“Thank you for bringing me.”
Gemma's studio was about twenty-by-twenty feet with walls of brick and flooring of scuffed wood. A painting of the sky at dusk covered the ceiling with pinks and oranges, soft grays, gold, clouds. She'd added a few rhinestones to it that sparkled like stars.
Only one wall, the one overlooking the alley, had a window. That window was huge, however, with black lines dividing the glass into rectangular panes. All the commercial structures on this historic street were at least two stories high. But on the far side of the alley, a neighborhood of old homes sprawled. He could make out roof lines, trees, smoke rising from chimneys. “Would you mind closing the blinds?”
“Oh! That’s right.” With a tug, she freed a bamboo roman shade that zipped down to cover the glass.
Her desk, in front of the window, reminded him of the type architects used. On both sides of it rolling carts held vials upon vials of liquid.
“I sometimes come up here with my laptop,” she said, “when I need quiet to work on the business side of running the shop. But most of the time I do that type of work downstairs so I can keep this as a creative zone.”
“Where does the manufacturing happen?”
“When I started making perfume and selling it online, back in high school, our family's kitchen was my manufacturing hub. My mom and dad and brothers would all pitch in. That continued until around the time I opened the shop. The business had grown enough by then that I contracted with a company in Bangor. They handle my manufacturing and shipping.”
“I see.”
“FYI, Cedric and Chaz both work for large companies who don't contract out manufacturing like I do. Their companies have their own plants.”
Jude leaned over the notepad on her desk. Scribbled words covered the top page.
“Every fragrance of mine,” she said, “begins with a bolt of inspiration. It goes from my imagination to this notepad where I brainstorm and mix and match ideas.”
“Where does the bolt of inspiration come from?”
“Both from memory and the present. I've always had a very sensitive nose. My great-grandfather, Paul Bettencourt, was raised with the Rhapsodie legacy. Centuries of perfumers had come before him, and he'd been trained in perfume since birth. He saw potential in me when I was young and began to pass his training on to me.” She pushed her hands into her pockets. “All of us associate our experiences and the emotions of those experiences with smells. Some of those experience-emotion-smell combinations are worthy of becoming perfume.”
“You take experiences and emotions and boil them down into a physical bottle of perfume?” He was a consumer of creative work. He purchased and greatly admired art, books, and music. But he couldn't imagine having the ability to make any of those things himself.
“I try to. Once I flesh out my thoughts on the notepad, I begin working with these vials. They contain fragrance notes.” She reached for one of the carts. “Scents are extracted from flowers and all kinds of other materials.”
“Like what other materials?”
“Balsam. Spice. Grass. Fruit. To name a few.” She unscrewed a vial and held it to his face.
“Vanilla.”
“Yes. One of the most recognizable scents. For many people, this scent evokes a comforting emotion. It's cozy. It makes us feel secure—maybe because when we were growing up our house was filled with this scent when, for example, our mom was baking cookies.” Deftly, she returned the vial to the cart and unscrewed another for him to smell.
“Citrus?” he guessed.
“Tangerine, to be specific. Smelling citrus is like smelling sunshine. It's uplifting. One more.” The citrus returned to its spot, and she held another out to him.
He sniffed. “I'm not sure what that is.”
“Pink pepper. It's spicy and it tends to invigorate us and make us want to embrace adventure.”
“Huh.” Pink pepper was just a smell. It did not make him want to embrace adventure.
Gemma pushed up her sleeves. “Big cosmetic brands often take their inspiration for a new perfume to one of the great perfume houses in France. They meet with an evaluator who helps them articulate and refine their ideas. Then the evaluator communicates with a perfumer, also called a nose. The nose works with all these aromas”—she indicated the carts—“and many, many more in a lab. He or she experiments and gradually cultivates the fragrance. It's an art form. The great noses are brilliant because they have a gift for combining separate notes into the perfect blend. When that happens, we say that anaccordis reached. The separate notes become one, masterful whole.”
He hoped this lesson went on for days because he could happily watch her for that long.
“There's no client or evaluator here,” she said. “There's just me, the perfumer, following my own imagination and taste.” She grabbed strips of paper from her desk and led him to a glass shelving unit that displayed all of her perfumes. “You smelled individual scent notes just now. Here's a finished fragrance.” She sprayed perfume onto a strip of paper, fanned the paper in the air for a few seconds, and held it up to him.
He breathed it in.
“This is Relaxation and Berry, the fragrance you were smelling the day I leapt to the conclusion that you were about to perish on my shop floor from a severe allergic reaction.”
