THE PERFUMER’S EVENING

The Perfumer’s Evening is held in the middle of February for ten. A working perfumer is received privately, the raw materials are laid out, and each member leaves with a formulation made to his own account.

Nothing is bought from a counter and nothing carries a name.

The Form

Perfume is the luxury in which the distance between what a thing costs to make and what it sells for is widest, and the distance is filled almost entirely with advertising.

A bottle on a department store counter is a composition arrived at by committee, tested on panels and adjusted until it offends nobody. The person who made it is rarely named. There are perhaps a few hundred perfumers in the world working at the level that matters, and most are employed by four houses in Switzerland and France.

The remedy is the one the Court applies to wine. Take away the bottle, the name and the advertisement, and smell the material itself.

Almost nobody has done this. A person may have worn the same scent for twenty years and never smelled orris on its own, or labdanum, or vetiver root. They have only ever smelled arrangements.

The Evening

Ten at one table. The perfumer arrives with the materials laid out in order: the resins, the roots, the woods, the citrus that dies within the hour, and the animal notes, which are now mostly made in laboratories for reasons that become obvious once their origins are explained.

They are smelled separately and in silence first. Then in pairs, because a material changes entirely beside another one, and that is the whole of the craft.

Some of what is on the table took longer to make than the people smelling it have been alive. Orris root is dried for three to five years before it gives anything up, which is why it costs what it costs.

Afterward each member works with the perfumer on a formulation of his own. It is written down and kept, and what is made from it arrives later.

What Is Asked

The code is stated in the invitation.

No scent is worn. This is the one absolute rule of the evening: nothing on the skin, nothing on the hands, and no scented soap that morning. A room of ten people wearing what they wore yesterday cannot smell anything at all.

Telephones stay in pockets. A photographer is present for part of the evening, and what is worth keeping is sent afterward.

Nobody is expected to know anything, and the evening is better for those who do not.

Nobody is pitched at the table.

The Places

Ten. It is among the smallest tables the Court sets, because ten is the number of people who can work through one set of materials in an evening.

Members are written to in January. The sum is stated in the invitation and covers the whole of the evening and the formulation that follows from it.