We Made Custom Luxury Perfume in France
Until just recently, I always
thought perfume was way overpriced. How could these tiny little bottles
of overly-strong scent cost $50, $100 or even $500? It baffled my mind. But then our family traveled to
Grasse, France — the undisputed capital of perfume — to learn from the
most prestigious perfumeries in the world… and what we discovered is a
centuries-old industry that distills scents from thousands of
pounds of flowers, plants and other natural products to get what you finally
end up getting in that little glass bottle. In Grasse, we learn from the masters of perfume the painstaking processes they go through
to create their fragrances and ultimately the hundreds of individual scents
they pull from to create perfume. In the end, our daughter gets to create
her own personalized eau de parfum at the factory of one of Europe’s finest perfumeries. If you’ve ever scoffed at the
price of a perfume or cologne, prepare to gain an appreciation for the
art form that these scents really are. Grasse is home to the three most
highly-regarded perfumeries: Galimard, Molinard and Fragonard — but the town got its start in
perfume for an unexpected reason. Grasse used to be a hub for leather production —
specifically accessories like leather gloves for wealthy women — and the dyes and treatments
that they used to create the colors on the leather created horrible scents (as we can
attest from visiting tanneries in Morocco.) So they started using what they had in their
area: plants and flowers to create nice scents that they could apply to the leather to make it
a little bit more pleasing to their customers. Being complete amateurs in this topic, we
assembled a lineup of experts from Molinard, Fragonard and a local boutique perfumer in
Grasse to teach us more about the process. First up: Molinard. Our guides at Molinard and Fragonard talked us
through the long lineage of these companies, which are family businesses that are now
run by the descendants of their founders. Then, we learned about how
they source spices, herbs, flowers and animal products from around the world; and it was amazing to see how far they would go
to get their hands on a scent even 150 years ago. Then, the most interesting part: we learned that flowers and plants are
piled into machines where they are boiled, the water distilled, and they
ultimately create sometimes just a liter of concentrated scent from
tens of thousands of pounds of flowers. We got to see the very old machines
that were used in the 1800s, as well as the modern factory of Fragonard. Grasse is specifically known for growing
several different types of flowers. But the whole Côte d’Azur area is rich
with flowers and plants. This is the area comprising Grasse, Nice, Monaco, Cannes
and a lot of other little towns in between. The area has lively flower markets even in the
middle of wintertime, which really shows that they always have some kind of seasonal flower
that they can be distilling into a scent. In February, the crown jewel is the mimosa flower,
which we saw all over the flower markets, growing in the wild on an island in the area, and also
being given out for free at the Nice carnival. This is just one of many flowers grown in the area
and distilled into a usable scent for perfumes. This guide from Fragonard told us about a bread
called the fougassette de Grasse — which is only really made in Grasse. It uses
the same orange blossom oil that’s produced in the area for perfumes
as an ingredient in the dough. It smells really good! Smells like some
of the perfumes we sampled. It tastes… I mean… like how a bouquet smells. Very
interesting. It’s a perfume you can eat! It is! It’s weird… it tastes very floral. Yeah… Wow! The aftertaste… Very, very,
like, herbal and flowery-tasting. Interesting. And selling these isolated scents to
be used in the creation of perfumes is what makes Grasse so famous among perfumers. We learned that Fragonard specifically supplies
scents to some of the biggest names in perfume like Chanel and Dior to create some of their
most famous products. For this reason, though, Fragonard’s own scents are not sold
at department stores around the world, but only at their own boutiques because
they entered into strict non-compete agreements with some of those big names
that they supply the ingredients to. The trade-off of getting to sell so much
product to those big companies is that they are limited to only selling in their
own boutiques and in their online store. Finally, we were introduced to our first scents
and learned more about the chemistry of perfume. There are mainly four kinds of perfume.
Each has a different concentration of scent, which lasts different amounts of time on the skin. First, you have cologne,
which has the weakest scent and is only meant to last
a short time on your skin. Second, you have eau de
toilette, which is stronger and lasts 2-9 hours on the skin. Third, you have eau de
parfum. These fragrances have and last 9+ hours on the skin. Finally, you have parfum: the strongest
and most expensive scents because they have 20-40% perfume concentrate and
can be overpowering for most people. The remaining parts of a perfume are
water and alcohol at varying levels. So we had gotten our introduction to perfume
from Fragonard and Molinard, but one day we walked out of our apartment and down the
street to meet with Jessica: a professional Canadian perfumer who had moved to Grasse to
open her own perfumery called 1,000 Flowers. Jessica illuminated what it takes to become a
perfumer, which is lots of practice learning to identify scents. She taught us more about
base notes, middle notes and top notes. The top notes are the first thing that
you smell when you put on a scent, but they dissipate quickly. The middle notes reveal themselves
after the top notes fade. Then, finally, the base notes lay the
foundation of the scent and generally are the final notes smelled as the
fragrance fades throughout the day. An actual perfumer is called
a “nose” for obvious reasons, and every perfumer has a perfumer’s organ,
which is the mix of all of their top, middle and base notes that they keep organized
on shelves to create their individual perfumes. To become a nose you have to attend perfumery
school in France because that’s the only place that they have them; and we heard two
different numbers from Molinard and Jessica, but students learn to identify between 600 and
3,000 different scents across their program. After demand for her mentorship from
young perfumers developed over time, Jessica eventually expanded into this
bright and airy space above her boutique, which she’s recently fully renovated to
hold workshops for budding young perfumers. Inspired by our growing knowledge
and really wanting to get a hands-on experience that our girls could remember, we went back to Molinard so that our eldest
daughter could partake in a workshop to create her own signature scent and leave with
a little bottle of perfume to take back home. The instructor got into
the workshop straight away. Our daughter was tasked with
choosing from 18 different notes: six from the base, six from the
middle, and six from the top. She started by smelling all 18 and
pulling aside the ones she liked. She liked most of them, but after ditching
just a few, she had to whittle it down. Ultimately, she got it down to just six notes:
three base, two middle, and one top note. The girl running the workshop knew
how to balance these notes so that none were particularly overpowering and
all could work together as a fragrance. She wrote out the formula and then she and our daughter worked together to combine the
perfume liquids into the final bottle. We really cannot say enough good things
about this Molinard experience. It is honestly so hard to find things when
you’re traveling that have a real, tactile experience — and an educational
experience for young kids. So many things start at 8, 10, 12… even older… 15 in some
cases! And I think that a lot of people write off children as not being able to understand
certain topics. But the fact that they have this class specifically designed for 4- to
8-year-olds was such a refreshing thing. This was the final formula: 4 ml of cola as the top note, 11 ml of apricot and 9 ml of
raspberry as the middle notes, and 3 ml of coconut, 2 ml of licorice,
and 1 ml of toffee as the base notes. We were instructed to let the bottle sit for a week for all the notes to combine
before using it for the first time. Now that she had it on and we had
all experienced the top notes, we wanted to go out and have a really
active day and see how the top notes dissipated into the middle notes, which
then evolved into the base notes and see if eau de parfum actually performs as
advertised — which is as an all-day scent. So, off to the Nice Carnival we went. We just got back from the
dusty city. Perfume check! Still smell it? Smell it. All right… ready? Oh, yeah!
You smell great! Let me… Is it still strong? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it smells wonderful! Ooh, I
smell coconut now! That was one of yours, right? Really?
I actually do! Smell that, hang on. It has changed. Yeah… the
cola is not… not as strong. That evening we hit the town again for
opening night of the Nice Carnival Parade. There was music, dancing, gigantic floats and smoke billowing all over the place. We were certainly putting the perfume to the test. How was the carnival? All right, let’s
see… after all that dancing. Ready? And it has changed again, it’s not a joke! Really? Let me see… it’s definitely
lighter. It smells sweet. Toffee, I think it was. It
was toffee and licorice. Oh, it smells good on your skin, baby.
I’m impressed! That was a good scent. I was going to say… yeah, probably about
coming up on 12 hours. Pretty impressive. Ooh, that one… actually for some reason, that particular wrist I feel like I get more
of that that sweetness, like the dessert scent. We arrived in France highly
skeptical of perfume and cologne, not really understanding why what we assumed
was a synthetic liquid would cost so much. But now we’ve played the perfumer’s organ, we’ve smelled the top, middle and base notes of
fragrances from the best perfumers in the world, and we’ve come to understand that it
takes fields of flowers, herbs, woods, spices and other natural products to
create these wonderful fragrances. So we are skeptics no more. A quality perfume comes from the most
coveted scents that the earth has for us from the edges of the world, all
the way into a tiny glass bottle. And that’s pretty darn cool.
A little town in the south of France makes the world’s most popular, luxury perfumes. We visited Grasse to ask why fragrances are so expensive — and determine for ourselves whether fancy perfume is really worth the hype.
Follow us from Grasse’s “Big 3” perfumeries (Molinard, Fragonard & Galimard) to a boutique perfume school in the heart of town as we smell endless scents, play the perfumer’s organ and concoct a signature eau de parfum that we put to the test at the Nice Carnival.
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A very special thanks to Jessica Buchanan from 1,000 Flowers for generously and enthusiastically sharing her years of expertise with our family. If you’re interested in pursuing perfumery as a career, her academy is a tremendous resource! https://www.1000flowers.fr/
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0:00 Why is Perfume so Expensive?
1:50 How Perfume is Made
3:34 Fougassette de Grasse (orange blossom bread) Taste Test
4:39 4 Types of Perfume (cologne, eau de toilette, eau de parfum, parfum)
5:31 Lessons from a Professional Perfumer (top, middle & base notes & perfumer’s organ at 1,000 Flowers)
6:54 We Design a Signature Scent (Molinard kids perfume workshop)
9:01 Perfume Wear Test (Nice Carnival)