The last couple of days haven't been as intense when I first got here. Sarah's college friend Cammy came in from Vienna on Thursday, so she took us around Nice again and brought us to this huge mountain that used to have a castle on it. From there you had a wonderful view of Nice.At night we tried to go to this bar called Waynes for ladies night, but unfortunately the bar wasn't offering the specials so we went to an Irish pub for 4 euro cocktails. After two tequila sunrises we decided we still wanted to go dancing so we walked through Old Nice and found a bar that miraculously was playing American music! We danced for about an hour there until the Teknotonic came back on, then decided to return home for some shut-eye.
The next day we took the train to Grasse where we visited the famous Parfumeur Fragonard. Fragonard offers free tours of their perfumery; you learn the traditional production techniques they use to make perfume, eau de toilette, eau de parfum, and soap. It was really interesting to walk through the factory, but also I learned a lot and since I'm kind of nerdy I decided to take notes.
For example, did you know that there's a difference between perfume, eau de parfum and eau de toilette? The main difference is the concentration of "essence" (the actual scent) in the mixture. Perfume is just essence and alcohol and has the strongest concentration of essence, which is why you're only supposed to put it on your pulse points....or as Coco Chanel would say, "anywhere a woman wants to be kissed." Eau de parfum and eau de toilette are weaker in comparison and contain more water, the later you can supposedly bath in.
The guide showed us two methods for extracting the essence or scent from an object. For very delicate flowers like Jasmine they lay the flowers on sheets of beef fat, the fat soaks up the essence, then they take the fat and mix it with hot alcohol. The essence will separate from the fat and mix with the alcohol and then the mixture is cooled again so that the fat hardens, rises to the top, and can be removed.
For more durable elements like spices, wood, or lavender, they have a distillation process in which they steam the element, the steam with the scent of the element flows into fresh water and then that mixture is distilled and separated into water and essence. I vaguely remember having to distill something in chemistry class...maybe if I had been able to make my own perfume I would have paid more attention to the process =)
Perfume can contain anywhere from 25 to 250 different elemental sce
nts in it, but it's not only the different essences that make the perfume smell a certain way, but the proportions of each essence. The guide compared it to music; with the same 7 notes you can compose many different songs and types of music. She also said that in order to get 1 kilo of flower essence you would need 1 ton of flowers...
A perfume's scents are organized in a 3 tier pyramid structure. The scents at the top are the most volatile and will be what you usually smell first. They are typically light or citrus. These scents will stay on your skin for up to 2 hours. The scents in the middle of the pyramid are called "Heart notes" and will last 8-10 hours. They are usually the flowers, like rose or lavender. The "Bottom notes" will stay on your skin for 24 hours and scents such as vanilla and sandal wood.
The people who make perfume are considered alchemists and must attend one of the few schools in France to work in the industry. Usually, they have been trained and educated up to 10 years before they're considered a professional. Most of the people in this industry are men, even though it has been scientifically proven (according to the tour guide) that women have a stronger sense of smell (which in my opinion also explains why men are more likely to smell bad!). Women are now beginning to break into this profession, but interestingly are more likely to create men's cologne.
After our tour we walked through their store and smelled EVERYTHING. Fragonard does not market their product or advertise, so everything is significantly cheaper because it's not included in the price of your purchase. You also realize that the reason their tour is free is because afterwards you are almost guaranteed to spend your money in their store (as you can see in the picture above).
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