The first Grasse Perfume Week celebrates diversity of the sector

The first Grasse Perfume Week opened on Thursday to showcase Grasse’s expertise and the wide diversity of contemporary perfume creation.

Until Saturday, conferences, exhibitions, installations, workshops and tours will take place in and around the center of Grasse.

Organized by Nez, an olfactory cultural movement created in 2016 around a specialized publishing house, the event is the counterpart to the Paris Perfume Week created last year, prior to an edition in Shanghai in October.

“We want to present a panorama of contemporary perfumery, explain what has happened here, what continues to be done and what will be done tomorrow,” explained Romain Raimbault, director of Grasse Perfume Week.

While major groups are partnering the event and opening their doors in different parts of Grasse, the perfume mecca, the emphasis is on niche perfumers, invited to showcase their creations in a Palais des Congrès quivering with original fragrances.

“Thank you for believing in us. This is the beginning of a beautiful story,” said the town’s mayor, Jérôme Viaud, who had rose-scented misters installed in the pedestrian streets of the town center.

Among the many proposals for professionals, enthusiasts and the curious, the Swiss company Luzi will be organizing a screening of the film “Les Parapluies de Cherbourg” on Friday evening, with fragrances created for eight specific scenes, inspired by what the characters eat, images of the set, and atmospheres.

In an exhibition, Marc-Antoine Corticchiato, doctor in chemistry turned perfumer, looks back over 20 years of creations, associating each fragrance with the extract that forms its backbone and an evocation of his inspiration.

“I don’t start with a fictitious human target, like industrialists’ cabinets, but with a story,” said the perfumer.

Corsican cliffs for “Acqua di Scandola”, the breath of a horse for “Equistrius”, the light of dawn for his bestseller “Le Cri”, bringing together “all the most luminous materials” around ambrette seed, or a carpet of weeds for “Mal Aimé”, which combines brambles, roots and nettles around an extract of inula.

Like all niche perfumers, he has remained small: six employees, with annual sales of just over two million euros, a quarter of which is generated in France and the rest in some forty countries, including Italy and Kuwait.

But he invites the public to cultivate their “olfactory curiosity” so as not to be satisfied with the “consensual notes” of the sector’s big successes: “Big brands, small brands, it doesn’t matter. Use your nose!”