i had an absolutely maddening encounter in the gallery yesterday afternoon.
a man arrived late in the afternoon carrying a shopping bag which contained a bottle of fragrance he purchased many years ago. he told me that he loved the scent but couldn't find it any more and wanted me to "copy" it.
now i have to say requests like that make me crazy.
i have tried again and again over the years to make it politely but firmly clear, that reproducing "perfumes" is NOT what i do. EVER. under ANY circumstances. and while most of the people who contact me about reproducing much loved but discontinued fragrances are understanding when i explain why i don't do this there are always a few who belive i'll make an exception in their "very special" case. this is particularly annoying to me when they tell me that yes they have read the information on my website and yet still ask me to copy a perfume...
this guy was one of those and he would not take "no" for an answer.
i began by explaining why reproducing a perfume is technically very difficult. even a GC analysis may not reveal absolutely ever molecule in the fragrance compound. without those molecules a replicated scent will not match the original to the much more finely tuned human nose.
and even if a GC analysis reveals the majority of a perfume's odorants, there's no guarantee that those materials will be available today. the manufacturers of aromachemicals discontinue materials for many reasons. they may have developed better ones, tastes in scents may have changed or the FDA might have stepped in and said "no i'm sorry we've found that particular chemical to be toxic so no more please."
fortunately this last instance is very rare these days as fragrance manufacturers are a good deal more rigorous in their safety testing protocols than they were 30 or 40 years ago. still it does mean that very old fragrances may still contain certain chemicals that cannot be gotten now and without those, a scent will not be the same.
and if the perfume in question contains natural materials, these will have aged much like wine - they will have grown richer with time. jasmine absolute from last year's harvest will not smell the same as a harvest from 1963 and there's no way that i or the countless technicians i have worked with over the years know to match that natural process of growing old.
i also explained that acurately analyzing a perfume by process of gas chromatography is NOT an inexpensive process. it can cost several thousand dollars to run an accurate test. and since the end result of the test may reveal the unobtainable and may not reveal absolutely everything, that's a lot of money to spend on a gamble.
and few people understand that a GC profile is not an accurate formula. a perfumer would still need to spend what could be a great deal of time experimenting to find the exact proportions and fillingl in the missing pieces the chromatograph couldn't spot. i don't like to think what the bill for that amount of time might run to and rarely does anyone else.
lastly i told him that i consider that "copying" a scent no matter how old is an insult to the artist who created it originally. though perfume is a commodity and is copied with clocklike regularity, i will always consider such actions in the same light as forging a matisse and trying to pass it off as real. it is one thing to be inspired by a perfume - it is another entirely to attempt to copy it.
i told him that i did have certain private clients for whom i created custom scents in the style of a discontinued perfume they adored but could no longer buy but i refused to copy ANYTHING.
he listened quietly to all of the above and still continued to ask me to reproduce his scent and insisted that i smell it. well i did and needless to say i found it to be a dreary pedestrian fragrance made from obviously cheap entirely synthetic materials several of which make me ill (hence the "i hate perfume" portion of my program). this was not a fragrance impression i would waste a second of my time trying to recreate. the world is far better off without such olfactory horrors.
now i was raised to be polite to people (unless very very seriously provoked) and i certainly wasn't going to tell this man just what i thought of his scent - there was certainly no point in being rude. i simply said, "no i'm sorry this kind of scent is not my style at all and i'm afraid i couldn't create anything that might be similar." which i thought pretty much covered it.
i mean would one call up picasso and try to commission a painting in the style of matisse? or maybe worse yet, demand that he paint a picture of bow wearing kitties on black velevet...? i don't necessarily mean to compare myself to either of those artists but the point is we creative types all have our own way of doing things when it comes to what we make...
STILL he kept insisting. this went on for nearly half an hour. finally i realized i was very nearly on the verge of losing my temper completely and having what one of my assistants refers to as "une grande crise d'artiste" and i told this dreadful person,
"let me put this as plainly as possible: No i can't replicate this fragrance. No i WON'T replicate this fragrance and NO i DON'T know anyone who will. you will now please GO."
i understand totally how upsetting it can be to lose a scent one loves and which constantly reminds of kind hearts and gentle places. but it is necessary to understand that when these perfumes are gone, they are gone.
perfume is like life - it can last only so long and then it ends. beyond that final moment we must move on and search for something new...