Steven Claisse, Belmay Inc.’s corporate senior VP of fragrance development, and Nancy Cordaro, Belmay's senior evaluator, co-led a lecture at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York titled “The Language of Perfumery.”
On Oct. 18th, the lecture dramatized the real life steps involved in accepting a customer brief, exercising the creative process, strategy and evaluation, all the way to final submission.
“In the past, clients used a more traditional lexicon as to what fragrance types they wanted for a project (i.e. fougere or oriental). Today the language has evolved, giving way to an emotional narrative as clients seek to challenge the creativity of both the evaluator and perfumer. These days, we no longer 'color in the lines'," said Claisse.
One of the key points was learning to interpret the “Language of Perfumery." Perfumers and evaluators must interpret the more creative briefs /media sent from clients and turn that into a creative and commercial olfactive expression, the team explained. That and modern perfumery language transcends “classical terms.”
Students were also given opportunity to act as evaluators to the perfumer as they worked on a “blue sky brief” based on nothing else but a photo of an actor with the question: "What would Actor XYZ’s fragrance smell like?"
Both Claisse and Cordaro believe that if students take stock of where the fragrance industry is at this moment and are flexible as to where it is evolving, they will be able to offer their best expertise and find success in the fragrance industry.
