Scents and Sensibility: Exploring the art of perfumery

How does your perfume make you feel? Like a Picasso painting, antique ring or vintage Chanel suit – the experience when smelling the perfect scent is not just a unique sensory one, it’s deeply emotional. Like light, it changes as the day wears on. And yes, it's also a total luxury. Cartier’s in-house perfumer, Mathilde Laurent, has just created a new fragrance inspired by the ultimate luxury of them all – jewellery – bottling up the “living abstraction” a diamond creates when it refracts light into a myriad of colours like a rainbow. Catching up with Laurent in London, she shares with HUNGER the power of perfume, how she translated stones into scents and the new way to wear diamonds in 2k18.

Hi Mathilde! How did you find yourself in fragrance?

I don’t know! The moment I was 16-17 and you begin to think about what you want to do – this job didn’t really exist. Nobody knew there were creators behind perfumes so I was totally ignorant of this field. What I think was maybe special for me was that all my senses were very developed. I thought everyone would uses their senses to understand life – but some people are more hyper-sensorial than others. I think that was my case. I was just living, smelling, touching, hearing, seeing and combining all of this information all the time. My father was an architect, so I wanted to do the same job as him. My dad was always so, “no, no no, no! Don’t want to be an architect. You have to follow a classical path and then after that see if you want to do more creative things.” I had started to do photography: every person, object, and landscape. I was really preparing myself to be a photographer…

Did you wear perfume back then?

No! Not at all, I wore no perfume [laughs] It’s still the same, I wear no perfume – if you want to smell properly you have to be in a neutral space and to have a neutral nose.

How much of creating perfume is inspired by real life and memory?

When you create you are more creating harmonies that you have never smelt, in fact. If something exists, you take it as a tool to make something that does and you create your own beauty.

What was on your mood board at the time when you were creating the Cartier Carat fragrance?

The starting point was the diamond. It’s something that constitutes the house and we wanted to give it an expression. So many diamond-inspired perfumes have been made and in such a simple or basic way – a fragrance that has nothing to do with the diamond. I didn’t want this fragrance to be detached from the diamond. The fragrance must be born from the idea, like a cloud coming from the fire. So it was really important for me to understand the diamond. What is a diamond? It’s cold, okay! It’s like glass, like ice, it’s a crystal…and then I remember before I had joined Cartier I had never seen a real diamond in my hand – only in a shop and in films. I was then lucky enough to wear rings and brooches and what shocked me was the light. I remember I was wearing a watch and when I wore it I was mesmerised by what it gives you.

What does it give you?

The sun. Like when the sun appears on a rainy day. Immediately you’re inspired and you hope more. It’s light, joy and happiness.

Quite an abstract concept to bottle up…

Yes! But then I understood all these colours: red, orange, green, blue – this is what you can never stop looking at in a diamond. I wanted to try and put this in the perfume. Taking seven flowers, like the seven colours of the rainbow and joining them to have this pure, white light that the diamond gives. So I chose these seven flowers and I mixed them to create another flower. I had written a note on my desk that said “living abstraction.” Which is a kind of oxymoron, but then not really. Nothing prevents an abstraction from being living.

What inspires you the most?

Art history. I’m really interested in Marcel Duchamp. Artists that have really created their own group and expression. I love Monet for example, the master of expressionism, which at the time was incredibly rebellious and revolutionary. I’m always interested in the innovation in art the ruptures.

Cartier Carat Eau de Parfum, from £52, available via johnlewis.com

 

Text
Emma Firth
Imagery
Courtesy of Cartier