I had the opportunity recently to have my hand at perfume making with Gorilla Perfumers Simon and Mark Constantine. To my surprise, the process felt much like that of making a painting--mixing smells/colors, standing back to have a smell/look and just as usually happens with painting, perfume takes time and changes.
For my first perfume I decided to make a fragrance for the opening scene of Hiroshima Mon Amour. This is an amazing film and the first couple of minutes examine the sensuality and sorrow of memory, forgetting and the closeness of bodies. These themes are particularly poignant in the realm of smell, the sense that is believed to linked most directly to memory.
Out of this came a perfume in process that I'm calling Foreign Bodies. Currently the perfume is two accords the "body" accord is a slightly indolic peppery rose and the "foreign" accord is a smokey fruit blend.
