Why a Perfumer Is Called a Nose

There are two names for the people who make perfume. Perfumer is the official one. Nose is the one you actually hear — inside the industry, and among the people who collect what the industry produces. In French, le nez. In English, the Nose. It is unusual to refer to a working professional by a single organ of the body.

The convention comes from Grasse. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as the town in southern France became the capital of the fragrance industry, the houses began using the term le nez for the perfumers whose sense of smell was uncommonly fine. It was not a casual nickname. Of the dozens of perfumers working in a given factory, only one or two were ever called by it. They were the ones who could parse the smallest distinctions, invent new combinations, and decide the direction of a house. Their number, today, is said to be no more than fifty, out of the roughly one thousand perfumers practicing in the world.

The word carries two things at once. The first is craft. A master perfumer can distinguish and remember more than three thousand raw materials. On a single inhalation, the formula reassembles itself in his mind at the level of the molecule. The second is authority. To be called the Nose of a house is to hold the right to decide what the house will smell like.

What is interesting is how long this title remained anonymous. Throughout the twentieth century, the bottle bore the name of the designer and no one else. Who had actually composed the perfume was a fact known inside the house and almost nowhere outside it. The perfumer was a famous ghost.

The structure began to shift in 2000, when Frédéric Malle started printing the perfumer's name directly on the bottle of every fragrance he released. The Nose, at last, was given a face.

To call a perfumer a Nose is at once a reduction and a tribute. It is an acknowledgment that an entire life has been condensed into a single sense. That every scent began at the tip of one person's nose.