France in the 18th century. He creeps quietly through the alleyways. In secret, he follows his instincts. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. Girls disappear in mysterious circumstances. And the finest perfumes come into being. In our world, things are less tragic, gruesome and sinister for perfumers than in the classic “Perfume” - no need to worry there. Nobody has to commit murder for the right scent, and yet some compositions are absolutely killer. What is true, however, is that a scent always springs from the head and the nose of a perfumer. One luminary of fragrance development is Raymond Matts. He also designs fragrances for our American partner PROLITEC. We decided to take a closer look at him.
Who?
Raymond Matts is a fragrance designer. But not only that: he’s been called a perfume visionary, a tour de force in scent circles. Raymond Matts: the name has been known in the industry for a long time. For almost thirty years, Matts (who is also the founder of Raymond Matts LLC.) has been experiencing and studying the many facets of the fragrance industry.
He was the driving force behind many groundbreaking fragrances that captivate with their rare and unique combinations of ingredients. First and foremost, the famous celebrity fragrance bearing the name of actress Elizabeth Taylor. His perfume compositions have long since won recognition on the global fragrance market.
With Whom?
Matts started his career small and modest in Brooklyn at the Aramis counter, a perfumery specialising in men’s fragrances. There’s nothing small about him today: firmly established on the scene, he works in fragrance development at renowned fragrance houses.
At Elizabeth Arden, he created the most famous celebrity fragrance to date: Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds. He has also worked for the brands Karl Lagerfeld, Nino Cerruti and Arden. He can even add the position of Vice President of Estée Lauder Fragrances Worldwide at the Estée Lauder companies in Manhattan to his CV. And because sometimes more really is more: Matts’s name is also behind the successful campaigns of Clinique, Tommy Hilfiger Fragrances, Aramis, Origines and so on and so on…
How do you become a fragrance designer?
All roads lead to Rome. And quite a few of them lead to the dream job of perfumer too. But it isn’t easy, and only a few make the breakthrough. One of the roads leads back to Jean-Baptiste Grenouille’s home country: in Paris, there is a special academy for perfumers. The official training takes three years, but you need a bachelor’s degree before you start. And in the end, it’s really a matter of lifelong learning. But you can also make it without the Paris academy: with plenty of commitment, passion, perseverance… And above all: the right nose for it.
What does the job involve?
You might picture the job of a perfumer as rather glamorous: an elegant room, full of fragrant oils and liquids that creative minds combine drop by drop. But is that really how it is? Creative minds, yes. The rest: a little more sober. Laboratories with pipettes, scales, sensitive measuring instruments and computers. Calculations and chemistry. It takes an enormous amount of expertise. How do the scents interact? What chemical compounds lie behind them? Which scent note stays on the skin, and for how long? Depending on how long they can be perceived, a distinction is made between top, heart and base notes. Very complex work. It can easily take two years for a perfume to make it into its little bottle.
The difference:
Raymond Matts really is more than just a fragrance designer. He looks beyond the end of his own nose: what does the consumer want? He sees the customer and their desire for change. For something emotionally provocative. Quite simply, for something you’d look for in vain on perfumery shelves these days. But he can create it and satisfy this consumer longing: with his new perfume line, Raymond Matts Collection - Aura de Parfums. Created to be different. “My scents should inspire without the use of a celebrity figurehead, model, lifestyle or be marketed as aspirational. I much prefer inspirational instead of where the feeling is subjective and is adapted to that customer’s imagination.” To let the fragrances speak for themselves, he names them using onomatopoeia: words that imitate sounds. So his works bear names such as “Sunah”, “Jarro” or “Pashay”. “I love it when they can’t pinpoint and confine my blends to a commercial set of standards and values. I want to keep them guessing with each sniff”.
Matts often feels that people automatically deconstruct a scent into its individual ingredients in order to smell it. So he describes each of his fragrances with just two adjectives, and for him, that says it all. His scent “Sunah”, for example, is soft and sensuous. You sniff out everything else on your own personal olfactory journey. Absolutely killer, in other words.
Raymond Matts on his fragrances
