2009 Momentum - Glashütte Original

claims to be able to “hear” with his nose may sound a little mad, but
it is a tried and very trusted approach, confirmed by his numerous
contracts with companies and hotels. For his business clients he
designs and produces “corporate scents”, tailor-made scent solutions
for rooms, which he brands as “messages in a bottle”. “Every human
being and every company has its own smell,” explains Yogesh
Kumar, who started experimenting with aromatic essences at the
dining table back in his home in New Delhi when he was just 13.
As an adult, the perfume guru came to Vienna, where he began
composing individual fragrances for individual people in his shop
on stylish shopping street Kirchengasse. And if you feel uncomfortable
exposing your neck to the master’s nose, you can send a
scarf impregnated with your scent so that the quirky consultant
can use it as the basis for his initial scent report.
“It’s true, I’m tough,” Laurice Rahmé once told The
New York Times. The native of Paris made waves in the Big Apple
when she founded her own perfume label and personally led it to
success. The city’s beautiful people and its many fans come to her
for authentic New York scents like Park Avenue, which exudes the
luxurious flair of the famous street of designer boutiques, and Wall
Street, with its herbal notes and a hint of the salty air of the Atlantic.
The flamboyant Frenchwoman now markets over 25 different perfumes
under the name Bond No. 9, the address of her main store.
Those who cannot decide which fragrance is right for them (and who
are regarded as important customers) are driven in the Bond-mobile
to the locations in the city that inspired the individual creations. And
it is not only Madame Rahmé’s marketing strategies that are extravagant,
the fragrances themselves are too: they are all eaux de parfum
with a very high concentration of aromatic compounds – from
18 to 20 percent. In this respect the New Yorker of many years
remains true to her roots in traditional French perfume-making.
And this is an art that Serge Lutens has mastered
better than almost anyone else. The gentle, almost melancholic
perfumer divides his time between the hustle and bustle of Paris
and his much more sedate residence near Marrakech. Trends and
fashions are irrelevant to him; he lives his life according to his
own rules, not by anybody else’s: “You have to grab freedom with
your own hands; a freedom that has been granted to you by
someone else is no freedom at all.” In particular, Serge applies this
principle to the composition of his unique fragrances. They are rich,
authentic and mysterious and seem to draw their inspiration from
special memories and deep emotions. Their names fit them perf ectly.
There is Arabie, sensual and full of sunshine; Fleurs de Citron nier
with a clear, cool transparency and oriental notes; and the new
fragrance Serge Noir, inspired by the phoenix, the mythical bird
“Above all, perfumes must do one thing:
awaken pleasant memories and positive
associations. The people who come
to me want to be more than one among thousands.”
(Yogesh Kumar)
that is resurrected from its own ashes and which Serge identifies
with. The native of Lille is self-taught and started his career as a
young man in Paris developing Christian Dior’s first cosmetics
lines. He shaped the face of the French edition of Vogue as its Art
Director and then spent 15 years as Creative Director with Japanese
cosmetics producer Shiseido. In 2000 he started his own label,
Parfums Serge Lutens, which allowed him to concentrate on his
overriding passion: creating perfumes. And he has found an
appropriate platform for his compositions: Les Salons du Palais
Royal in the centre of Paris, opened in 1992, functions as a stage
for the master perfumer’s olfactory artworks. Lutens can be regarded
as a champion of scent, rejecting the idea of a world “where a sense
of smell no longer seems to be necessary.”
Nor does Nasomatto settle for anything resembling a
traditional approach. The subversive ingenuity of “Crazy Nose”, Italian
perfumer Alessandro Gualtieri, has led to innovative fragrances
that burst the bounds of convention. Working from his adopted
city, Amsterdam, he has devised a collection of perfumes whose
names strongly hint at their odours, like Absinth, Silver Musk and
Hindu Grass. Nasomatto, who has concocted imaginative compositions
for designers like Versace and Helmut Lang, wants to start
an olfactory revolution to inspire new perceptions of smell and how
it can trigger associations and emotions. He uses only the best ingredients
to conjure up intriguing aromas that are deeply sensuous,
and a little bit off the wall. ✺
Perfumers Websites
www.millerharris.com
www.dasparfum.com (for Yogesh Kumar)
www.bondno9.com
www.nasomatto.com
www.sergelutens.com
Momentum 1· 2009
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