Paris France Guide: Paris Hotels, Food, Wine and Discounts

Outside of Paris there is a small, relatively unknown school where one trains to become a perfumer, or what the French sometimes call "un nez".  The school, ISIPCA, is located in Versailles and when you visit, you can feel (well, smell) the years of perfumery on the grounds.  It is here that about twenty perfumers are trained each year at the only university-level school in the world to teach the creation of perfume.  Though some people try to learn perfumery on their own, a rigorous study of the fundamentals is seen as essential to work in the fragrance supply industry.  As a result of their studies, graduates can recreate perfumes with just their noses, even though modern equipment can potentially make copying scents much easier.

At the school, students first develop the ability to discern basic fragrance raw materials that fall into categories like citrus, green, aldehydic, marine/ozone, fruit, floral, spice, wood, amber, vanilla and musk.  In these classes, called “Education Olfactive” and taught by Isabelle Doyen (chief perfumer at Annick Goutal), you start by discerning up to 400 individual raw materials.  Next you learn the most common fragrance structures and study how real perfumes are created.  For example, in studying the “eau de cologne” (citrus) structure, students start by recreating the earliest-known eau de cologne, Jean-Marie Farina (18th century), moving on to 20th century classics like Eau Sauvage, and finally the modern structures like Bulgari Eau Parfumee and CK One.  With just their noses and expert guidance by master perfumers, students learn how to recreate these accords.  Following two years of formal education and another two to three years of apprenticeship at a fragrance house, students are ready to start creating perfumes with their own style and signature.

When we lived in Paris, Ineke worked at Quest International, one of the major fragrance houses (suppliers), and went through this extensive education and training to become a perfumer.  She now has combined this training with her previous fragrance marketing background to create her own line of eaux de parfums.  Usually perfumers are hidden away in the lab and not given public credit for their creations, in favor of the brand property being promoted, be it a fashion designer or celebrity.  Having the perfumer go directly to consumers, like Ineke has done, is still rare in the perfume industry. 

In the design of the product, we leveraged our French connections by using many French component suppliers, ranging from the custom "flacon" (Saint-Gobain Desjonqueres), to the carton (Alliora) and bakelite cap (Axilone).  On our last semi-annual trip back to Paris to work on our apartment, we took a trip out to Saint-Hilaire de Harcouet, Normandy, to do the press check for the cartons at Alliora.  The team there was hard-working and extremely proud of the quality of their work.  French suppliers benefit from a rich heritage (“patrimoine”) in the fragrance industry, and we feel that nowhere else in the world would we have been able to obtain the same level of craftsmanship. 

We are now finished the long and challenging startup phase of product development, and are launching the line at some of the best stores in the US and Europe.  We are already on the shelves of the Studio at Fred Segal (Los Angeles) and will very soon be available at Bergdorf Goodman in New York City.  If you would like to have a look at the line, please visit our website.

If you are interested in smelling vintage fragrances, there is a fragrance museum called the Osmotheque at ISIPCA in Versailles.  They hold sessions for the general public several times per month, for which you must reserve in advance.

Ineke Fragrances
http://www.ineke.com

The Elzevir Apartment
http://www.elzevir.net

ISIPCA & Osmotheque
http://www.isipca.fr
http://www.osmotheque.fr