Hello Chris, thank you for taking the time to do this interview! It’s been almost four years since our first collaboration (on Zoologist Beaver)! I notice that over the years you have put more focus on your perfumery ingredient distribution business than your own perfume business. Could you tell us more?
Yes, I seem to have become an ingredients supplier, more or less by accident! It started with me offering for sale materials I had to buy in much larger quantities than I imagined ever using because, quite simply, no one sold them in smaller amounts. That part of the business has grown in leaps and bounds as both the amateur perfume-making community has grown and the indie professional community has grown worldwide. As a result, I’m in the process of having major building works done, partly to fix a collapsing roof but also partly to convert areas of our home into secure ingredient-storage areas. I’m pleased that Pell Wall now supports so many up-and-coming perfumers while also supplying much more established businesses and providing access to some of the most interesting ingredients on the market. I believe I’m the only working creative perfumer who is also a major ingredients supplier, and I think that is part of the reason why that aspect of the business has been so successful. I don’t sell anything I wouldn’t use myself.
Are you still teaching perfumery and making new perfumes? And speaking of teaching, you once mentioned that the renowned perfumer behind Mason Francis Kurkdjan had actually travelled to the UK and given talks on perfumery to other perfumers. I thought he was so busy that he wouldn’t have time to share his perfumery knowledge.
I do still run teaching workshops and take on occasional interns, though I don’t do as much of that as I’d like to. It’s an aspect of the work I enjoy. My ambition for the Pell Wall ingredients website is that it should be an educational resource as well as just a shop, so on it I include quotations from other perfumers about the materials as well as my own scent impressions and thoughts about usage. Fortunately, I also still get commissions to create new fragrances for other brands quite regularly (though few are as willing as Zoologist to have me talk about it!), and I still release new fragrances for my own brand at least once a year. I believe when I attended a Perfumer Lovers London talk by Francis Kurkdjan he was promoting new perfumes he was releasing. It was very interesting, but, sadly, no secrets of the perfumer’s art were shared!
Let’s talk about Elephant, shall we? This perfume has taken us more than a year to develop. I remember back in April 2016, when you accepted the project, we thought we could get it designed in three months. In the end, it took us much longer. During this period we both got distracted by many things, and I didn’t really rush you (I think!).
I enjoyed working on Elephant very much, despite the distractions. And no, I certainly didn’t feel I was being rushed. One of the joys of this kind of work is that there is plenty of freedom for creativity to emerge over time.
The initial concept of Elephant was a rich Indian spice/chai tea/sandalwood themed perfume, because I felt that elephants and Indians traditionally have a strong connection. By the time we had reached the third prototype, however, we changed direction – we “opened the windows” to let the air in in the new prototypes, so to speak… now, to me the perfume smells like a herd of elephant walking through a forest and foraging on tree leaves.
I think we were right to change direction, both because where we ended up was much more original and also because it played to my particular strengths as a creative perfumer. As time went on, we moved more and more away from chai and towards fresh air, greenery and leafy effects (an area I think of as one of my strengths). I spent a long time getting the tropical forest effect right and used some very unusual materials to help me do so, alongside more conventional green materials such as violet leaf absolute and Mintonat (which also has an enhancing effect on other materials by the way – many materials have more than one effect in the fragrance). Creating the illusion of fresh air sounds as though it should be easy, but it’s actually quite challenging in a perfume and it’s something I’ve spent a lot of time working on. Small amounts of material that in pure form don’t smell very nice are key to making it work, alongside transparent materials that ‘open up’ the perfume and make it sing. In Elephant, I used 6% of Kohinool to help get that effect. It’s a lovely material, with soft woody-amber and floral aspects. Plus, its name is derived from that of the most famous diamond in the world – and who couldn’t be inspired by that?
You mentioned that Elephant was your most complex perfume to date.
Yes. It didn’t start out that way. But as time went on and we added more complex accords, it finished up with hundreds of individual materials. One of the more complex accords is the sandalwood, made up of 26 different ingredients including natural sandalwood from Vanuatu, which, being a natural product, is itself made up of dozens of aroma chemicals. Almost as complex is the chocolate accord at 23 materials, including several very high-impact materials that need very careful dosing to get right and appear in vanishingly small amounts. Most perfumes I’ve created contain less than 50 ingredients, which is pretty typical for commercial fragrances. I hope wearers won't be aware of the complexity at all, except in the sense that the fragrance should hold their interest better and seem more natural. In my view, if you can pick out the individual notes in a perfume too easily, it’s not finished yet. A perfume smells like itself. If it still smells of its ingredients, then it’s still only a blend.
Above: Sandalwood forest reserve in Marayoor, Kerala, India
Many people who love fragrance say one of their favourite ingredients is sandalwood, and yet not many people have smelled real, pure sandalwood oil. Also, there are different kinds and grades of sandalwood oil. To me, the scent of sandalwood is mildly woody and creamy, definitely distinct, but not very strong. Can you tell us more about the effect of sandalwood in perfumery, and your sandalwood accord for Elephant?
Natural sandalwood is very expensive and hard to come by now, and the type widely regarded as the best – Indian sandalwood from Santalum album heartwood – is not legally available anywhere outside India. So, if you’re offered any, it’s either been smuggled out or, more likely, it’s fake. In my view, Vanuatu sandalwood from Santalum austrocaledonicum is the next best, and the government of the island began actively encouraging community farming and planting about 10 years ago. That oil, too, has become very expensive, but fortunately I bought a small store of it 6 years ago that I’m still eking out. Next would be Santalum spicatum or Australian Sandalwood, now extensively imported into India for distillation. Finally, there are other unrelated species such as Amyris balsamifera – sometimes sold as West Indian Sandalwood – which is deceiving. But despite being a completely different plant, it is possible to produce a very fine oil from it. The wood oil is widely sold, but personally I think the oil extracted from the bark is superior. Elephant contains Vanuatu sandalwood, as well as Amyris bark oil and two dozen other ingredients combined to make a convincing imitation of Indian sandalwood, but with a bit more strength and power. Many people can hardly smell real sandalwood, but almost everyone should be able to smell the blend used in Elephant.
I also want to touch on the coconut milk and cocoa ingredients you used in Elephant. I know they’re in the perfume, because we developed the scents together, but I think most people might have a hard time detecting them. These two ingredients have a distinct strong food/smell association, and yet in the perfume it’s lightly used.
I tried to use these elements in a way that would allow them to integrate into the perfume as a whole. I remember when you first asked me to add a chocolate note – something that wasn’t part of the original brief – I said it was certainly possible. What I envisaged was a chocolate that would enhance and work with the sandalwood to give it added richness and depth. If you look for it, you can certainly find chocolate in Elephant – but if you’re not looking, I don’t think it jumps out at you as it might from something like Chanel's Coco Mademoiselle, for example. In the same way, I saw the coconut milk element acting in support of the milky, soft elements of the sandalwood core of Elephant. I didn’t want it to smell like food. After all, most people enjoy the smell of frying bacon, but few people want to wear a perfume that smells like it!
May I assume that Elephant is your proudest work? What should the wearer expect from this perfume?
I guess if you ask most perfumer-creators what their favourite work is, they will usually say it’s the one they most recently finished. I’m certainly a bit like that! I suppose part of the reason for that is that, like any artist or craftsman, I’m always seeking to improve the quality of the work I do. Elephant has benefited from all my mistakes and successes that went before it. I hope it will be a grand commercial success – but even if it isn’t, I believe we’ve created something genuinely original and I’m extremely proud of that. In a crowded perfume market, it’s not easy to come up with something that is new, beautiful and has something to say. Elephant is all of those.
Thank you so much!
Note to reader: It might seem odd that I call Elephant “the scent of deforestation”. Elephants have big appetites, and on the surface they are quite destructive to their habitat. In 2013, I watched a TED Talk by the biologist Allan Savory on the subject of desertification. He confessed that in 1950s, when he was young, his research indicated to him that in order to stop the deterioration of the land in Africa’s national parks, the number of elephants had to be reduced. The government agreed, and subsequently 40,000 elephants were killed to “stop the damage”. Later, he discovered that his research conclusion was faulty. He described it as “the saddest and greatest blunder of my life, and I will carry that to my grave.” This sparked a stronger determination to find a solution to desertification. Eventually he figured out that the constant grazing and movement of large herds is essential to the regeneration and protection of the natural ecosystem. This talk left me with teary eyes and is forever etched in my mind. I subsequently watched more videos on elephants and learned that their “purging” behaviour plays an important role in the dispersal of seeds and the clearance of areas for new plants to grow.
When I smelled Chris’ fourth revision of Elephant – the aroma of fresh air, green leaves, woody dry down – in my mind I immediately saw images of leaves and bark being stripped from trees by elephants. I knew this was the right scent direction we should move forward with. I hope you will enjoy this scent. It’s one of Zoologist’s proudest creations.
-Victor Wong
Zoologist Elephant will be available on September 30th, 2017
Could you tell us something about yourself and your passion for perfumery? When did you first start making perfume?
Making perfume has been a lifelong interest, going back to my early teens. Like many people I started by blending essential oils. I read-around the subject extensively - in those days I virtually lived in the library - we're spoiled now that the internet makes access to knowledge so much easier. By the time I was in my early twenties I'd made my first 'real' perfume as a gift for my mum - I rather suspect it was dreadful, but she wore it a few times anyway.
Shortly after that I got a proper job and pursued a career first in IT, later customer satisfaction, leadership, national security by way of intellectual property, human networking, training, sales and Government relations (I still do some consulting in most of those areas). Perfumes continued to be an interest in the background throughout this period, but wasn't my primary focus and I did a lot more buying than making. The background I gained in legal and regulatory frameworks has proved helpful in getting to grips with the many rules and regulations that surround perfumery, and a there's some other carry-over in terms of some of the basics of running a business in retail that have stood me in good stead. Even so it's hard to imagine a bigger change than between national security and fragrance creation.
One thing I have found is that understanding requirements is much the same whether you are selling a big computing deal or designing a bespoke perfume: it’s all about asking the right questions and listening carefully to the answers.
Along the way I discovered it was possible to get some formal training in making perfumes, and what's more I could get it from the perfumer who made an exclusive personal perfume for HM The Queen - with qualifications like that who could resist? My partner bought the first course for me as a birthday present and there was no stopping after that.
I was made redundant for the second time and it seemed fated that it was time to return to the early passion and make something of it: so I started making things I thought might sell and as luck would have it, most of them did… so I made more, learned more and that cycle continues: the more you learn the more you realise how much you don't know. I've always been driven to collect knowledge - whether of the not-much-use-except-in-trivia-competitions variety or the more directly applicable sort - I can't imagine stopping that until I'm packed into a (scented) pine box!
What is your approach to making a perfume? How would you describe the style of your perfumes?
I suppose it’s intuitive in the sense that I sort of know what to put together to get an effect, although there’s a fair bit of analysis there too: I start any new fragrance with a list of potential ingredients in a spreadsheet. Actually that’s not true because before that it’s an idea in my head that gradually develops into ingredients, that then get listed in the spreadsheet with first draft proportions. It’s only once I’ve spent quite a bit of time with the fragrance in this virtual state that I make up the first version. When I say quite a bit of time, that can be a couple of days or months depending on how hard I’m finding it. Once the first version is made then it’s either a case of chuck it out and start again or tweak to get to the scent I imagined. Tweaking can be a few versions or dozens – depending on both me and the client, if there is one.
What were your initial reactions when Zoologist Perfumes approached you to make a perfume based on an animal theme, and a perfume named "Beaver"?
Well to start with it’s always flattering to be asked to realise someone’s concept, to turn a dream into reality: it’s a great privilege to be able to do that. In this particular case though there was also the animal theme, which I loved from the start: animal ingredients have been a traditional part of the perfumer’s palette for generations (now mostly replaced with synthetic equivalents for ethical reasons) but it’s uncommon for any fragrance since the 18th century to feature animalics as the main theme.
But then there’s the beaver business and I must confess I was in two minds about that: the common euphemistic use of the term made it impossible to avoid a snigger at the idea, but the brief made it clear that what we were talking about here was the Canadian national animal – not just any animal and not a comedy fragrance: that made it a great challenge that I enjoyed working on.
I’m still hoping to be asked to do Arctic Fox by the way – one of my dogs (Jazz) does that characteristic pounce we’ve all seen arctic foxes do on wildlife documentaries – it reminds me of the idea every time I see her do it.
Could you tell us what makes Beaver special? Is it a big deviation from other perfumes that you've made in the past, or even from most perfumes in the market?
Beaver is first and foremost an animal fragrance: a complex of musks and animalic materials. I wanted to capture the claustrophobic closeness of the inside of the den as well as watery notes to reflect the beaver’s well known practice of damning and of course some distinct woody notes to get the sense of the felled trees used in building. But most of all it’s the animal: not dirty (beavers are in and out of water all the time after all) but not sterile or washed either. There are a few animalic fragrances on the market, a very few, but there’s nothing quite like Beaver: he’s a very civilised, sophisticated chap, but he’s still an animal for all that.
Castoreum has been a common musky ingredient for perfumes for decades. What is its special property and what role does it play in the Beaver perfume?
Castoreum is one of the traditional animal ingredients – very few perfumers now use the natural extract of beaver glands – there are no animal parts in Beaver. However I did use a very fine quality recreation to give the uniquely leathery-musk, faintly sour scent that is so uniquely beaver, it just had to be present in Beaver. Unlike Civet there is no faecal quality to castoreum, it’s clean but darkly animalic and very, very interesting: it adds a wonderfully complex undertone to the play of water, wood, musk and maple leaves that make up the heart of this characteristically Canadian scent.
