Interview by Matteo Pini
Portrait by Raphaël Lugassy 

What is an acceptable smell? For many, the sweat, semen, blood and saliva notes that make up Sécrétions Magnifiques, Antoine Lie’s 2006 perfume for état Libre d’Orange, might bring to mind an A&E ward or a particularly raucous Berlin nightclub, rather than something to spritz liberally after a warm shower. That fragrance, one of the most notorious of the past two decades, is just one example of Lie’s olfactory radicalism, a sensibility that has enlivened commercial and niche perfume houses alike. Studying at Givaudan’s Perfumery School under Jean Carles, Lie’s reputation as perfume’s enfant terrible has grown ever larger across his three-decade career, with recent fragrances foregrounding plastic, metal and gunpowder notes.

Matteo Pini What does evil smell like?

Antoine Lie Perfumery is an art, but it is also a profit-making industry. At the moment, a lot of companies are making scents that are transparent, unobtrusive, easy to smell, but with no real identity or conviction behind them. They are more closely inspired by shower gel and deodorant than the perfumery of the past, and are made to sell a lot of products. That’s the way those companies do business, but I come from an age where perfume is an art and an expression of possibility. If you look at the past, you see perfumers who had a powerful signature, who were taking more risks and using ingredients we might now call “evil”. If used in the right way, ingredients like civet or old leather that are very animalic, polarising, and almost fecal, can give a fragrance a new dimension and make it unforgettable. So, it would take the consumer more time to get to know the perfume because they would have to work through the offputting elements. Notes like blood might be described as evil, but I don’t think evil is the right term. I would use the word “intellectual” because you have to learn how to smell them and in what context.

MP This echoes the idea that true beauty is created through an element of imperfection. Those animalic notes trouble the balance and make the formulation more interesting, as well as more true to life.

AL That’s right. When I was training as a nose, someone in the company I respected greatly said, “A good fragrance always has a defect, something that is not right.” The art is to intrigue people and trigger attention but not make it too alienating.

MP Your perfume Sécrétions Magnifiques foregrounds its “corporeal” ingredients. What was the process behind formulating that perfume and why do you think people react so strongly to it?

AL When the company started, Etienne de Swardt, the founder ofétat Libre d’Orange, said to me, “I want to do a perfume that is very provocative, that only five people on Earth are going to like.” I liked this approach because, at the time, I was not happy with the direction perfume was heading towards, with lots of focus groups, consumer testing, and less of the creative aspect from the perfumers. I was thinking about the fluid mechanisms within the body when you’re falling in love – blood, saliva, sperm and sweat – and what they would smell like in a perfume. Traditionally, for a perfume about love you would use rose, orange flower, citrus, “nice” notes that everybody recognises. I wanted to make an olfactive structure using completely unexpected elements, ingredients that were not politically correct. Making a perfume with those ingredients ended up being a big challenge, and I told Etienne I wanted to add another fluid to make it more harmonious. I decided that mother’s milk would wrap it up in a blanket, making it rounder and more acceptable. When it was launched, there was a big reaction. Some people were saying I should go to an insane asylum, and others were saying I was the most important perfumer of the century. Sécrétions Magnifiques was not made to shock people: it’s easy to make an “avant garde” perfume that smells of shit and urine. It was a perfume about the beauty of falling in love because when you fall in love, you are the most authentic version of yourself. I wanted to reveal the beauty of what is happening inside the body when that happens. Everything was done at the right level and dosage to communicate that feeling. Nearly 20 years after it launched, I’m still asked about it and it’s in the top eight of the brand’s best-selling perfumes. It ended up that more than five people liked it. Sometimes you are rewarded for taking creative risks.

MP I wonder how much of the intense response to the fragrance is a fear of our own bodily secretions, a fear of the blood that pumps through us. As a perfume, it brings the inside out.

AL Fragrance can reveal something true within you. People buy fragrances to become a new person, to transform themselves. Some men wear very “masculine” scents to superficially appear more attractive, but a perfume like Sécrétions Magnifiques reveals a deeper kind of truth. Recently, I’ve been working with Zviad Tsikolia, an industrial designer who creates armoured cars and weaponry for the Georgian military. I said, why don’t we do a collection about war? The Tsikolia fragrances use gunpowder, blood, iron, burned plastic, notes that are relevant to war zones. War is a reality for a lot of people, and you have the ability as a perfumer to transform it into something beautiful. Of course, no commercial brand would claim the concept of war and put it on their bottle. That’s the battle between niche and commercial perfumery.

MP How do these questions of truth and reality apply when you’re using synthetic ingredients? In your perfume XX ± Latex for UERMI, you convey a world outside of biological, embodied “truth” through use of plastic and metal notes.

AL My views on synthetic notes have changed over time. Ten years into my career, I was looking for a different approach in perfumery. In the 2000s, I began working with brands like Comme des Garçons, who helped me understand who I was as a perfumer and what I wanted to do. They were crazy in terms of their vision for perfumery, composing scents with industrial notes like iron, concrete, plastic and latex. I loved to work with synthetics during that period, mixing a floral accord with an artificial note. My practice has now evolved a bit. A lot of natural ingredients are not used in industrial perfumery because they are too expensive, even though they are more beautiful. I now use synthetics as the skeleton of the olfactive structure, and the naturals as the muscles, the skin, the face. In the past I was personalising fragrances through use of synthetic materials, whereas now I am using synthetics to help reveal the personality and beauty of the natural materials.

MP Perfumery has been seen as a kind of dark art within culture, in that you never know the direct recipe of what you’re smelling. It’s heavily intertwined with the creation and stimulation of desire, from the packaging and the language used to describe it. Even in our most famous cultural imagining of the perfumer, Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985), the nose is a killer. How do you relate to the mystery of the perfumer?

AL There is a lot of bullshit around the construction of perfume and the perfumer. There is always this perception of somebody completely different, who can smell like a dog. In the past, people have been afraid that I’d smell them top to bottom! Some perfumers play with that idea a lot, saying they can smell from 30 metres away. I’m not like that at all, I prefer to play it straight. My nose is trained in the same way someone trains at the gym every day. I have a clear vision of what I want to achieve, and that requires a lot of passion and hard work. It’s not an inherent skill at all. .