Mathilde Laurent, Cartier perfumer: "We cannot live without breathing, nor breathe without smelling. In other words, we cannot live without smelling"

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Smell continues to be

despite the fact that odors can cause emotional, physical and mental reactions," commented

a CSIC neuroscientist and a merit academic from the

to Yo Dona a while ago .

weather.

Mathilde Laurent,

's official perfumer

since 2005, is one of those women who fight from her pulpit, that of fragrance creator, to restore smell to the importance it should have.

In a world where it seems that everything enters our eyes, and therefore sight would be dominant, Laurent emphatically affirms that

as he has no doubt emphasized in his recent book

( which would be translated as the sense of aroma, published in June 2022 by NEZ).

Mathilde Laurent attaches so much importance to smell that for Cartier she is not only the creator of the fragrances of the jewelery house for almost two decades, but she is also the designer of very special installations with which she intends for the general public to

in an exceptional way, giving fragrances back

and establishing a dialogue to discover their

OSNI 2, one of the olfactory installations created by Mathilde Laurent for Cartier.Alexandre Urbrain © Cartier

Smell with all the senses

It all started in 2017, when he created his first interactive experience, named

-a clear reference to UFOs, with the acronym in French meaning

a cloud of scented gas that enveloped you with its perfume after climb a ladder

The second experiential installation has just taken place in Paris, under the name of

a journey through a dark corridor that ended in a room with the projection of a panther of light that jumped and jumped in a curtain of scented water that spread I could touch (and smell).

"The idea is not to prevent seeing, but to put all the senses at the command of smell," she explains when we meet to talk to her.

Because for Mathilde,

To smell is to feel with all your senses"

Speaking of smell, not everyone gives it enough importance, but for you it is "the king of the senses".

Explain this statement to me. Smell is the king of the senses because we cannot live without breathing and we cannot breathe without smelling.

In other words,

In the brain, as soon as one smells an odor,

it panics.

The centers that take their place are the amygdala, that of emotions and instincts, so the body decides on its own, and the hippocampus, which is that of memory.

So, actually,

And there, precisely, we live.

Because the more we reason, the less we live.

With smell we recover intuition, instincts, the body regains control.

And that is why smell in the brain passes through the center of all the senses.

And when we smell, we memorize with an image, a sound, emotions... That's why smell is the sense that unites all the senses, like a king with his ministers.

And for all this

while vision does not retain smell, hearing does not retain vision.

There are senses that function alone, autonomously, and others that bring together all the others, such as smell. How should we talk about perfumes so that the general public understands everything that lies behind it? I recognize that there is a void and I know that it is very difficult to talk about perfumes.

The important thing is not to describe them, to talk about perfume you have to

its power and what we experience when we smell them.

To say that a perfume contains rose... [makes a gesture of obviousness, from 'And what does that tell us?'] Knowing what it contains is of no importance.

the great perfumer [for many, the father of modern perfumery] said that

Therefore, to talk about perfume you have to describe that 'shock', so that you want to receive that same 'shock'.

That is the most beautiful thing, the emotion, the aesthetic.

You have to talk about a perfume as something that provides the pleasure of beauty.

Alexandre Isard © Cartier

Mathilde Laurent, the strange perfumer

If we delve further into Mathilde Laurent's profession, we could say that she is

Normally, most perfumers have a career path that includes spending time, if not a stay for life, in

that share the cake of making aromas for the firms that request them -three of the best known in the world are

Few are the noses that

and Mathilde is one of them, at Cartier.

She is also one of the few who has never been

since after studying perfumery in Versailles, she went directly to work at

as an apprentice to

'in person'.

Does this trajectory influence Laurent en Cartier's way of making perfumes, described as

"I went to Guerlain at the age of 24 because I felt attracted to the history of the house. That was what gave color to the beginning of my career and, of course, had an impact on the rest, because Cartier came looking for me when I was in Guerlain. It is true that it

and that I do not know of other perfumers with a similar trajectory. Now, for me it

Of course, I think that I have been able to deepen my understanding of luxury and the search of

in perfume".

The perfume 'La Panthère' and all its versions, one of Mathilde Laurent's creations at Cartier

In line with what you are commenting on, how do you manage to make contemporary perfumery in a 'maison' with as much tradition as Cartier is? Cartier is a 'maison' whose tradition is to innovate.

Throughout its history

When he made panther-spotted jewelry in 1914, no one had ever done that before.

When

creates the panther brooch for the Duchess of Windsor,

covered in diamonds, no one had done it before.

Innovation is part of the history of the spirit of the house, which is bold.

That the creations acquire a historical character and give us the feeling that they are classics is something else.

At Cartier you are responsible for having made perfumes like 'Baisier Volé' or 'La Panthère', but you are also guilty of introducing Haute Perfumery into the 'maison', with the 'Les Heures' collection.

What exactly is Haute Perfumery? Haute Perfumery at Cartier is

the perfumer who creates a perfume solely for the beauty of the gesture, a perfumery that revisits the history of the art of perfumery and pays homage to it.

We do not refer to the price of the ingredients to justify their value,

Oud et Pink, a creation by Mathilde Laurent, from the 'Les Heures' Haute Perfumery collection, by Cartier.

You are a chemist by training.

Is a perfumer more like a chemist or a poet? Both.

I'm very sorry [she laughs], but I am obliged to answer that, because that is precisely the difficulty of our trade, how to have a brain that is both right and left,

and how to do poetry when you are a chemist .

Fortunately, these are preconceived ideas, that a chemist cannot be a poet, nor a chemical poet.

I know a great perfume chemist who is a great artist, but it is true that

[laughs again]... It's possible though.

I try to be both. At the beginning of the interview she talked about the power of smells in memory... A smell that she remembers from her childhood and has stuck with her?

For a perfumer, all the smells of childhood mark and remain in the memory.

That is what allows you to work, learn the ingredients and, with this olfactory library, one becomes a nose.

So I don't have a smell,

it 's all here in my head, it's terrible!

Although if I had to choose one... My father was an architect and had a

They were called Ecoline, I loved their smell, so particular.

Over time, as an adult, I found them again and identified the molecule that reminded me of their scent, para-cresol.

When I tell you this [he squeezes his eyes shut and touches his temples]

I am in my father's office, sitting in his chair, on his floor, I see all the inks, all the colors: blue, the yellow, the green, the red... And there you have that 'shock' that Edmond Roudnitska was talking about! Exactly!

not from a perfume, but from a smell that awakened in me that sensation of being aware of the moment you are living in and that you know that in 100 years you will still remember it.

And the perfume is precisely that what it achieves.

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