英语书籍：The Scent Trail（4）

英语书籍：The Scent Trail（4）ZT

=====TODAY'S BOOK=====================

THE SCENT TRAIL
How One Woman's Quest For The Perfect
Perfume Took Her Around The World
by Celia Lyttelton (nonfiction)

Published by New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
ISBN: 9780451226242
Copyright (c) 2007 Celia Lyttleton

SCENT (Part 4 of 5)
======================================

(continued from Wednesday)

When Serge Lutens--whom I met in Marrakech--makes a perfume, the
process has less to do with practicalities and methodology than it
has to do with his intuition and imagination. Serge never had any
formal training--he simply discovered his own way. He said that he
is merely the intermediary through whom the perfume is created,
and that to make a perfume requires a state of permanent nervous
tension that remains with him for a year. When a perfume is finally
perfected it is, he said, not unlike an epiphany, or a short-lived
ecstasy.

It can take years to perfect a perfume, but although the art of the
perfumer is a refined one, some scents have come about through happy
accident. Shalimar was born when Jacques Guerlain accidentally
tipped some vanilla essence into an existing rather dandyish cologne
called Jicky (Jicky was also the first scent to combine natural and
synthetic materials). But the traditional process of extracting a
flower's scent to make the top notes in a perfume is very elaborate
and time-consuming: it takes 100 kilograms of petals to yield just 1
liter of essential oil.

Finally, synthetic imitations of animal secretions and real
ambergris are used, sparingly, as fixatives. In the days when real
musk and civet were used, scents lasted for decades and were sexier
than they are today because the animals' secretions are so similar
to our own. Real ambergris holds its scent for centuries.


While we smelled the scents, Anastasia plied me with hundreds of
questions. It was a bit like concocting an entry for 'Who's Who.'
She wanted to know what my favorite foods and drinks were, how old I
was and what my hobbies were. Some of her questions made me feel as
if I were on the psychiatrist's couch: she wanted to know about my
dreams and my childhood memories, what home meant to me, how I
thought people saw me and how I saw myself. And then she asked me
what scent meant to me.

I said that I knew I wanted an ancient smell rather than a modern
one, and I wanted more than just a "pretty" scent. We began to match
my memories from childhood with individual smells. My memories of
aromatic plants and the smell of the green lake I used to swim in as
a child; the scent of the Tuscan lemon trees, the pine forests and
the blackberries and, of course, the buttery iris roots. Anastasia
thought vetivert and iris would suit me, and then, as I told her
about my grandparents' house, she immediately suggested that my
scent should have some woody and smoky notes, with vanilla, perhaps,
to remind me of the dark chocolate, and ambergris, to induce a
euphoria reminiscent of those bracing salty sea breezes in the
Aegean.

When I said that I loved creamy sauces with fish and vegetables
flavored with nutmeg and garlic, we added nutmeg to the list of
possible ingredients. Then we began to discuss the things that
excite me. I said that traveling was one of my passions, partly
because I always remember the olfactory details of different
countries: the burnt musky, pungent and wild perfumes of Yemen and
the souks; the spices of the Middle East, where the fountains are
perfumed with rosewater and where the perfume itself is much more
powerful and oily than Western perfumes.

I said that I would love to find the unguent of lilies mixed with
real musk that I'd discovered in Aleppo, and that I loved
frankincense and myrrh, which I'd first smelled in Yemen. I told
her I loved Syria's damask rose and the jasmine that reminded me of
the garlands hung over doorways and the little jasmine bracelets
that girls sell in India. I said that I liked ancient and mysterious
smells that were evocative of distant lands.

We sniffed tonka bean, a narcotic bean, which had a rich vanilla
smell and reminded me of truffles and almonds. We were gradually
building up a fan of samplers, and a scent was beginning to evolve,
but we also needed to concentrate on shading or rounding off the
predominant scents. Before I chose the final ingredients, Anastasia
sent me off for a "color profile" because, as she told me, color is
related to perfume and she wanted to see whether my favorite colors
accorded with my favorite smells.

As Baudelaire wrote in his poem "Correspondences":

'All scents and colours meet as one,
Perfumes are as sweet as the oboe's sound,
Green as the prairies,
Fresh as a child's caress.'


And in Huysmans' "A Rebours," the protagonist, Des Esseintes,
transposed poems by Baudelaire into perfumes, creating aromatic
stanzas.

Many of the famous scent formulas are color coded: spicy and
oriental odors are coded red and orange, floral and citrus ones tend
to be coded yellow and green, while in the fougere group, which
evokes an accord of lavender, oak moss, coumarin (a synthetic that
imitates the scent of the tonka bean) and bergamot, notes are coded
in greens and browns. Chypre, which was made by Coty in 1917 from
oak moss, labdanum (cistus) and patchouli, is coded in the browns
and yellows of those ingredients, and the ozonic scents--a new
classification--which are watery and limpid with a whiff of sea air,
are coded blue.

Anastasia sent me to Adam James, a color expert and colleague of
hers. When I arrived for my appointment he immediately opened a
cabinet containing shelves and shelves of little bottles filled
with colored liquids. Some were bright, while others were pale and
opalescent. He asked me to choose my favorite colours and instantly
I went for the cool, pale, pastel colours, the light cerulean blues,
the violets and the lemon yellows, the pale purples, pale greens and
the blues of my favorite gems: sapphire and aquamarine. I was
worried that these colours might define me as fey, ungrounded and
indecisive, but I had chosen the ones I honestly preferred and I
listened, fascinated, as Adam told me how the colors I had chosen
related to the scents that Anastasia and I had thought likely to
make up my bespoke perfume.

The light purple represented iris; the aqueous blue was ambergris.
Adam told me that my color selection showed that I possessed
intellectual clarity, inner joy and that I was self-aware. He told
me that the colors I had chosen also represented beauty and
refinement, but he suggested that I was about to face a period of
change and new beginnings. The green I'd chosen represented my love
of nature and suggested that I was intuitive and inspirational. He
said there was something ethereal and otherworldly about me.

I felt a little as if I were having my palm read, but some of what
he'd said rang true, so I suspended di*****elief and felt more
confident about his observations when he said that my color
selection suggested that I was about to embark on a journey. When I
told him about the book he said that my traveling would not only be
for the book, but that it would be a journey for myself which would
be cathartic.

Adam also thought that I needed a darker color, some base notes, to
ground me. He said that there was a lot of water in the colors I had
chosen, but that the earth's qualities shouldn't be neglected. So I
chose a darker orange, and then Adam matched the colors I had picked
almost exactly with the scents Anastasia and I were veering toward.
He said that my colors represented bergamot, mimosa, green tea,
cedar wood, root resins, vetivert bourbon, Mediterranean flowers,
frankincense and myrrh, peaches and apricots, figs and cassis.

Adam sent me away with a bottle filled with Marrakech jasmine,
honeysuckle and water lilies, telling me that even though jasmine,
the scent, is white, on the color table it is red and that would
also help to ground some of what he called my "wackiness" and
wildness.

When I returned to Anastasia's house with Adam James's report, she
suggested that my scent should include some citrus notes. She waved
a vial of petitgrain under my nose. Petitgrain is distilled from the
twigs and leaves of bitter orange trees, so it has a bittersweetness
that I liked. Anastasia also recommended the powdery essence of
mimosa and said that, because I'd said sensuality was important to
me, I should add musk and jasmine, both of which have strong erotic
properties.

(continued on Friday)