The Perfumery Team concept developed about ten years ago in a small group of perfumers working together at Lautier in Grasse. The team concept has completely transformed our creative approach to perfumery and led us into the following policies:
Selecting odoriferous substances. Although there exist thousands of perfumery materials from synthetic origins and a few hundred natural ones, today about 1000 to 1200 materials usually make a perfume composer’s palette collection.
Our inability to assimilate intrinsic knowledge of thousands of odoriferous substances (quality, durability, intensity), a need to master perfume composition, has led us to select no more than 400 aromatic raw materials, both synthetic and natural. It is interesting that computer statistics on daily aromatic raw material use in perfumery give a list of 600 items, fifty of which make up 80% of volume used annually. Our collection, although restricted, does remain open to new materials.