Down with Perfume

Perfume is typically crafted by mixing ingredients composed of essential oils and synthetic mixes. To recreate a known smell, most perfumers use headspace analysis, a process by which the air around a specific object is captured, then run through a device called a gas chromatograph to get its molecular profile. But Brosius maintains that good perfume requires a human touch. He cites Sweet Pea as an example. “You cannot extract [the essence of sweet pea] from the flower itself,” he says. Technicians from a well-known corporate perfumer tried to copy the flower’s smell using headspace analysis in the mid-90s, but when they asked Brosius to assess the result he found it subpar. It smelled partly of Lemon Pledge, partly of plastic flower, and partly of something he could only identify as “awful.” He leans forward to explain. “The analysis was all well and good, but it takes an incredibly skilled nose to go in there and fine-tune [a scent] to the point that it is recognizable.”

Brosius’s skilled nose has brought him tremendous success in the perfume world. Over the past decade, he has won awards, worked with celebrities, and exhibited his fragrance library at the Smithsonian’s Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum in New York—not bad for someone with no formal training. He got his start as a retail employee at Kiehl’s, a boutique pharmacy of sorts, during the late 80s and early 90s. It was there, one day, that his first celebrity client, Cindy Crawford, came in to stock up on a variety of scents. But she told him, “I really like just having one bottle in my bag. Could we put these all together?” Brosius was happy to give it a shot.

Thus inspired, he spent much of 1992 reading, researching, and experimenting. In 1994, he launched Demeter Fragrances, a company designed to offer an alternative to traditional perfumes. With Demeter, he crafted some 2,000 unconventional single-note scents—among them Glue, Earthworm, and Gin & Tonic—and earned four Fifi awards, the industry’s top honour. Two of them were for Snow, which took him five-and-a-half years to develop.

Despite Demeter’s success, Brosius sold the company in 2002, and left it altogether in 2004. Essentially, his reputation for mixing one-note perfumes had trapped him when he really wanted to focus on custom blends.

In July 2004, he opened CB I Hate Perfume. The name came from a manifesto he’d composed in 1992, when he was first thinking about becoming a perfumer. “Perfume is too often an ethereal corset trapping everyone in the same unnatural shape,” he wrote, “an arrogant slap in the face from across the room. People who smell like everyone else disgust me.”

The manifesto often leads to questions from customers. “People say ‘What does that mean? You’re a perfumer and you hate perfume?’ ” he says. “But that’s actually part of the process. People’s reactions help me to determine quickly if, yes, this is a client I can work with or, no, this is someone who needs to be directed to Bloomingdale’s as quickly as possible.”

Fortunately, my reaction is acceptable. Back at the table, we focus on cottage smells and narrow the final selection down to Bonfire, Ivy Vine, and the earthy White Truffle.

Brosius lines up three pipettes, three testing papers, and the three bottles, then dips each tester into its respective bottle and spreads it out under his nose, inhaling gently. When he thinks he has the right proportions, he writes a formula in my file and transfers a few drops from each bottle into a vial. He smells the mixture, adds a little more Ivy Vine, then tests again. Looking pleased, he hands me a tester.

I smell a smouldering fire blended with a summer rain. It’s a very specific moment—at the cottage on Lake Nipissing, watching the last ribbons of smoke curl up toward the evening sky. And it’s in a bottle.