Grasse
Country: FranceArea: 1,231 km²
Time zone: GMT +1

Grasse is considered the world’s perfume capital and still produces two thirds of France’s natural perfumes, for cosmetics and food. It is located just inland from the sea, and its climate is warm and sheltered. An abundance of water running down the hills and flowing along the Siagne canal, built in 1860, enables it to grow flowers year-round and in great numbers.

If you were sitting on a terrace in Grasse, southern France, on an evening in late May, it is highly likely that tiny odorous molecules (the term for the substance of smell) would issue from local jasmine flowers –  the small white blooms on green vines that fall foaming down the sides of houses – invade your nose and stick to your olfactory neurons. The result would be an impression of rich, musky herbage with a sweeter top note, a scent that Jude Stewart in her book Revelations on Air: A Guidebook to Smell (2021) describes as “powdery and silken-fine,” carrying a “sense of a deepening golden bower.” In Patrick Süskind’s 1985 novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer – the ur-text on perfume, set in Grasse – jasmine has a “sticky-sweet, erotic scent”. Joan Didion wrote that it was the scent of jasmine in the air in Los Angeles that made it impossible for her to continue living in New York.

Jasmine is a good ambassador for Grasse, not only because of its abundance – prettiness and wildness, but because it combines its pleasantness with sour notes. As Stewart writes, “Its honeyed, warm sweetness is edged with a dash of shit and decay, thanks to its high concentration of the molecules indole (also in faeces) and cresol (that sweetly nasty tinge of coal tar).” Grasse, too, owes its contemporary status as the perfume capital of the world to the much more malorodous practice of leather tanning, for which it was a hub in the Middle Ages, and which at the time involved boiling animal skins in water and scouring with lye. The leather was sometimes epilated by rubbing with urine, so that uric acid entered the leather itself. In that era, Grasse would have stunk of hot animal skins, faeces, urine and chemicals, as well as all the usual urban scents – horse stables, rat nests, rotting lemon rinds, baking bread, cooking fumes and human bodies.

In Perfume, Grenouille makes a perfume from mixing cat shit, a dried up nub of cheese, rotten egg and castoreum, ammonia, nutmeg, horn shavings and singed pork rind to the oil of a garden’s worth of flowers, alcohol and civet, so that the disgusting part “becomes almost interesting”, and the perfume on the whole, expressive of a “robust, vivacious scent of life”.

The development of perfume was, or so the myth goes, an attempt to cover up all of this. The art of perfuming was introduced by Catherine de Medici, who arrived in France in 1583 as a child bride to the future King Henry bearing leather gloves scented with musk and civet. Italy was, unlike France at the time, well-practiced at using perfumes to cover up bad smells, and Catherine also brought a few vials with her. Perfume – for which Grasse, being naturally full of lavender, myrtle, jasmine, rose, orange blossom and wild mimosa, was already ideally placed – began to be added to leather products before selling, particularly gloves, as they can be gracefully raised to the nose when an unpleasant whiff reaches the wearer. When Grasse lost its edge as a tanning district to Nice, it continued making perfumes, and the French perfume industry began in earnest. (The French sometimes tell this story differently; according to some sources it was a French tanner, Jean de Galimard, who first offered Catherine a pair of scented gloves).

Stewart notes that the number of unique smells humans can distinguish may go as high as one trillion. While “we aren’t the best all-around smellers in the animal kingdom,” she writes (that title is apparently held by the African elephant), “we are the best discriminators between smells – thanks to our brains, huge portions of which are wired for smell.” Stewart lays out the process by which airbourne molecules become apprehended by sense organs and made describable. Imagine yourself again on the terrace in Grasse, sniffing at the air: “the inhaled air gets warmed, filtered, and humidified as it bumps its way through the turbinate passages in your nasal cavity. This smell-laden air eventually reaches a spot a few centimetres behind the area where eyeglasses rest on your face. Here is where the olfactory organs, stacked directly under your brain’s frontal cortex, reside. At the bottom of this stack is your olfactory epithelium, a yellow, mucous-rich layer. Inside the sticky, moist epithelium are nestled the olfactory neurons. They dangle downward, like upside-down carrots growing in soil. Smell molecules first stick to the epithelium and then melt, perhaps with a sigh of arrival. From the millions of smell molecules in the outer atmosphere, our noses siphon up only a few hundred or thousand smell molecules with every sniff that eventually reach this final destination. The olfactory neurons detect the smells, but it’s the olfactory receptor proteins sitting inside the neurons that actually bind to odorants.” Our noses can distinguish between an almost incomprehensible number of smells: “Estimates range from eighty million to a theoretical upper limit of one trillion smells.” What’s more is that we’re doing this all the time – sitting at a desk, riding the bus, waking up, we are continually smelling and processing the world around us.

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On the first weekend in August, Grasse holds a Fête du Jasmin, during which the fire department fills their truck with jasmine-scented water and sprays it on the crowd. There’s a rose festival in May, which Alice and I just missed when we visited. We were in Grasse to visit the organic farm of Aurélien Guichard, founder and head of Matiere Premiere, at which he grows Rose Centifolia (also known as “cabbage rose”, a dense, intensely fragrant pink rose), tuberose (a white, lily-like flower that blooms at night) and lavandin (a long, strong-smelling lavender hybrid). Born in the region, which was recognised as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2018, Guichard founded the farm in 2016 with the idea of becoming the only perfumer in the world to produce his own ingredients. Matiere Premiere means “raw material”, and the farming itself is elevated to the status of the craft of perfume-making; sourcing, Guichard tells me, is his first act of creation.

Each perfume – there are 11, Radical Rose, French Flower, Falcon Leather (inspired by the leathery sweatiness of a falconer’s glove), Encens Suave, Crystal Saffron, Vanilla Powder, Santal Austral, Parisian Musc, Bois D’ébène, Neroli Oranger, Cologne Cédrat – is named for its main ingredient, with which each perfume begins with an “overdose” that’s then complemented with a few equally qualitative ingredients. The perfume then darts off down the mid-notes – whether soft, barky patchouli, vegetal tea leaf, or shimmering, translucent pear. As Guichard says, “I always try to take the raw materials to places they haven’t been before. Sometimes this takes just a few tries, like for Crystal Saffron. The bright, crystalline quality of the oil immediately inspired me to create something that would smell very bright.” The perfume is sparkling and vibrant, with a warm suede background. “Vanilla Powder, on the other hand”, says Guichard, “took years to perfect. The first versions of Vanilla Powder were much closer to the smell of the vanilla absolute itself, which is very true to the natural scent of the dried vanilla beans: rich, warm, intense and quite comforting. I personally enjoyed this direction but people close to me compared their first impression of the fragrance to a dessert. I decided to take a different route with this fragrance, creating luminosity and verticality.”

This focus on the raw material extends to careful sourcing. The neroli essence used in Neroli Oranger comes from Lebanon; the saffron oil used in Crystal Saffron is from the Kozani region of Northern Greece. Guichard consistently seeks out ethical and organic production, which is often commensurate with “olfactive excellence”. “For example,” he tells me, “the central ingredient in our Santal Austral fragrance is Australian organic sandalwood oil, which we source from First Nations people who plant 20 new trees for every one they cut down. Similarly, the incredible vanilla absolute in Vanilla Powder comes from Madagascar and is certified by the Fair for Life agricultural program. We like to work with partners whose social and environmental behaviour matches the top olfactive quality we are looking for.”

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Guichard’s parents live in a handsome house on the farm itself, and we came across Guichard’s father, Jean, working with another man to graft a new field of roses adjacent to where we were picking. Jean Guichard is a perfumer and the director of the Givaudan Perfumery School, and the creative force behind scents like Calvin Klein’s Obsession and Deci Dela by Nina Ricci. “To him,” says Guichard, “perfumery is about poetry more than just industry.” His parents in turn – Guichard’s grandparents – were flower growers, who grew jasmine, verbena and roses, and instilled in him “a deep appreciation for the land and nature’s gifts.” This agricultural lineage means that Matiere Premiere relies on a deeper timescale than most commercial fragrance producers: instead of working from a single shipment of roses, sourced from wherever is available, Guichard works with land that has been continually farmed for three generations. Even then, instead of looking at the life cycle of a single tree, he looks at the life cycle of the field in which it grows, which spans around 20 years.

On a sunny morning, we made our way along the rose bushes, wearing white aprons with a pocket on the front that made us into marsupials. The correct way to harvest the rose is to snap it off just behind the green peduncle, the green fleshy part that supports the head. This green part has a powerful smell of pepper, and as the morning went on and we picked more roses my fingers became spiced and gummy with resin. The roses are grown without pesticides, so grasses and poppies line the bushes, and the grasses are speckled with tiny white snails. I came upon some kind of curling pea plant, sending out thin tendrils to the roses it spread between. After the roses are picked, their scent is extracted into a “concrete”, which in turn is transformed into an absolute. This “absolute” is the central ingredient of Radical Rose – the heady, dusky perfume that captures not only the sensuality of the petal but the spiciness of the green and the woodiness of the shrub.

Rose is often dismissed as fusty and sentimental, but as Stewart writes, “behind its rounded, classical quality, the scent [of rose] still emanates some heat, prickly and pollen-like. It evokes late summer, lazily crawling insects, the finery of silken petals rotting under a bush, the sprawl of untidy nature.” The rose’s history as a scent is geographically extensive. Stewart writes about Zahir ud-Din Muhammad, better known as Babur, founder of the Mughal Dynasty in 1526 and so enthusiastic about roses that he named his three daughters Gulrang (Rose-Colored), Gulchihra (Rose-Faced), and Gulbadan (Rose-Bodied). She also notes that the Persian word for rose, gul, “is also that language’s generic word for flower, signaling the rose’s pre-eminence in its category.” The beauty of the rose is due to its proximity to fleshiness – the pressable, dewy petals – and its related connection to ephemerality: a “momentary exaltation”, a “sensuality and liveness that cannot last forever”. The rose then is used to describe a moment of true hedonistic pleasure and liveliness: wealthy Elizabethans hurled eggshells full of rose water at one another at dinner parties; in Persia and Damascus, people would bury unopened rosebuds underground and dig them up for important dinners – “when heated with the food, the rosebuds would flare dramatically open on the plate.”

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Smell is, perhaps, the purest sense. A smell is just a smell. When we eat, we are using several senses – taste, sight, smell, touch – and the language we use to describe the qualities of food often straddles these. “Spicy” names a taste but also a feeling in the mouth and nose. You can walk into a room and know that something spicy is being cooked before you taste it. Smell is much less easy to transcribe using other senses. (It approaches an idea). As cultural theorist Anna Kornbluh points out in a conversation with Stewart published in the Paris Review, “Even though smell is our most sensitive sense, it’s the one around which we have the least cultural apparatus. You can’t traffic in smell the way we traffic in images or sounds.”

But as Guichard says, “In everyday language, it’s true there are few words to describe scents. However, in perfumery, much like in music, we have a more adaptable and precise vocabulary at our disposal.” On Fragrantica, the online perfume encyclopaedia that is built of contributor reviews, notes and wishlists, this professional vocabulary is pleasingly mashed together with more idiosyncratic descriptions: users will refer to the “drydown”, the final stage of a perfume’s olfactory life on the skin when it has passed through the spiky top notes and reached the base notes; but also reach for personal metaphors (one user describes Radical Rose as having “a kind of dampness”). Matiere Premiere’s French Flower is “creamy and solar”, “sensual creamy elegant”, “intense, borderline buttery”, “natural, tender, youthful”, with “an almost dewy, light comely green freshness”. Someone says it is “almost linear”; someone else that “I can smell the flower, the stem, maybe even a bit of the soil.” “The tuberose sits just right on my nose, it doesn’t smell too wet or old”, notes a reviewer, while another makes do with “One word. Flamboyant.”

Guichard shares a studio on the farm with his mother, an artist. Her grass sculptures stand among the bottles and vials of his workshop.

These descriptions don’t necessarily gel. Guichard tells me that “smells touch on something deeply personal and intimate within us, something we might struggle to express.” Wittgenstein’s famous line, that it is impossible to know whether my red is your red, is even more slippery when applied to smells – which we even sniff at differently. As Stewart writes: “Your sniff pattern – to help you actively perceive a smell – is highly individualised and distinctive to you […] Thanks to your sniff pattern, you’ll rarely overwhelm yourself with sniffing too much stink or exhaust yourself in smelling something lovely.”  There is so much, still, that is unknown; a “deep riddle”, in Stewart’s phrase, who writes that olfactory receptors are “promiscuous”, binding to many molecules. Guichard states that “ultimately, the value of a fragrance lies in the moments we experience with it. To achieve this, a perfume must have a presence, a distinct olfactory signature.” This idea – that a smell’s real value is its full sense of presence, with its corresponding traces in memory and association – is what describes perfume’s resistance to linguistic capture.

In Revelations on Air, Stewart quotes “smell-psychologist” Rachel Herz to formulate an answer as to why so much of our brains are given over to the processing of smell, and perhaps why it’s still so difficult to isolate smell from feeling. Herz proposes that our ability to experience and express emotion grew directly out of our brain’s ability to process smell. This is true in one easy sense: the amygdala, which governs emotional processing and memory, slowly evolved out of the primitive olfactory cortex which controls smelling. But, notes Stewart, “she’s also referring to evolution of a metaphorical sort.” Herz writes that “Emotions are to us what scents are to our animal cousins [...] Smell, for animals, informs survival in direct and explicit ways; for us its primary survival codes have been transformed into our experience of emotions.” In other words, the mutable, complex emotional profiles attached to places, people and situations are what allow us, as social animals, better chances to survive. Smells, for people, prefigure, unlock and reveal feelings, a phenomenon Hertz calls “olfactory-emotion translation.” Many people report becoming increasingly repulsed by a partner’s previously attractive natural smell as their commitment to the relationship wanes; the deep subterranean tide of love’s ebbing is reflected in an animal desire to get away.

The Matiere Premiere bottles are designed to communicate the simple formula of their construction, in which a central ingredient takes centre stage.

The attempt to describe the indescribable is also part of smell’s deep power. “There is a dimension within the olfactory experience that transcends us,” says Guichard: “yet, we find ways to talk about these moments, people and places. Perhaps that’s more important than the smell or perfume itself.” There’s something intensely and maddeningly mysterious about smell, an essential quality that’s matched by Guichard’s ambition. He has not yet used jasmine in his perfume – the smell that is the perfumer’s darling for its complexity yet friendly availability as a host to other scents, as well as hanging heavily over the doorways of the houses of Grasse. Perhaps that would be too easy. “Every smell can be replicated,” he says, “but what truly fascinates me is trying to create a scent that doesn’t yet exist. In my work as a perfumer, there is a familiar element tied to working with ingredients – but there is also a constant pursuit of the unknown.” .