CELIA LYTTELTON - THE SCENT TRAIL - EXCLUSIVE INTRODUCTION

An Exclusive Introduction To The Scent Trail By The Author

The world of scent conjures up far more than meets the eye, or perhaps I should say the nose. The journey from flower to essence is a complex one, and from harvest to bottle the raw material changes hands many times - from the cultivators to the brokers and importers, from the gritty factory floors and distilleries to the chemists and ‘noses’ in their hermetically sealed labs, and finally to the perfumers in their luxuriously appointed shops. And I know exactly why I wanted to embark on my olfactory odyssey.

I wanted to seek out the old haunts of perfumery before they disappeared, see the last rare crops of Tuscan irises and rose du Mai in the south of France before they were swallowed up by real estate. I wanted to see for myself the mimoseries where the stamens of mimosa are distilled on site, and the laborious method of enfleurage, in which delicate petals are laid out on trays of fat to extract their precious aromas. Part of my quest was to find pure and rare perfumes too, and for this I would have to travel. On my scent trail I met ‘noses’, who were passionate about their precious crops and essences; they talked about them as if they were wines. Flowers and leaves had to be from the first pressings and crops from certain years, like vintage wines.

In many ways, the fragrance industry has robbed scent of its mystery, replacing natural ingredients made from raw materials with synthetic ones until all the gods have departed. But there is a quiet scent revolution rebelling against what I call the duty-free-zone of designer fragrances, the ‘musak’ of perfume, and I wanted to be a part of this movement advocating natural perfume. Rather than spraying on a fragrance fog of over-hyped, celebrity-endorsed fragrance, the more discerning amongst us favour the ambrosial clouds that have been lovingly created by artisan senteurs.

As I began the research for the book, I soon realized that there was a wealth of material on the story of perfume. The allure and the mystery of scent are deeply entrenched in our psyche and our past, and yet much of its culture has been forgotten and lost. There were so many extraordinary stories and fabulous legends that I wanted to unearth and revive in The Scent Trail.

What would it have been like sailing down to Tarsus to meet Mark Antony in one of Cleopatra’s golden ships, the sails of which were so perfumed ‘that the winds were lovesick with them’? Or to be one of Emperor Nero’s guests drowning in a sea of rose petals? And imagine Marie-Antoinette - fleeing Paris and the guillotine - disguised as a peasant; only her Houbigant signature scent gave her away. And in 1922, when Howard and Carter opened Tutankhamun’s tomb and sarcophagus, kyphi, an ancient aroma made from twenty-eight spices and plants which were used to embalm the body, still held its sublime aroma after 3,000 years.

Perfume reflects the spread of civilisations, ancient lore, the movement of faiths, scientific breakthroughs and the voyages of discovery. I wanted to see and discover its myriad forms over the ages; from pomades and pomanders to censers and burners, from hollowed-out necklaces of pearls of scent to scented food and drink. Perfumes, so fleeting and yet omnipresent, both sacred and profane, are used in so many diverse ways, in different cultures.

In the Yemen the ancient custom of fumigating rooms with Frankincense is still widespread today, while bunches of myrrh are attached to the pinnies of toddlers to ward away evil spirits and, more practically, to keep the flies away. On the isle of Socotra, troglodyte women smear civet behind their ears - an ancient scent ingredient much lauded in Shakespeare. Moroccan aristocrats swill grains of musk in hot milk for breakfast so that they exude and sweat its potent scent throughout the day. In India people wear fresh garlands of jasmine to keep the acrid smells of the streets at bay, whilst in Turkey, bus conductors spray passengers with refreshing rose water - quite unimaginable in the UK!

Originally the subtitle of The Scent Trail was to be ‘The Geography of Perfume’, but I soon realized that it was much more than this. The whole gamut of odours are psycho-geographical, and scents can be deeply imbued with a spirit of place or a memory of that place and time. For me, nothing brings back a time and place more than the alchemy of its smell.

When you walk into a chilled warehouse in Grasse, southern France, it is as if all the earth’s aromas are at your fingertips or in your nostrils. Grasse is where raw materials for perfume come to be brokered and treated, and represents a world harvest. If you put me blindfolded in a country I would be able to guess where I was, in that many countries have their own ‘fragrant identity' - like the spice souks of the Middle East, pungent with cumin and cinnamon, the humid Hindu temples suffused with the burning wicks of jasmine oil, or the meadows of mimosa in Provence and the virgin forests of frankincense on the isle of Socotra.

So it had to be a travel book about perfume. There have been many learned treatises, ‘coffee-table’ books on perfume and histories and biographies of famous French perfumers, but few have tackled the subject of harvesting or have followed the journey from field to bottle.

This was what I wanted to do. The question was how? It could not be chronological or follow a single route, although in antiquity the scent routes were synonymous with the spice ones. Many years ago, my mother started a book on the ancient spice trade routes by exploring the great ruined cities that sprang up as a result of this trade. When I accompanied her on these trips to Petra and the Sabean sites in Yemen I thought there must be a similar tale to tell about scent trails; of the great caravans that trundled across the Empty Quarter for months, even years, carrying Indian spices and Arabian incense to Ancient Rome, the great consumer. The demands for perfume led many a vessel to spread its sails with the monsoon winds from the Red Sea to India.

I wanted to trace the journeys of perfume, both historical and literal and find the ingredients that evoke exotic journeys and distant shores, such as the hypnotic black hemlock, or a Taif rose grown 5,000 feet above the level of the Arabian sea. But of course it was impossible to travel to every scent-growing region in the world. The trail had to have some structure. So what better way was there than to have one’s own bespoke perfume. In that way each ingredient I chose would represent a chapter and my quest for that particular flower, resin or leaf, or even piece of whale’s vomit: ambergris!

In this way I could discover perfume’s true origins, and follow its ingredients’ fragrant paths and circuitous routes on carts, via factory floors and distilleries to alembics resulting in refined absolutes in phials, with the promise of love philtres working its aphrodisiac magic.

It had never occurred to me have a bespoke perfume until I came across Anastasia Brosler in Crown Perfumeries several years ago. And from then I knew I had to have my own ‘eau de me' - a perfume that follows my every mood and which works with my biochemistry. The bespoke perfume became a reality and formed the spine and thread of The Scent Trail - a melting, merging extension of myself, something one leaves behind incongruously called sillage, or séage as the French call it; the wake of your scent.

As I began to explore olfactory profiles and fantasize about my perfumed aura, I pondered and marvelled on how it was that noses could transpose them into tangible scents. For instance, did I want the scent of leather in my old Jaguar, or of a forest floor after rain? Perhaps the meadow greenness of Angelica, a stoic Armenian incense, or a carnal tuberose, the perfume of a seventeenth-century courtesan redolent with civet scraped off the anuses of Ethiopian cats? Or maybe a healing scent to balance my Circadian rhythms and chakras.

Stephen and I travelled to Yemen, the Foreign Office warned us that there was a very real possibility of our being kidnapped.

But despite the sometimes scary incidents, I am so delighted that, having reached the end of my olfactory odyssey, I am now able to recall so many of the wonderful people I met, and revisit the places I love, for they are now encapsulated in the magical djinn of my perfume bottle. I had truly been on a mystical, magical journey of discovery - a journey of a lifetime that I will never forget.