BBC Perfume Documentary - Part 2

"Bottling the memory"

Part 2 of BBC's perfume documentary was all about revealing how a certain scent can take you back to certain places, spaces and people.


New York's perfumer Christopher Brosius was the proud owner of the "I hate Perfume" gallery to which he believed transported you to a memory as you smelt the scents. His scents were not that of the ordinary sweet and subtle fragrances that are sold on a daily basis, but he liked to think of his scents as magic. Roast Beef, magic markers, musky unwashed bodies were just a few of the bizzare fragrances to which he was selling in his store, scents that Brosius believed excavate "beauty from what is real". We followed Sean Crowley, an English enthusiast on his journey with perfumer Brosius as they worked together to create a fragrance to which presented Crowley's lust for old English traditions. The pair worked together on including elements such as shortbread biscuits, cobbled streets, smoke from pipes, old books and whisky in order to try and create the perfect fragrance to which in their eyes mimicked that of 1930's England (at the high end price of $2000!!).


Running almost parallel to the style in which Brosius worked, was french perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena who created his fragrances based on fantasy. Ellena lived a life to which was very excluded from the outside world and somewhat life in general as he worked with only one other lab helper and was described as the "Obi-Wan Kenobi of fragrance". Ellena worked on the "surprise" element of the fragrance, each of his perfumes were entirely unique and he created his fragrances on what he felt was right in the moment, even the brands he would work for would not know what he would be creating until the very final moment; perhaps the reason as to why he was in such popular demand by high end brands such as Hermes.

The documentary also explored the Givodan "perfume school" to which Jean-Claude Ellena attended in his younger years. The school only selects very few applicants each year and are very specific with whom they choose, on year they were so underwhelmed by the applicants that they took on 0 students. Within the 3 years that the students study at Givodan they will not make one fragrance, but instead learn about the depths and discovery of how the perfect perfume is created. Givodan is famous for homing students who went on to create fragrance masterpieces in the consumer's eye such as; One million by Paco Rabanne, Obsession by Calvin Klein as well as other works by Givenchy and Dior.

Overall I found the documentary fascinating to see how despite the two perfumers working on opposing sides of the world, their technique of creating something was infact very similar, within the way in which they both saw the relationship between scent and memory to be the most important, as well as both wanting to inspire memories of the future through scents that they both felt needed to represent the person whom was wearing it.

"Time is a luxury that is not cheap" - Jean-Claude Ellena