To mimic a scent that exists in nature is a subtle craft, certainly. But it’s also an easy fact-checking process for anyone with olfactory receptors and access to the inspiration — a rose, a macaron, a Mediterranean breeze. To scent a feeling or an object that has no odor, however, requires learning another language, a more psychic one. Mathilde Laurent, the in-house perfumer at Cartier, speaks it fluently. “All my senses are always open and recording,” she says. “For me, it’s not only one sense in action. I often say there are nine dimensions: 3D and 5S [the five senses] and time.”
When we first meet, Laurent is wearing a black pantsuit with discreet planetary and lightning patches embroidered on the shoulder and down the trousers. When she wears its fraternal red twin to dinner that evening, I come to understand that this was her day tuxedo. Her platinum hair is twisted into a piecey chignon, and architectural jewelry drips from her body — a cascade of crystals dangling inside a helix and a large pearl suspended from a hoop are cinched to her ears. (Neither one is Cartier, but obtained from a local artist with a warehouse shop.) When I admire them, she promptly removes both pieces and attaches them to my own ears. She does this in a way that conveys to me that she already understands everything about me and that this doesn’t mean we are friends.
The glass walls of her laboratory are scrawled with quotes, including one (translated into French) from Steve Jobs (“Customers don’t know what they want until you show it to them”). The space is filled with both art she admires and art she has created. She is exactly the person you might expect could access sensory dimensions you cannot, who might be able to read your innermost thoughts. She tells you to inhale deeply at all times: into a sorrel sorbet, a black tea a friend brought back from Korea, a bouquet of fresh flowers. Also on the subway. “You can get more at ease with ‘bad’ smells,” says Laurent. “They are just different from what you’ve been told was good.”
The reason I find myself talking about subway smells with one of the most lauded perfumers on the planet is that Laurent has just created a new scent for Cartier (a brand not generally associated with public transportation, but we digressed). Her mission was to capture the scent of a diamond, that deeply lusted-after — and utterly fragrance-free — rock. But Laurent’s version is not the flashy crystalline form of carbon that has been marketed into a nonnegotiable part of the betrothal process. “The diamond I wanted to give smell to was a diamond that you could buy for yourself at 18,” she says of creating this perfume, called Carat. “Very fresh, made of little flowers that you could find in your garden.” The result is a rainbow of florals (literally, from red tulip through violet) that coalesce into a sparkling white scent. It’s softer than what one might imagine emanating from a rock. “I didn’t think, What do they expect as the smell of a diamond?” says Laurent. “I thought about refraction and rainbow.”
There is something a little godlike about giving scent to the odorless. Think of the sun — it doesn’t have a smell, not one that we have access to, and yet we know it. “You could scent the warmth, or the smell of your skin in the sun,” says Laurent. “To me it could be the smell of your skin secreting almonds.” I ask her what other scentless entity she would like to give a fragrance. “I was asked once what would be the smell of peace,” she says. “I think about it since. Peace is the most important thing to look for. I don’t have an answer yet.”
A version of this article originally appeared in the October 2018 issue of Allure. For fashion credits, see Shopping Guide. To get your copy, head to newsstands or subscribe now.
Source: Read Full Article