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This article was the winner of the 2018 Perfumed Plume Award for online fragrance journalism.
In keeping with our previous transparency on our wax and fragrance ingredients, we've been dreaming about sharing something that you don't get to see (or sniff) every day: the secrets behinds what it takes to compose a finished fragrance.
What's behind the fragrance
In fragrance there is virtually no copyright protection over the creative formula of a scent, so perfumers keep these recipes closely guarded trade secrets. This means that the artistry behind a fragrance is rarely understood and certainly not fully appreciated.
In fact, creating a fragrance is much like creating a musical composition or writing a poem: it requires a depth of experience and understanding to work with many raw materials—called notes as in music—to create successful scents. A little too much or too little of one element or another could imbalance the entire creation. The perfumer, like a refined musical composer, use their artistic skill to balance numerous natural and man-made molecules, some similar, and others more unexpected and dissonant, to yield a result that dazzles our senses.
Our master perfumer, Christophe Laudamiel, personally suggested to do something uncommon with us, if not unheard of: to disclose (as an exception) some of the detailed formulae of some of our scents. We want to show how much complexity, quality and precision goes into a scent composition. We hope you'll appreciate the artistry and respect the transparency!
Revealing the secrets of Green Market
Before creating a fragrance formula, a new idea starts with a creative concept. We brought Christophe the notion of a Farmers' Market in late 2015. We described the bright colors and commotion as freshly cut stems, fruits and vegetables tumbled out onto rickety tables tops. Christophe used the stories and ideas we told him to guide his selection of fragrance notes from over 2000 available to him.
In March 2016 we completed the fragrance for Green Market, after 15 modifications to the original scent Christophe created. The final composition contains 23 ingredients, bringing you to the midst of an energetic green market on a weekend morning.
Click the scent's trail to reveal the formula of Green Market within: