The Perfume Lover: A Personal Story of Scent

Fascinating. This isn’t my world at all, but it could’ve been. I must’ve lived this before, in another life, because it speaks to me so much.’

Love’s Baby Soft, but a paradox indeed, and

And I’ve been studying both in the capital of love and luxury, Paris, where I settled half a lifetime ago. It is in Paris that I learned about l’amour; in Paris that I stepped through the looking

favourable microclimate for growing them. Though most of the land has now been sold to real-estate developers, it is still very much a perfumery centre, with several labs and a few prominent perfumers based in the area.

it is the historian Elisabeth de Feydeau.

But why is it that those two words, ‘French’ and ‘perfume’, have been said in the same breath for centuries? In other words: why is perfume French? If you ask most people in the industry, they’ll answer, ‘Well, because of Grasse, I guess,’ Grasse being the town in the South of France where perfumery developed as an offshoot of the leather-tanning industry. Tanning products were rank, so fine leathers were steeped in aromatic essences to counteract the stench, and Grasse enjoyed a particularl