Indie bands and scents with agendas

What makes a real perfumer?

There's a whole world of indie perfumers out there, all doing their own thing. They aren't all interested in recreating Mitsouko to order, or being one of the very very few accepted into perfume school.

I just read an interview in which a well known US marketing person and "trained nose", she says, gives her opinion that a real perfumer has to have been to perfume school and must have worked with a qualified practising perfumer for 10 years. A real perfumer has to be able to do all the things you learn at perfume school, like recreating other people's scents by nose, without cheating by using a gas chromatography machine. A real perfumer should be able to create exactly what the clients want, through as many moderations (AKA mods) as they need. She says that the natural versus synthetics debate is a smokescreen which enables "charlatans" - "uninformed enthusiasts and authors with personal agendas"- to flourish.

Which means that some of the finest scents ever created were made by people who aren't "real perfumers."

And by the same criteria The Beatles were not real musicians.

They could write and perform their own songs, and play other people's rock and roll; they hadn't been to music college and studied at the feet of established musicians. They couldn't write it down what they'd written, and they needed George Martin to orchestrate their more elaborate recordings for them. But they could write great songs, get half the world to fall in love with them, and they didn't do badly at stacking up the dosh either.

In fact, a chum of mine got very close to being accepted for the perfume school that most of the people that expert is talking about went to. He got as far as talking to the man who made the decision to turn him down. The problem wasn't his experience, enthusiasm or talent. it was that he's European. They need people from the far east and south America, where the big money is set to come from. 

The people who go through perfume school are going to be making some very large companies a lot of money: they'll make room fragrances, fabric conditioners, toilet blocks, washing up liquid and one day, if they are very lucky, they'll get to make 20 variations on a scent for a celebrity or a luxury brand to put out as their own. A handful of them will get to decide what to make for themselves.

Which is why there is a whole bunch of indie perfumers all with their own agendas, making their own scents because they want to do it like that. Just like there are thousands of bands practising in their parent's garages, writing their own songs. Some of them will be successful, but all of them are having a fantastic time doing what they love.

It's not always about making millions; sometimes it's about ownership of your own soul.

Youth Dew - my childhood perfume memory

Youth Dew by Estee Lauder. Misnamed?

There are some scents that have been so popular for so long, that they must surely provoke Proustian memories by the thousand. This is a tale of one of those perfumes.

A couple of months ago I found an almost empty bottle of Youth Dew on my gatepost. It was almost as if I'd attached a sign to announce 'perfume fanatic, this way'. The real reason was that the council's recycling department had left it on the pavement, and a neighbour had tidied it a bit.

It got me thinking. Did I know what it smelled like? Well, no. So while I was stuck in Heathrow - again - I remembered the curious incident of the scent on the gatepost and gave it a sniff. And that's where it got even more curious.

In the back of my olfactory memory I'd stored my evidence in what perfume smells like. A favourite aunt and a glamorous neighbour who worked in the local department store's beauty counter were the only people I knew who wore perfume all the time. So I'd learned early that perfume has one definitive scent; that all others - no matter how beautiful - seemed like mere variations. 

I own over 300 bottles now, including classics that existed long before Youth Dew was blended and bottled. But Youth Dew is that scent. Not Chanel No 5.0, not Mitsouko, not Miss Dior. This one. That's my childhood memory of perfume.

So instead of flowers defining my baseline, I had spiced powder. The name and the scent have a dissonance, don't you think? Youth Dew seems innocuous and light. But this smell is darkly seductive, polished, structured and groomed. This scent wears a corset and plucks its eyebrows. But perhaps it forgets to wash the dishes. It's Joan in Mad Men. Roger might buy her Chanel No 5 to impress her, but she buys this for herself. And she can happily go into a carpeted department store and ask a patronising assistant for a bottle of Youth Dew without anyone raising their eyebrows. Perhaps that was its secret.

Youth Dew dates from an era when the smell was the reason women chose a signature scent. Forget the name, the box and the advertising, and go smell it. Observe the sensually slim ballgown bottle though, and when it's empty put it on a gatepost one day.