Christine + perfumes
I started smoking at 16. In the 90s, cigarettes were part of the landscape. Everyone smoked, and I really struggled with the smell. Ironically, the only time it became tolerable was when I lit one myself.
For years, tobacco numbed my relationship with smells. My olfactory sensitivity gradually faded, like background noise that went silent.
Then one day, I quit.
And something opened up.
Smells returned with an intensity I had never known before. With them came memories, emotions, fragments of life. I understood that perfume had this strange power: to embed itself in memory and awaken what sleeps within us.
When you develop your attention to smells, an entire world appears. An invisible, intimate, deeply unsettling world.
It's in this space that I feel good.
I don't construct scents to decorate or impress. I create to express emotions. To translate inner states, nostalgias, silences, bursts of optimism, sometimes wounds. A bit like music. Perfume has become for me a way to give form to what is difficult to explain with words. An outlet.
This, with respect and humility towards the material, knowing full well that the world of perfumery is to the universe what my small self is to a grain of sand.
And I have a contemplative nature. I need slowness, reflection, meaning. I like to believe that there is still magic in the details of everyday life: the smell of wood warmed by the sun, a garment imbued with a memory, the humid air before the rain.
Through olfactory exploration, I try to share my way of feeling the world. To revive memory, the fragile beauty of things, and that discreet and neglected poetry that runs through our lives.
For years, tobacco numbed my relationship with smells. My olfactory sensitivity gradually faded, like background noise that went silent.
Then one day, I quit.
And something opened up.
Smells returned with an intensity I had never known before. With them came memories, emotions, fragments of life. I understood that perfume had this strange power: to embed itself in memory and awaken what sleeps within us.
When you develop your attention to smells, an entire world appears. An invisible, intimate, deeply unsettling world.
It's in this space that I feel good.
I don't construct scents to decorate or impress. I create to express emotions. To translate inner states, nostalgias, silences, bursts of optimism, sometimes wounds. A bit like music. Perfume has become for me a way to give form to what is difficult to explain with words. An outlet.
This, with respect and humility towards the material, knowing full well that the world of perfumery is to the universe what my small self is to a grain of sand.
And I have a contemplative nature. I need slowness, reflection, meaning. I like to believe that there is still magic in the details of everyday life: the smell of wood warmed by the sun, a garment imbued with a memory, the humid air before the rain.
Through olfactory exploration, I try to share my way of feeling the world. To revive memory, the fragile beauty of things, and that discreet and neglected poetry that runs through our lives.
- Christine F.