The Diary of a Nose Read Online Free PDF Page A

is the first picture in the series. In a full-page image, a young woman with braided hair and wearing a brightly colored silk scarf rests her head on a pile of cushions with multicolored designs whose perky invigorating shades remind me of sweet peas.
    In the background, the sky, a landscape, a hazy world of smooth uninterrupted lines. The pile of cushions and its juxtaposition of green, yellow, pink, mauve and blue are allegories on the theme of harmony. They emanate a cheerful seductiveness that I would like to recreate in the women’s perfume I have in draft form, the one that takes an evocation of pears as its starting point.

    Cabris, Monday 8 February 2010
    Mint again
    My usual suppliers have offered me different forms of mint obtained using a variety of distillation and extraction processes. Essences, because they are distilled using water vapor at more than one hundred degrees Celsius, lose the green notes of crushed leaves. Absolutes, which are made using dried vegetation (the inclusion of water being unsuitable for this type of extraction), smell like straw or cut hay, which is not right for this project. Extractions using carbon dioxide, because they are produced at extremely low temperatures, come closer to the smell of freshly chopped mint. Among those on offer, I am drawn to one product but, because it contains a lot of chlorophyll – a pigment that is spinach green in color – it will need work to remove the color. For, although I would like a ‘green smell,’ I want a colorless perfume, in order to have an element of surprise.
    For the Hermessence perfume
Brin de Réglisse
, I decided to combine the liquorice (‘réglisse’) of the name with lavender. I used essence of lavender and intervened to modify its composition, which includes several hundred different molecules, so that I could have an ingredient in keeping with the idea I so coveted. In this instance, the composition of mint essences is not very complex, and I have no wish to modify it: the major constituents and those responsible for the smell are principally carvone or menthol. Carvone is the flavor of minty chewing-gum, and menthol that of minty sweets.
    Alongside this research into ingredients, I am experimenting with new accords using the samples at my disposal. I am playing on the contrast between the cool greenness of mint and the dark suffocating qualities of patchouli: a surprising combination.

    Cabris, Friday 12 February 2010
    Anguish
    I am no stranger to ill-defined, unexplained feelings of anguish. I never invited them in. They appeared out of nowhere when I was twenty years old or a little less. I loathed them, then accepted them. Much later, it was this anguish that led me to understand that ‘the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible’. This quote from Oscar Wilde, which is both simple and complex, shook me so profoundly when I first read it that I felt I had completely lost my footing for a few seconds. It was as if I were on the edge of a gaping abyss, empty of all knowledge; then this fleeting sensation dazzled me, it seemed like proof of an undeniable alertness, affirming my existence.
    Anguish always surges up without warning, but I recognize the early signs. When I am composing perfumes, it most often appears when I start a project. So it is not unusual for me to feel choked with anguish when I read the first lines of a formula I have just written. This formula, reduced to just a few lines, produces a panicky feeling that I will run out of ideas, run dry. In fact, I feel an animal need to tackle each creation with a ‘pared down’ response (if that does not sound too presumptuous), as if stripped of facile automatic responses, of the reflexes that clutter up creators’ lives, particularly more experienced creators. Sometimes those first lines are the product of pure impulse, a short-lived urge, but more often than not they are dictated by anattempt to transcribe a more extensive and elaborate