My Journey Into Perfumery
How a musician learned to compose in a medium he could not hear
I came to perfumery through music, not cosmetics or business — years as a singer and composer, trained formally in harmony and counterpoint, before I ever touched a blotter. Early in my apprenticeship to scent, in the period when you are only allowed to smell, not yet to make, I was told to spend an afternoon with orris, the root of the iris, and I expected nothing from it; I had met it before and found it cold and powdery, the smell of face powder in an old drawer.
I put a single drop on the blotter out of obedience and breathed in. And the orris, without any drama at all, did something. It did not remind me of music. It was music — not a tune, but the exact emotional sensation of an interval I had known since boyhood: the minor sixth, the most aching distance in all of Western music, the one that lives in nearly every melody that has ever quietly undone a grown person. The orris carried that ache, the identical feeling, arriving through a different door.
My first instinct was to distrust it — a musician is trained to be suspicious of a too-beautiful coincidence — so I reached for another material, then another, half hoping to find nothing. Instead I found everything. The cedar I had dismissed as merely woody rang out as the clean open stability of a perfect fifth. A bitter green thing I disliked was a tritone, the same restless refusal to resolve the medieval church had feared. They had been intervals the whole time. I had been smelling music for months and filing it under chemistry, the way you can walk past a cathedral every day and call it a large grey building, because no one ever told you to look up.
I understood then that I had not changed careers at all. I had been studying the same thing my whole life; music had simply been the only language I had for it. That afternoon gave me a second one — and the second could do something the first could not. It could enter a person without their permission, in the dark, beneath the level where they decide what to let in.
