Bottled memories

"Can you make me the smell of freshly cooked rice cakes mixed with the tropical afternoon air in a lakeside town and bottle it?" I asked Mr. Pascal Gaurin as I was coming out of his Manhattan office, visibly lined with familiar designer perfume bottles and long thin strips of paper for testing fragrances. "I will remember that," Mr. Gaurin warmly replied. I went out of his office so grateful that one day, I would probably have that rice cake version of the perfume "Eternity" to fill my treasure chest of memories. I later walked through their laboratory of fragrances where I saw chemists in white gowns handling thousands of similar-looking brown bottles that had  mostly number labels. I could not help but stop at one that was labeled "acacia flower."

I have always been intrigued by the science involved in sensing that when I come across anything that endeavors to make such an art of this science, I cannot resist the temptation to peep into these discoveries. This is what prompted me to visit a company called International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF), one of the world’s leading explorers and creators in the art and science of capturing aromas and tastes, from your room spray to your detergents, to your colognes, to your perfumes and even the taste of your McDonald’s French fries. It was a magnet for my passion. Pascal Gaurin is among the more than 70 perfumers at IFF. These perfumers are the olfactory equivalent of master chefs and high-fashion designers. When I sat down in his office, he immediately marked my experience with a smell I don’t think I could ever forget. He dipped the tip of a strip of paper into some chemical solution and made me and two other women who worked in his office, smell it. One of the two was Carol Brys who graciously facilitated my visit. Then, Gaurin made us write on a piece of paper the word that came to our minds upon smelling the solution. We each came up with very different words which demonstrated Gaurin’s point that the experience of fragrance is subjective and unique. Gaurin is also French which means he was born and raised in a culture replete with aromas that in part explains his natural talent for designing fragrances since as he emphasized, there is no formal training/schooling for the art of smelling unlike the visual arts for the eyes and music for the ears.

Gaurin also explained some of the technologies that IFF has pioneered which intrigued and fascinated me such as the "Living Fragrances" which essentially captures the essence of living plants and flowers, to distinguish it from the fragrance of harvested flora. It involves some glass dome being placed in a living, breathing flower. That really blows my mind since it is like capturing a fragrant episode in a running floral life series, an aroma that has evolved through 120 million years since flowering plants came to be in natural history. There are even fragrances extracted from hydroponic flora (grown in water) as opposed to the same flora being grown in the soil. As soon as the essences are captured, the molecules are taken back to the laboratories at IFF and analyzed. As soon as their molecular structures are determined, these can be replicated in the laboratories and diffused in the many atomizers, bubbles, sprays that flavor the goods that fill the air around us.

Smell can be more than pleasing. They can even be perhaps therapeutic. Gaurin also shared with me some medical experiments he was aware of where they have been helping such as in the case of coma victims who have been known to respond to fragrance stimulants, kicking off brain activity in parts that visual and auditory stimulants fail to reach. This shows promise and more experiments would still have to be done before it can be established treatment but it does make sense to pursue it since it is already known scientifically that our sense of smell is really the best bookmark of memories as we can detect parts per trillion and the smell sticks to our memory more tenaciously than any other memory stimulated by the other senses. (I have already written at least two columns on the science of smell so I will not anymore go into that in this one.)

Before I ended my interview and thanked Gaurin, I asked him if one day, one would be able to go to a perfumer and ask him to capture the smell of the memory one holds so dear so that she can carry it with her in her bag when she travels, like a memory spray – the opposite of that "memory zapper" in that movie "Men in Black." It could be the smell of a mountain air where she learned how to recognize a perfect mountain morning, the pervading smell of freshly baked bread and pastries when you open a Paris-street window, the smell of a newly bathed baby lying on crisp fresh cotton sheets, the slightest hint of pipe smoke on woolen suit, the smell of a letter coming out of a sealed envelope that has traveled half-way around the world, and the sweet smell of melon strips mixed with ice after an afternoon of child’s play. Oh and yes, the smell of "eternity rice cakes." Gaurin said "Yes"; it is possible to capture the smell of anything that defines the experiences of your life. How long they will last and stay the same is another matter that science could find out for us to help secure the retrieval of our memories when we need to recover parts of ourselves we have lost or think we have lost.

There was a thunderstorm when I got out of the IFF building so I stayed at an Italian café next door till the rain eased up. While there, dripping, I imagined being at sea, finding a bottle floating by the shore. Instead of a note, I open it and out comes the aromas of a cherished past to clothe my present, mixing with new air of possibilities. Little fragrant eternities where science, art and life meet.

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