I couldn’t hold my breath any longer. The spiel was highly concentrated, and I was starting to hyperventilate. But my Nose asked me to muster one more inhalation. She wanted to educate my nostrils. Her nose told her I didn’t know my “Intuition” from my “Knowing”. Or, my “Youth Dew” from my “Brut”.
“If you want to smell the world you need only to come to the French Riviera. We can now simulate the world’s most arousing animal musk. Did you know ambergris is a substance secreted by the digestive system of sperm whales? And castor is produced by beaver glands?”
There was a lot of talk about modern, high-tech techniques and meeting the qualitative and quantitative expectations of the modern marketplace and making human beings smell desirable in an ecologically desirable way.
Having finished the maceration rooms and proud of myself for finding out that ylang-ylang comes from a tree belonging to the custard apple family, my next stop was “The International Museum of Perfumery”.