Researching the Different Worlds of Perfume for Fiction
We relate so many of our memories to certain smells, and we smell them again we’re transported back to that moment. Here, author Alka Joshi shares how researching the different worlds of perfume helped her in writing her new novel, The Perfumist of Paris.
I knew nothing about perfume before I decided to write a novel about it. Perfume had always intimidated me; I was hesitant to wear it. What if I thought the scent I was wearing smelled of fresh lilacs, but others thought it smelled like rotting fruit? I admired (and shied away from) women who wore perfume with confidence and thought nothing of overpowering a room with their scent.
The fragrances I grew up with were not Chanel or Giorgio or Opium. They were the scents of my native India: the jasmine garlands my mother threaded through her braid; the rosewater beetlenut paans the chaiwalla chewed. They were the scents of vetiver window screens hung in the heat of a Rajasthani summer, my auntie’s favorite sandalwood snuff, the rickshaw driver’s coconut hair oil. These scents were soothing to me, a reminder of where I came from.
For centuries, European traders had been buying essences of tuberose, mounds of cloves, bottles of sandalwood oil from India and selling them to French fragrance houses. Why, I wondered, did the perfumes of France and India seem to have so little to do with one another?
When I mentioned this to Michael Edelstein, the producer of “The Henna Artist” episodic series, he put me in touch with Ann Gottlieb, the woman behind iconic scents like Eternity, CK One, Marc Jacobs Decadence, and J’adore. She agreed to meet with me.
I flew to New York City. Ann arranged a tour for me at IFF, one of the three largest global fragrance and flavor companies, and the perfect workplace setting for my book’s protagonist, Radha. Ann introduced me to Linda Levy, president of the Fragrance Foundation, who introduced me to Paul Austin, one of the most knowledgeable experts in the industry and a lovely, kind human being. I couldn’t have had a more gracious and generous introduction to the world of perfume.
Paul was in the midst of launching the first niche fragrance combining India’s flora, spices, and woods with French savoir faire. The brand is LilaNur. Master perfumers from around the world were designing seven LilaNur fragrances to be sold at Harrods and Bergdorfs. I could easily imagine those gorgeous scents of jasmine, tuberose, vetiver, damask rose—the familiar scents of my India—coming to life in modern French haute-perfumerie. I was intrigued, and even more impressed, when I found out LilaNur was providing rural workers in India with year-round income.
I flew to Paris to meet with renowned master perfumers and their assistants, visited a creative atelier and a compounding factory in Grasse. In Versailles, I toured the perfume “organ” of Jean Patou (Joy parfum) at the Osmotheque Museum. The pinnacle of my research was interviewing the urbane 84-year-old Yves de Chiris, a mentor of Paul Austin’s, who had worked in the hedonistic fragrance industry of 1970s Paris. The stories he could tell!
I knew by now that Europeans preferred lighter scents and used alcohol to temper the intensity of the ingredients. Those from the East preferred potent scents, but they also knew a little went a long way. Perfume is a science, and Master Perfumers are creative chemists. They’re also some of the happiest people I’ve met.
Armed with luscious anecdotes, facts, and notes from interviews, I wove all I’d learned into The Perfumist of Paris. Now, Indian-born Radha would travel from Paris to India to find exotic ingredients she would need for her first solo fragrance project. She would combine east and west and create something new, something fresh. The story grew, evolved, blossomed.
Once the novel was sent to the printers, I called Paul Austin. Would he and LilaNur be interested in collaborating with the launch of The Perfumist of Paris? Yes, he would. LilaNur would bring the third novel in the Jaipur Trilogy to life by capturing moments in the narrative that evoke the vivid and multi-sensory story of India.
Alka Joshi was born in the desert state of Rajasthan in India. In 1967, her family immigrated to America. She earned a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from California College of Arts in San Francisco. Prior to writing The Henna Artist, Alka ran an advertising and marketing agency for 30 years. She has spent time in France and Italy and currently lives with her husband on the Northern California Coast.
