To begin with, it is quite difficult to determine the exact date of birth of this synonym, which has become popular first in the media and eventually in the general public. However, we can already feel the possibility of the metonymy as early as 1897, in the famous ” nose speech” of Cyrano de Bergerac: “Sign for a perfumery!” In any case, says Eugénie Briot, program manager at Givaudan’s Perfumery School, “I don’t think I ever found this expression in the 19th century, or even probably until the 1920s. But by the late 1940s, journalists were referring to perfumers as ‘noses’.”
COUTURIERS AND “PETITES MAINS”
The historian of perfumes Elisabeth de Feydeau links the appearance of the “nose” with the birth of the “couturier-parfumeur”, at the beginning of the last century: “in the case of Lanvin or Chanel, it is the couturier and him only who signs the perfume, created in a way by a technician, called “nose” and that no one considers as a creator, she explains. As far as Chanel N°5 is concerned, for example, the name of Ernest Beaux will in the articles intended for the general public only in in the 1990s “. She adds that the creation of perfume being generally done from a brief, the “nose” creates for others “like the “petites mains” of the Couture (French expression for seamstresses), equally anonymous”. At first reserved for perfumers who did not sign under their own name, the term “nose” then spread with the popularity that we know now.
NOSE VS BRAIN
In any case, the organ that is supposed to be the main instrument of the profession has ended up taking precedence over the job itself, with all the reductive projections that this entails in the eyes of the main stakeholders. “It’s like saying that a painter is a hand or an eye” says perfumer-creator Dominique Ropion. However, the nose (as an organ) is not that fundamental in the creation of a perfume. Perfumers-creators “smell” and work much less with their nose than with their brain and use words almost as much, if not more, by synesthesia, than smells in the daily exercise of their profession.
THE PROUST MADELEINE
In the same way that a fashion designer draws a garment, the perfumer writes a formula, in a chart, with the percentage dosage of each element. The training of the profession consists in memorizing a smell, naming it and associating it with an image. In short, to systematize these associations which everyone can experience and of which Proust’s madeleine is certainly the most famous example. They have then to break them down into raw materials (synthetic and natural) and classify them into different families: a very cerebral task indeed. It is obviously not the nose that can convert the emotional dimension of odors into equations, so the reluctance of perfumers-creators towards this term is quite understandable. “This expression is considered pejorative by perfumers because it does not reflect the intellectual aspect of their activity. Only its sensory aspect,” says Annick le Guerer, anthropologist, philosopher and historian of odors, smell and perfume.
A CENTRAL ORGAN
Even if, obviously, the importance of this appendage is undeniable, as testifies the major Kovaliov, who finds himself deprived of it one fine morning, in the short story The Nose, by Gogol: “O Lord, O Lord! What have I done to deserve such a misery? Had I lost an arm or a leg, it would have not been so bad; had I lost my ears, it would have been bad enough but nevertheless bearable, but without a nose a man is goodness knows what; he’s not a bird, he’s not a human being; in fact, just take him and throw him out of the window!” The main point is to leave the nose, quite the central organ, in its right place.
