HERE’S a bit of irony. The man who is tasked with creating fragrances for the luxury House of Chanel since 1978, does not use perfumes. Jacques Polge said this in a matter-of-fact way at his office at the Chanel laboratories in Paris last October.

“I don’t use perfume as I’m afraid it will interfere with the work I do. At the same time, I do smell of perfume because I usually work in an environment that is loaded with fragrances,” said the distinguished nose of Chanel.

He has an impressive command of English so no translator was necessary. But, you do get the impression that he is translating what he wants to say in English from French in his mind.
Unique ability: Jacques Polge, ‘the nose’ of Chanel sniffing a paper blotter tabs (mouillettes) to test a fragrance. – Pic courtesy of Chanel

Polge, before the interview, had taken me on a short tour of the lab facilities. The place looked neat and functional, but fragrance lingered in the air. I was allowed to test out their perfume “bank” where various essential oils were arranged. As I didn’t have any coffee beans at hand to neutralise the smell after each sniff, pretty soon I couldn’t tell the difference between them.

Chanel is one of only three brands in the world (the other two are Dior and Hermes) that has a dedicated person to create its fragrances. Polge is the third master perfumer, after Ernest Beaux (who created the legendary N°5) and Henri Robert (of N°19 and Pour Monsieur fame). He can be credited with many successes – Coco, Coco Mademoiselle and Allure (including Allure Homme) – to name but a few. Some call him one of the greatest “perfume composers” in the world!

Surely the “nose” has been accosted by all kinds of smells and odours during his long career with Chanel. How does the 67-year-old Polge remember them all?

“When you start, you have to train your nose and your memory, and that’s really the base of it. You have to find a way of remembering. When I started out, I had difficulty remembering the smell of vetiver. One day, I made a connection with the smell of vetiver with that from the days of my youth spent with my grandparents in a farm in the South of France. In the autumn, they would burn the leaves of the platane (plane) tree,” he explains.

“When it rained these fires would give out a smell similar to vetiver. There are no rules, everyone has to find his own way of remembering smells. For me it was by associating them with my own memories.”

In a previous interview in GQ, Polge said that while he has not kept count, he probably can identify 3,000 different types of odours. And in another interview, he admitted that he loves the scent of vanilla, dislikes the cloying scent of tuberoses and hates the pungent odour of cheese (one can only imagine what he has to put up with, when dining at French restaurants).

He told me he loves the smell of air. But, he doesn’t try to always decipher what he smells. “I live a life like everybody else. For instance, when I go on vacation, I like going to the mountains because there’s a quality of air that you don’t find in Paris.”

Unfortunately, sometimes certain smells assail you whether you like it or not. He particularly detests the smell of sweat. (I made a mental note of that and was thankful that I has earlier liberally doused myself with Allure before the interview!)

Polge grew up in the South of France near Avignon and often visited Grasse in the summer. In a Vanity Fair interview, he said he grew up smelling the fragrance of flowers.

“Of course, my surroundings as a child led me to perfumery. We are all influenced by our childhood. It’s unconscious and instinctive,” he said.

After obtaning an arts degree in Aix-en-Provence, Polge went to Grasse to learn his trade in the school run by the Master Jean Carles. The first thing he had to do was recognise different smells and the various properties attached to them. “Some are very pleasant but disappear very quickly, others are moderately pleasant at the start but they last very long. Once you have done that for all the raw materials then you will be able to make a compound that is pleasant at the start.”

The start is important as most people base their decision to purchase a perfume by how it smells in the beginning.

“I remember trying to imitate the very famous perfumes to examine how they are made. That helps you train your sense of aesthetic. When I started out, I tried to imitate Chanel N°5 and it was very difficult. Now, of course, I know why,” said Polge, who after all, is now the custodian of Chanel’s fragrance secrets. “What I like about perfumes is that it’s a form of poetry. When you wear a fragrance, then you ‘see’ it and you use words and images (to describe it). That, to me, is poetic.”

Polge takes what the noses present to him and gives it a twist so that it reflects the Chanel brand and fashion as “perfume follows fashion”. When one creates a fragrance, he said, it has to start with an idea and the idea is a smell. Various assays are done to try and reach that fragrance.

“Sometimes, I don’t succeed and sometimes, along the way I find another scent that I didn’t think of before. Sometimes, despite having a precise idea I might end up with something really different. There are no precise rules but then, it’s also not about mixing products by chance,” he added.

Polge confessed that he does get exhausted with all that “sniffing” around. “But the difference between me and people who are not noses is that when I am exhausted, the distinction is greater. So when I get tired, I stop and move on to something else.”

It appears the base oils for the fragrances tend to be the same. Polge explained that perfumers normally have two options to find new scents. One is to take the common products and distil them in such a way that something unique is created. The other is to have scientists analyse various raw materials in the hope of discovering something new.

“For example, before the last World War, we only knew six constituents of jasmine but now, we know more than 200,” he said.

While it’s important to keep searching for new material, he said that it’s equally important to keep all the traditional raw materials. For example, in the beginning of the year there’s bergamot, mandarin, lemon and orange. Chanel has its own production of rosa centifolia (the French rose) in Grasse. The oil of the rose comes mainly from Bulgaria and Turkey. These are the base for many fragrances, and hence, very important to the industry.

What’s even more important (and a favourite of his) is N°5, not only for Chanel but all perfumers over the world. “It is the first couturier perfume and the perfume from where everything started. ”

Among his own creations, he is particularly fond of Coco Mademoiselle (2001) which was hugely successful and Égoïste pour Homme (1990) which didn’t do as well.

“When I joined Chanel, I decided to recreate some of the fragrances that Mademoiselle (Coco) Chanel had created, One of them was Bois des Îles, and found quite a lot of sandalwood in the formula. Sandalwood as the main characteristic has never been used in a men’s fragrance,” he explained.

Apparently, English-speaking men were put off by the name because it implied they were egoists.

The down-to-earth Polge is surely no egoist himself. When asked what he hoped his legacy would be, he was surprised. “Never thought of that. Well, I hope it’s not too pompous to hope that the perfumes I create will survive me.”

When asked what he thought the scent of such a man like him should be, he laughed and replied: “The scent of liberty, which is probably the scent of the wind in the forest!”