00:00I do a lot of work in fragrant oils, but I hate those hippy oils.
00:30We're surrounded by visual art, music for the ear, but what about the art of smell?
00:42Jonathan Midgley has devoted his whole life to it.
00:45I guess I like decadent as opposed to classical.
00:48Classical is form and purity of form.
00:51Decadent is the complexity that arises with the breaking up of classical form into focusing on more details.
00:57In a sense, you smell a rock melon, I smell a thousand chemicals.
01:12I think Opium is brilliant. It's come out in the late 70s.
01:14It's brash. Its name implies decadence.
01:17I'm a reference to a drug.
01:19It's great, but it is in contrast to Sage Chanel 19, which is that classic, refined, incredibly
01:26Oh, I don't know, just refined. That's the word.
01:30If we compare it to music, it's like using the right notes to make a beautiful piece of music.
01:35A perfumer takes various aromatic notes, they're referred to as notes, and puts them together to make a beautiful aroma.
01:42A perfumer's lab is arrayed like a library, a library of smells, and there's rows and rows and rows of bottles, and each bottle has a fragrance, a unique aroma.
01:58What are some of the more unusual aromas you've had to make?
02:02This is a weird one, but for a theatre company in Hobart, I was requested to make the smell of sex for their invitations for a very risque play called Quartet.
02:16I mean, that's unusual.
02:21It's true to say even in the finest skin perfumes, erogenic aromas are included to enhance a person's appeal.
02:28Okay, both male and female perfumes employ, at a subtle level, aromas that are along those lines.
02:34So I was already familiar with the things to use, because they've been used for centuries in fragrance.
02:40Jonathan, how did you get interested in smell?
02:43I've always been interested in smell, um, as long as I can remember.
02:48But the more I learned about it, the more I encountered names, the more I desired to actually smell the names of the aromatics that I'd heard about.
03:03This is strange. Paintings. Quite often I'll see maybe a symbolist painting or some visual stimulus that will manifest in an idea for a perfume.
03:13Another source is an actual smell itself. Maybe it's a new synthetic. Wow, that synthetic is fantastic. I love that.
03:19Like, to make a perfume, it's almost pedantic. You have to be so, like, not a milligram out, um, a milligram out of some of the aromatics I use and the perfume's ruined.
03:30So I think that comes out in, um, not preciousness, but certainly a fanatical attention to perfection and to detail.
03:39As a consequence of being able to manufacture on a small scale, I can use a higher percentage of some of the more expensive natural ingredients.
03:56Some of the rarer flowers, and probably use them in a higher percentage.
04:01Really nice, fiery, woody, oriental. Oh, lovely. Lots of sandalwoods. Try some oil?
04:06Yep, please. Okay.
04:08Skin chemistry is probably the primary, um, influencing factor on the way perfume works on a person.
04:14Diet, that the food they eat is obviously going to influence the condition of their skin.
04:19Um, also I believe, and this is not often mentioned, but a person's aura, a person's spiritual persona,
04:28I believe a perfume has to harmonize with, with that.
04:32I'm very interested in Buddhism, and some of the Buddhist surfaces, for want of a better word, are saturated with references to perfume.
04:47Yeah, all of that comes through, distills down into my lifestyle.
04:52In the perfume bathrooms which bewitch the eyes, with their pillars gleaming with jewels and their dazzling pearl-embroided curtains,
05:00with their floor of pure bright crystal, with numerous urns encrusted with countless gems, and filled with flowers and odorous water,
05:09with exquisite perfumes whose aroma penetrates the immensity of the universe.
05:14I anoint the bodies of all the Buddhas, gleaming like purified, polished and burnished gold.
05:32Oh, okay. This fruit has inspired a number of perfumes.
05:35See, a perfumer, part of a perfumer's task and role is to recreate all odours, not just, oh yum, nice French style perfumes, but this.
05:46And I've worked on this actual smell cantaloupe for years, and I must say I'm quite pleased with, with having perfected,
05:52that I've got the identical smell to this fruit, but without ever having to extract the fruit.
05:57Just using myriad aromatic ingredients to reproduce this.
06:03That, again, I think would, must be perceived as art, to be able to reproduce that, just using chemicals that, each on their own, don't really smell like that.
