BBC perfume documentary - two approaches to fragrance

The BBC series taught me a lot about the many different approaches to scent and fragrance. 

  

Smells and what appeals to people is very personal and unique. The more typical perception of fragrance is what i would describe as romantic. The top perfumer for luxury brand Hermes, sees fragrance as being almost like a form of escapism. It is a way of beautifying reality, and creating a sort of dream like imagination, in a scent.

The perfumer spends hours a day in solitude coming up with inspiration for scents, and then enhances them and creates from imagination rather than reality. He showed in the documentary a whole new depth to scent and perfume, which i hadn't realized. He claimed that scent can have texture, for example a piece of steel would inspire a smooth and cold scent, more masculine.

In juxtaposition was the brand 'I hate perfume'. This perfumer was inspired heavily by the more real/ gritty smells of everyday life. Although we may not associate these with perfume, the smells still have similar and perhaps more accurate affects of bringing back memories. The perfumer is inspires by things like the scent of old books, or ink and paper bags. He compleltly rejects the idea of beautifying smells with unrealistic and unnatural 'prettier' scents. 

One quality that both approaches to fragrance share is that they aim to capture a moment. Fragrance is like a form of magic, however as the documentary shows there is a lot more science and chemistry involved than magic.