英语书籍：The Scent Trail（The end）

英语书籍：The Scent Trail（The end）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 5 of 5)
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(continued from Thursday)

Gradually we composed a synthesis and symphony of smells. It was
aromatic and mood-enhancing, spicy and floral, breezy, euphoric and
erotic. It included neroli, which is an uplifting citrus; jasmine,
which recalled hot sultry nights in India; mimosa for its powdery,
smoky aroma; iris, a reminder of my childhood; nutmeg for its flavor
and narcotic properties (if taken in large quantities nutmeg makes
people hallucinate); damask rose, redolent of the souks in the
Levant; petitgrain for the aromatic landscapes of the south; and
musk for its erotic properties. We also chose vetivert for the
greenness in my nature; ambergris, which is evocative of the
euphoric salty sea air; and frankincense and myrrh, those ancient,
mysterious aromas.

At the end of my second session with Anastasia I tucked all the
samplers of the scents I had chosen into the pages of my notebook.
Many hours later when I unzipped my bag, a scent wafted up that was
so delicious that I knew we'd chosen the right ingredients. Emotions
and memories welled up in me as I breathed in and I felt confident
about my olfactory odyssey, if a little anxious about Adam's
prediction that it would be a personally cathartic journey.

This is the pyramid formula we came up with for my scent for a
lifetime--the scent that no one but me would ever wear.



'MY BESPOKE SCENT'
'The Pyramid Formula'

THE TOP NOTES
Neroli citrus: 'heavy but fresh'
Citron petitgrain: 'aromatic, zingy and slightly bitter'
Zambac jasmine: 'erotic, exotic, warm, fruity. and rich'

MIDDLE (HEART) NOTES
Mimosa: 'earthy, powdery and spicily floral'
Damask rose: 'musky and floral'
Iris: 'warm and richly rooty--as the air smells after a summer
shower--with aromatic fennel-like overtones'
Nutmeg: 'spicy, musky and masculine'

BASE NOTES
Vetivert aromatic: 'earthy, damp and cooling'
Frankincense: 'pine and lemon notes at first, then heady, spicy and
sweet'
Myrrh: 'redolent of the forest floor; honeyed with hints of lemon
and rosemary'
Ambergris: 'breezy, euphoric, redolent of warm suntanned skin'

So I set out for the places where these ingredients grow, to meet
the people who harvest them and to discover at least some of the
secrets of perfume making from the perfumers who "magic" the raw
ingredients into scent. I was curious to find out whether the
formula that Anastasia and I had conjured up really was the right
magical formula for me.


CHAPTER TWO
'MIMOSA'
'Grasse, the Cradle of Perfume'

'Then were not summer's distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were beretft,
Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was:
But flowers distill'd though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.'
--WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE "Sonnet V"


The powdery scent of mimosa haunts the hills around Grasse, the
cradle of perfume. Rose, jasmine, jonquil, lavender and herbs also
perfume the hills in Provence: it is as if a perfumer has just
opened several vials of essences and attars and held them out in
front of you. Mimosa has been cultivated in the hills above Grasse
since the eighteenth century and was once so much in demand that a
special train left Menton every day to convey large quantities of
cut branches to the florists in Paris.

Today mimosa is still valuable to the perfumer for its fougere
(fernlike) woodland scent and it is still grown in the hills above
Grasse, but in smaller quantities. As well as its fougere quality,
it also has a spicy floral note, although it is not overtly floral;
nor is it delicate, but rather it is warm and earthy and full of
buttery pulverulence. Mimosa's heart note infuses many classic
French scents, but it is not usually used as a single note in
perfume because, on its own, some think it too sweet and almost
sickly. A distinguished nose, Marcel Caries, who worked in the
1950s, regarded mimosa as a little nauseating: it made him quite
queasy and he didn't think of it as being very clean-cut. He
actually said that it made him think of a woman of doubtful
reputation. On the other hand, Marcel Proust's favorite scent was
Jean Patou's Vacances, which is a bouquet of lilac, hyacinth and
mimosa. I liken mimosa to a dessert wine: I think of it as golden,
honeyed, summery, dry and earthy, with an oleaginous sweetness that
makes it a very rich perfume. To me, mimosa is to vetivert as
Sauternes is to Sauvignon.

Thirty varieties of mimosa grow on the Cote d'Azur, but there are no
records to show when it was introduced to Europe from Africa or
Australia, where it is indigenous. All thirty varieties have compact
globular heads of fragrant yellow blossoms, and the trees can grow
up to 30 feet tall. Its essence is extracted by a volatile solvent
and ends up in the form of a concrete, a solid viscous substance, or
as an absolute, which is the purest of all scent commodities; it is
the refined product of the concrete after the wax and alcohol have
been removed.

I knew that I would be able to breathe in the rich, sweet scent of
mimosa as Stephen and I and our eighteen-month-old son, Tarquin,
drove down through the hills above Grasse, but first I'd planned
to meet Les Hauts Parfumeurs in Paris. I hoped they would give me
introductions to the Grassois noses who would, in turn, educate me
about the Grasse perfume business in general and the extraction
of mimosa essence in particular. We crossed the Channel without
incident and, when we arrived, an Indian summer sun shed its golden
light on Paris.

I decided to walk to my first appointment--with Pamela Roberts of
L'Artisan Parfumeur--because I wanted to drink in the elegance of
Paris in the astonishing October sunshine. I walked from the Marais
to Montparnasse, pounding the boulevards from the Place de la
Republique all the way along Boulevard Beaumarchais. I crossed the
Ile Saint-Louis and caught tantalizing glimpses of Notre-Dame and
the Louvre (but there was no time to sightsee). I walked along the
Boulevard Saint-Germain, past Montparnasse cemetery and the ghosts
of Man Ray, Baudelaire, Sartre and de Beauvoir, and down the
Boulevard Raspail. It was uplifting.

When I arrived, Pamela ushered me into a room full of classic scent
bottles and wooden trays with sprinklings of raw ingredients. There
were vanilla pods, cloves, ambrette seeds and much, much more, all
arranged on podiums. I also smelled the single-note mimosa--
L'Artisan Parfumeur makes the only single-note mimosa scent that
I know of--and I became instantly addicted. Anastasia Brozler had
been right: I knew instantly that I had to have this scent, with its
warm earthy richness--which also reminded me of two of my favorite
colours, green and yellow--as a heady heart note to my own scent. I
also spotted crystalline granules of frankincense and myrrh, and we
debated where the best frankincense and myrrh came from; Pamela
insisted on Somalia, I on Yemen and Oman.

L'Artisan Parfumeur's best-selling perfume is Mur et Musc,
blackberry and musk, and is redolent of late summers and mellow
fruitfulness. It reminded me of picking blackberries as a child.
Pamela said that good perfumes open the doors to our memories, and
that although expensive ingredients are important, they are not
enough. She believes that the accords and harmonies and the image or
memory or atmosphere that the perfumer is trying to evoke are what
is really important.

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Paperback: Today's read ends on page 21.