Paris

Visiting Osmotheque, the world’s only perfume archive, was a dream come true. Their focus is not perfume bottles (though they have a gorgeous showroom with a ton of antique and vintage bottles), but the juice itself: the actual scents. They formed in 1990 when a group of perfumers decided it was not enough for perfumes to live on only through memory, written descriptions, and nostalgia; we need to be able to smell them firsthand.

This picture showing “la cave” or “the cellar” — 12°C fridges filled with dark glass bottles containing perfume topped with argon, an inert gas, to keep the perfumes as stable as possible within their bottles — that is the heart of Osmotheque. Their archive houses 5,000 perfumes, 850 of which are no longer available except here.

What I did not realize until I visited is that Osmotheque does not simply take the vintage/antique perfume out of the bottle and preserve it. They have perfume formulas entrusted to them, and they re-blend the formulas with fresh materials: that is what gets preserved in the cellar. (When a raw material is no longer available, that perfume does not get reconstituted.) It is simply reality that perfumes under any conditions will degrade and change over time, to the point that after enough years have passed, the way the juice smells is no longer the same scent that the perfumer created and shared with the world. I asked if they ever get vintage perfume so well-preserved that they don’t need to reconstitute it; the answer is no.

After visiting the cellar, we were treated to a fantastic (and scented) lesson on the history of perfumery. We smelled perfumes from centuries ago when distilled alcohol was first used, all the way through the 20th century. It was striking how that musty “vintagey” smell that overpowers so much of vintage perfume for me was basically absent. There were perfumes where I could smell a sensibility that I associate with vintage style (Shocking by Schiaparelli, 1937, was the primary example of this for me), but on the whole, I felt like I was encountering the perfumes clearly, the way they were originally encountered, and not through the scrim and cobwebs of age and time.

Thank you to Jen at Immortal Perfumes for an incredible week in Paris! We went to Osmotheque and got to smell classics from their archive, visited Versailles, vintage markets, Fragonard museum and workshop, plus several other perfume shops both contemporary and historic. So many smells, so many memorable moments. I’ll share more in the coming days but here are a few snapshots, including me with a giant bottle of Shalimar upstairs at Guerlain.

One of the best things I smelled in Paris was the scent of a church, Saint-Pierre de Montmartre. Built in the 12th century, it’s the second-oldest standing church in Paris. The smell was incense with nearly 900 years of patina — as if the stone had absorbed centuries of incense and candle smoke and prayers sent upwards, and the walls whispered their scent back into the air inside its arches, growing softer and deeper with each passing year.

One day, after spending the morning ambling through different gardens throughout the Palace of Versailles grounds, we stumbled upon the Perfumers’ Garden. It was rainy, fragrant, and peaceful (and, it turns out, not open to the public that day — we got kicked out later, but not before enjoying the plants and flowers).