How was the menu at Souk put together?

A creator of perfumes is an artist, just like a musician or a chef, and it’s always good to connect the arts. In this case, the question was how. In gastronomy, we use a lot of things naturally perfumed, as well as spices and herbs like ginger, pepper and vanilla. So for the menu, the chef (Sujan Mukherjee) and I had a session to understand how we could introduce in the dishes essential oils used only in perfumery. We picked Souk because the eastern Mediterranean is also a region for a lot of perfumes.

What kind of research goes into your perfumes?

Perfumes evaporate, so sometimes, if you’re lucky, research might lead you to a 150-year-old bottle belonging to a princess, with some essential oil left in it in, because oil doesn’t evaporate. Using that, the components can be found out.

Where can your perfumes be purchased?

In France, we have our own boutique, else in Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Abu Dhabi, Brazil and on the Internet. But my speciality is private perfumes, perfumes for one person, for the special and the rich, who can afford 10,000 euros for a creation. Some spend even more for the ingredients because they want pure Agarwood and special rose perfumes.

Who are some of those people?

The clients are usually secretive so the one I can mention is the French royal family. They spend one day in the chateau for me to understand their requirement. Most are clients from the Arabic and Middle-East countries, or the Far East, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China. One of them has a private museum with a collection of Agarwood and the cost of the museum itself will be 4 billion dollars.

Tell us a story worth a thousand perfumes...

A client from Brazil wanted to create her own perfume. In the first meeting, I showed her my series of classical perfumes to see what kind of family of perfumes the client likes. This woman had a Greek name. So I thought, ‘If she’s Greek, I will prepare a traditional Greek essential oil’. It was something between oregano and thyme, a small herb used more in food. But when I put this product on the nose of this Greek client, her face changed and she started to cry. She cried, cried and cried. And when she stopped crying, she explained, ‘This is the smell of the garden and the kitchen of my grandmother in the island of Patmos 50 years ago’. This was so big an emotion, she cried. All of this is to explain when I do a private perfume, people want it to have a different impact. They want to keep a memory going forever with the smell.

Have you always been able to create a perfume that a client wants?

I’ve done a little over 100 private perfumes, only one was a disaster. Why? Because the client was a man who arrived and told me, ‘I want the smell of the bedroom of my mother’. But in the bedroom, the mother’s clothes had the smell of camphor, which is not very beautiful for a perfume. Yet I mixed that with other things and he said, ‘Ah, yes, it smells like the room of my mother but it’s not good enough to use it on my skin’. So I said, ‘Yes, you can’t do that, it’s horrible!’ So I altered it to a normal flavour and then he complained, ‘It’s not smelling like the room of my mother!’ After two-three sessions like this, I told him, ‘Thank you very much! I cannot do your project. I give you back your money.’

Your favourite ingredient?

The very expensive Agarwood. It’s a speciality because I started with it around 15 years ago and it comes from my own supplier with plantation factories in Vietnam and Thailand. Not from India anymore because natural forests producing sandalwood are being destroyed. But I do prefer jasmine from India and China, rose from France and Neroli from Morocco, tuberose from India and bergamot from the south of Italy. I can’t survive without them! I am not a good perfumer for sweet perfumes like peach. I am stronger with flower and citrus perfumes.

Your favourite perfume?

It is the perfume my wife likes on me and her favourite is Empress Sissi.