The Insider's Guide To Perfumery

There is a lot more to learn about perfumes than just top, heart and base notes. Mavis Teo compiles some tips to enhance your olfactory appreciation that not even those with an enviable perfume collection may know

- Mavis Teo

WINNING FORMULA

It takes time, sometimes years, to produce a winner. There are many mass luxury brands that can launch a few new bottles a year. “However, to create a quality, lasting fragrance that hits the right notes with many discerning noses, you’d need at least a year to come up with the right formula,” says Erwin Creed, the seventh-generation perfumer at the House of Creed. He would know what he is saying. The house is behind Aventus, a scent created for men in 2010, and has remained so popular that Creed has gone on to develop a women’s version (which took them three years) and just last year, a cologne edition. For the uninitiated, Aventus starts off fresh and slightly sweet with bergamot, blackcurrant, apple, and pineapple notes, before taking on woody tones from birch, pink berries, jasmine, and patchouli. Musk, ambergris, vanilla and oakmoss complete its musky base.

TRAINING & TUTELAGE

It takes an average of four years to become a junior perfumer or “nose”. This applies to someone with a chemistry or relevant science degree who is entering the industry through the most elite route. While there are institutes that offer courses that range from a few months to two years, Givaudan, the world’s largest perfume company, has a four-year programme in both

France and Singapore that usually only accepts two students every year out of thousands of applicants. After graduation, a perfumer can spend many years under the tutelage of a master perfumer before he becomes a master himself. Many perfumers do have a heightened sense of smell but that alone will not make a good perfumer. What sets a good perfumer apart is having the ability to combine scents in unique and interesting ways, and recognising the ones that work well together.