composing fragrances for twenty-seven years — first at Givaudan, then at Firmenich, and now, for the past six years, exclusively for olfactory. She is responsible for all twelve fragrances in our current collection.

"Marie-Claire Dupont has been making fragrances for twenty-seven years. She still cannot explain how she knows when one is finished."

"The hardest part is knowing when to stop," she says. "A fragrance is like a sentence. Every word must earn its place. If you add one note too many, you lose the meaning. MUSK 07, for example — that took me fourteen months to simplify down to something that smells like nothing. Like skin. Like you."

She picks up a mouillette — a perfumer's test strip — and dips it into an unlabelled bottle. "This is number thirteen. It is not ready yet. Maybe next year. Maybe never. I do not rush."