Isabelle Doyen, Perfumes and Literature

Isabelle Doyen: When people talk to me about literature, I immediately think of Mandragore, the fragrance I created for Annick Goutal. It was inspired by the world of Harry Potter. It was Camille Goutal who introduced me to this magical universe. I have known her since she was a child, but when it came to discovering Harry Potter, she was ‘my elder’. She was the one who reassured me, telling me, ‘It’s not so bad that Dumbledore dies. You’ll see.’

Professor Sprout’s lesson on Mandrakes inspired me a lot, especially since my children watched The Chamber of Secrets over and over again. Suddenly, I thought, ‘That’s a great name for a perfume,’ and I started working on the idea of a fragrance featuring Mandrake.

The word ‘Mandragore’ in French is, for me, very beautiful, both written and pronounced. It is mysterious, elegant, a little dark, a little obscure. This guided me in choosing the ingredients and creating my formula around narcotic notes, aniseed, bergamot, pepper, not to mention iris…

La Foire aux immortels, a comic book by Enki Bilal. It has a gothic atmosphere, a little dark, futuristic, a little timeless too. This comic book greatly inspired me to create L’Eau des immortels for Voyages Imaginaires. Bilal based his hero on the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, whom I find magnificent, so elegant and timeless. This comic book has always had a profound effect on me, and I thought it would provide a great atmosphere for a fragrance. Even the name is magnificent.

Yes, I came up with L’Eau des Immortels inspired by the dark side of the comic book and the fact that Bruno Ganz also starred in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. He played the part of an angel in that film.

Bruno Ganz, immortals, angels… I put these ingredients and inspirations into the pot with a dash of Nick Cave, who also appears in Wings of Desire and exudes something dark and mysterious. We see him giving a concert. L’eau des immortels was thus born between Wenders and Bilal.

Of course, because a perfumer writes a story with his ingredients.

At ISIPCA, I was responsible for the students’ olfactory training. My role was to introduce them to raw materials and help them smell them, then memorise them so that they could have all these materials neatly organised in little drawers in their heads for when they wanted to create a formula. That’s the basis of our profession.

The best way to memorise a material is to describe the smell we have under our noses. That way, we can identify it and it will be easier to memorise. To do this, we first write a normal directory. If I let you smell rosemary essence, in your directory, under the letter R, you will write the word ‘rosemary’ and accompany it with your description of the essence of rosemary: ‘aromatic’, “herbaceous”, ‘slightly woody’, ‘slightly bloody’. It is important to try as hard as possible to describe the scent in words.

At the same time, you will create another directory, which I call ‘the reverse directory’. In this directory, you will create a section for ‘bloody’, a section for “herbaceous” and a section for ‘aromatic’. And in each of these sections, you will place the rosemary essence so that you can find it when you are looking for materials that inspire you with grassy, aromatic notes… It is a great tool for your future formulas, with sections that are entirely personal to you.

Indeed, in perfumery, we don’t have many tools to pass on. We don’t have a magic formula. Perfumery, unlike mathematics, is intangible. We learn by weighing up other people’s formulas, by understanding how one perfumer has created a rose, how another has created a different one, and we draw inspiration from that.

Joris-Karl Huysmans is, for me, extremely representative. He wrote a short booklet entitled ‘Croquis parisiens’ (Parisian Sketches). At one point, he describes the smells in a brothel, with scents of musk and I don’t remember what else… It’s simply magnificent.

I think of Borges because I find his short stories incredible. When I read Borges’ short stories, I often feel like I’m in a kaleidoscope, or something that blurs my bearings. I’ve already been inspired by his writings in a perfume.

I created a fragrance called Antimatière for Les Nez. It was inspired by a short story by Borges called The Aleph. The Aleph is a point in the universe that brings together the entire universe. Borges mentions it in his short story, which also talks about love and travel, about a man who decides to make a new start. I wanted to create a fragrance that brings together all the scents of the world.

I worked on the fragrance like a painter works with white. Just as white brings together all the colours of the solar spectrum, this fragrance was intended to bring together all the scents of the universe and, in my view, should smell of ‘almost nothing’, of antimatter. To achieve this, I used tones of ambergris and musk.

That’s true. I created another fragrance for Les Nez, also inspired by a great author, Rainer Maria Rilke. This fragrance is called The Unicorn Spell. I built it around a very green note, in reference to Rilke’s The Unicorn. They fed it, not with corn, but only with the possibility
of being. I chose this sentence from Rilke as the starting point for this very special fragrance. I truly believe that the great writers of past centuries, like contemporary authors, will never cease to inspire me.