Memories are precious. And few things are as good at evoking memories as smells. Now imagine someone decided your most cherished memory contained allergens that had to be banned? Your grandfather’s eau de cologne. Your mother’s favourite perfume. Reformulated, or in some cases, taken off the shelves altogether.
You needn’t despair. In France, where perfume is practically a religion, they have a copyright library of smells. The Osmothèque, in Versailles, is entitled to ask for the formula of every new fragrance marketed in France. And it has all the old ones, too. That’s important because no one’s immune when it comes to EU regulations. One of the key ingredients in Chanel No.5 is citral, now subject to restrictions because it can cause skin reactions. Likewise the oakmoss in Guerlain’s classic Mitsouko. Perfumers perform fancy footwork to keep them smelling roughly the same, but for the originals, you have to go to the Osmothèque.
These olfactory madeleines are tended to by noses from the great perfume houses, many of whom give up their time voluntarily. You can visit, but it’s by appointment only. Occasionally, however, they let some of their bottles out into the world, to be sniffed (not tried on the skin – those allergens) under highly controlled conditions.
Last week perfume obsessive Odette Toilette (real name, Lizzie Ostrom) invited the Osmothèque to share some of its highlights with 50 curious Londoners in a basement in Piccadilly. The atmosphere was appropriately vintage: an art deco brasserie with cocktail tables and a cabaret stage. On the menu were 19 out-of-circulation smells, carefully selected by Odette and osmocurator Stéphanie Bakouche.
Bakouche took us through the history of fragrance, which turns out to be like the history of art but backwards (and slightly rearranged). For a long time it was all photo-realism: reconstructions of natural smells like lily of the valley, or rose. Then perfumers went conceptual. Nowhere in nature does vanilla find it self cosying up to lavender with a chaser of civet, as with the monumental Jicky (1889). Or there’s Fougere Royal – “Royal Fern” (1882), which doesn’t smell of ferns (because they don’t smell). Instead it’s a combination of lavender and coumarin, a chemical extracted from tonka beans. But Le Jardin de Mon Curé (1895) is a work of pure impressionism: a conjuring up of the garden of a country priest, with flowers, herbs, and something rodentine lurking in the undergrowth.
You can still buy Chanel’s Cuir de Russie, or Russian leather, a floral with the merest tang of something smoky in the background. But if you’re after the far blunter, rougher Guerlain version, the Osmothèque is your only option. The huge dose of birch tar, meant to bring to mind soldiers’ boots, would never make it past the regulators now – in high concentrations it’s a possible carcinogen. On the smelling strip in front of me it teeters on the edge of charred bacon. As to whether it’s masculine or feminine, Bakouche says “that’s all just marketing”. It would certainly take some self-confidence to wear. Not everyone wants to risk being mistaken for cured meat. But gender needn’t come into it.
Should Britain establish its own smell vault? Our perfume industry is miniscule compared to France’s, but, judging by enthusiasm of those present, it would have a devoted clientele. They collect sounds as well as books at the British Library in St Pancras, why not smells? Imagine a darkened gallery where, at the touch of a button, you could call forth your dad’s original formula Old Spice. The name Osmothèque’s taken: they could call it the Odouroom.
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