Nine Out of Ten Men Remember the Scent of Their First Love: An Honest Conversation with a Perfumer

Did you know that every proper fragrance has its own story? Have you ever wondered how a scent can influence your social status? What distinguishes a modern fragrance from an outdated one? Together with AXE, we wanted to give you a glimpse behind the scenes of the perfume world, with the help of the renowned Belarusian perfumer Vlad Rekunov.

The Significance of Scents in Our Social Lives

During my masterclasses, I often ask men if they remember the scent of their first love. Nine out of ten answer affirmatively. When I ask women if it matters to them whether a man wears a fragrance, they confirm that a man in a fragrance is very sexy. History is full of such examples. There’s Cleopatra’s ship, infused with spices, which captivated Mark Antony as she entered the port of Rome. There’s also the boudoir of Josephine Bonaparte, which still smelled of musk 70 years after her death.

Even in our daily lives, we constantly encounter the influence of scents. For instance, we feel much more comfortable in fresh clothes or in a room with a pleasant smell. The same projections work when communicating with people. A scent serves as an olfactory trigger that aids in communication, just like a pleasant visual image. Therefore, if you intend to expand your circle of acquaintances, besides being neat and polite, you need to appeal to the olfactory senses. If you don’t use this, you’re simply missing out on great opportunities.

And I’m not saying you need to use premium fragrances. If you have a scent, even a minimally average one, you already position yourself in a completely different status. It’s like the difference between an educated person and an uneducated one.

The Creation of a Fragrance

The creation of a personal perfume fragrance is a very interesting process. The consultation itself is a special hour that cannot be repeated anywhere else. The person feels a sense of magic at the end when they receive their unique scent. But the process in between is the prosaic part, where there’s a lot of technical work: endless addition of components to the composition and dissolution.

The Art of Aromatic Compositions

If you simply mix orange, jasmine, cedar, and musk, you make a simple mix of oils, not a perfume. To create a beautiful melody, you need to correctly combine notes into chords and arrange the chords correctly. Here, you need to consider many things, including the persistence and intensity of the fragrance.

For example, if you mix a very intense citrus with a weakly intense sandalwood, you get a picture where the citrus first fully sounds, then there’s a long gap without a scent, and then you start to notice the smell of sandalwood. It’s like listening to music that suddenly goes silent for five minutes and then reappears.

In nature itself, you can easily find many brilliant combinations. It’s on the surface, but you need to notice it. If we look at wet, raw weather, we look at the color of the trees, the state of the branches, and the wet stone, which also has its own aroma. And this is already a living perfume work.

We, perfumers, constantly develop in the field of integration of natural smells, their variability. And there are also smells that do not exist in nature: for example, aldehydes – alcohols derived by humans. By adding them to natural smells, we create absolutely new aromatic combinations. Thus, we have an infinite field of scents.

A perfumer correctly combines components that mutually support each other. For example, you feel not just a pineapple, but how juicy it is, and its slight sourness at the top, and its astringent sweetness closer to the base, and its fibrous structure and a little bit of the prickliness of the peel. And all this sounds at the same time. And then this pineapple softly transitions into a green top and then just as softly into a plant with juicy leaves. That’s the melody, you understand? This scent has a plot.

Getting to Know the Person

In your interviews, you mentioned that it’s important for you to get to know a person, to learn more about them. Why is this important? How will a conditional ‘doctor who loves Tarantino movies’ influence the scent that suits them?

There’s a kind of magic here when you integrate non-verbal sensations and turn them into a material form. I’m not the only one who does this. The brief for the famous Angel Mugler fragrance sounded like this: ‘I want it to remind me of the atmosphere of a fair festival, where the smells of chocolate, caramel, nougat, and my father’s beard mixed.’ That is, it also mentions his Alsatian childhood. Imagine how much non-verbal information is embedded here!

And you intuitively gave a good example – we have a doctor. If it’s a surgeon, then we exclude saffron and everything that reminds of the smell of bandages, surgery. If it’s a therapist, it’s better to exclude patchouli because it is often used to neutralize the smells of therapeutic ointments.