Perfume is a mixture of fragrant essential oils or aroma compounds, fixatives and solvents in liquid form that are used to give the human body, food, animals, objects, and living-spaces an agreeable scent. Perfumes contain tens to hundreds of ingredients, including natural aromatic plant extracts and synthetic aromatic chemicals (including alcohols, aldehydes, esters and terpenes). Certain animal secretions also serve as perfume fixatives, keeping more volatile perfume ingredients from evaporating too rapidly. Such products include ambergris from the sperm whale, castor oil from the beaver, and musk from the civet cat.
As with the other senses, smell doesn’t have a vocabulary of its own so it borrows from the other sensory systems. Smell can be described as sharp, sour, salty, warm or cool, and it can smell like flowers, fruit, chocolate or wood. But the most interesting aspect of a fragrance is that it is unique to each individual wearer, since the skin’s own smell plays an important role in how a perfume smells on the person wearing it.
Magne’s story of Anne, a world-class perfumer who is a plausible psychopath, is intriguing and the film’s many small olfactory touches add up to an absorbing look at the fascinating industries that depend on the human nose—from luxury handbag designers to zoological parks hoping to recreate authentically scented environments for their visitors. Although the early dynamic between Anne and Guillaume resembles a salty cop/bad cop routine more than a romantic meet cute, Magne has some fun with this comedic subplot as well.