PERFUMER FLAVORIST - Allured Publication - December 1987/January 1988

Edmond Roudnitska : Curriculum Vitæ

Not all perfumes are works of art (no more that all musical compositions are masterpieces) or incline one to grant them artistic status for the simple reason that they are more and more composed industrially and less and less by professional artists. As a result of this industrialization, which tends to replace true creative perfumers with prolific "mixers" and also vulgarizes the product, we have entered a period of artistic decadence with profit being the excuse for any kind of deformation of the product no matter how blatant. I am not only expressing my own opinion here but one held fairly generally.

What I shall never cease to support, because it is to me a primary truth, is that beauty and profit are not incompatible. In fact, profit should allow one to have more beauty and that beauty will prolong the duration of profitability.

To combine beauty and profit, it is only necessary for those responsible for the choice of perfume in the industry to look not only to profit but also to beauty; that is to say, they should simply have the desire for beauty.

L'Eau d'Hermès is a fragrance which I dedicate to the memory of Emile Hermès for the 150th anniversary of his House and which I have composed in his prestigious image. It is a marriage of love between fine Hermès leather and a beautiful perfume. It is to industrial perfumery as the saddler's needle is to the sewing machine. It will be our modest contribution to the encouragement of a return to noble traditions.

The very heavy concentrations of perfumes, which I mentioned previously, are born from two misconceptions. The first is related with Fechner's law, which I explain in Esthétique en Question : sensation increases like the logarithm of that concentration. This means that if the concentration goes from 1 to 16, for example, the corresponding sensation will only go from 1 to 5.

The second error stems from ignorance of the regulatory mechanism in our olfactory receiver, which amplifies odors which are too weak but inhibits the reception of too powerful odors. To over-concentrate fragrances is to waste money which could be used to work on beautiful products designed by artistic composers and to reach the corresponding clientele.

Nature, which has a proven sense of measure, does not like violence : the lessons are valid today as in the past. I would add finally and, here I come back to aesthetics, that the concentration of a beautiful perfume is not decided by reason of its strength or by its cost price, but by its optimal olfactory efficiency. It is at a predetermined dilution that a concentrate takes on its most beautiful form. Only a person of taste, a connoisseur, can discover it. That is, first and foremost, the job of the creator.

                               Edmond Roudnitska