Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [273]
Marcel Proust and the madeleine aside, the French make a commendable effort to ensure that their homes, shops, and workplaces smell pleasing. Scent is one of the easiest ways to bring an element of “Frenchness” into your home and, simultaneously, create a sense of well-being. Barbara Milo Ohrbach, in her wonderful and bestselling book The Scented Room, notes that she has made it a habit to buy flowers from a market or corner kiosk when she travels so she can make her hotel room feel and smell more like home (a habit I endorse!). Pico Iyer writes in Condé Nast Traveler (“Scents of Place,” May 2010) that when he opens the cabinet above his bathroom sink, “all the perfumes of Araby—and Bangkok and Addis Ababa and Paris—come flooding out.… Ever since I began staying in the kind of hotel that offers high-end toiletries more than a quarter of a century ago, I’ve been unable to contain myself.” Gretchen Rubin, in her wonderful book The Happiness Project (HarperCollins, 2009), noticed one day that “though I sometimes mocked the scented-candle-pushing brand of happiness, I discovered that there is something nice about working in an office with a candle burning.” I, too, can testify to the effect something as simple as a candle can have on my mood, my happiness, and my level of motivation. Additionally, potpourri, lavender sachets, bowls of quince, dried rose petals, room fragrance sprays and diffusers, and ceramic lamp rings are all great mood pickups. (For particularly alluring room fragrances, check out Florence, Italy–based Antica Farmacista, anticafarmacista.com.)
Some of these can be made at home, and two good resources include The Scented Home: Natural Recipes in the French Tradition by Laura Fronty (Universe, 2002) and The Scented Room by Barbara Milo Ohrbach (Clarkson Potter, 1990). Some scents, of course, simply can’t be replicated back home, like that of Gauloises or Gitanes cigarettes, the smell of very old churches like Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and some Métro stations, which is good: some scents don’t travel, so attached are they to a certain place.
I became even more fascinated by the way things smell after I read The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession by Chandler Burr (Random House, 2002). I felt like a whole new world had opened up for me, one that isn’t always sweet: the competition between the world’s largest scent companies is fierce and cutthroat. Burr informs us that “virtually all the smells in all scented products in the world are manufactured by [five] huge companies that operate in carefully guarded anonymity.” These big boys—with power now even more concentrated, after several mergers since the publication of Burr’s book—are International Flavors & Fragrances (United States), Givaudan Roure (Switzerland), Firmenich (Switzerland), Symrise (Germany), and Takasago (Japan). The story-within-a-story in this book is that of Luca Turin, a renowned biophysicist who wrote Parfums: Le Guide, a bestseller in France, and The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell (Ecco, 2006). Turin is something of a scientific maverick, having proposed a new theory of smell to unravel the mystery of scent. Turin told Burr that he got into the scent world because it was part of his upbringing and heritage: “Because I’m French, at least by upbringing. Frenchmen will do things Anglo men won’t, and France is a country of smells.” Some of the scientific equations and explanations here are admittedly over my head, but I still love this inside look at a world where science, marketing, art, and nature come together.
Le Labo
One of the more creative olfactory items I’ve ever seen is the Santal 26 perfumed notepad produced by Le Labo, a really cool company that I only recently discovered. Founded in 2006 by Édouard Roschi (Swiss) and Fabrice Penot (French), Le Labo—short for laboratoire (laboratory)—aims to