L'Entropiste

Bertrand Duchaufour

Boltzmann’s grave in Vienna, with his famous formula for entropy S=k.logW credit: gingercinnamon/Atlas Obscura

Entropy is a measure of what you don’t know about something when you’re observing it from the outside. It is related to the number of internal configurations the thing can have that would leave whatever you’re observing unaffected. In this respect, perfumery is surely the highest-entropy of all the arts. You might spot an alteration in a painting, a typo in a novel or a wrong note in a score pretty easily, but jiggling the exact percentages in a perfume formula by a fraction would likely leave the overall effect unperturbed even to the keenest nose. For example, I remember the great perfumer Guy Robert once showing me all the formulae for Chanel No.5 he had collected over the years, arranged as an evolutionary tree by similarity so as to demonstrate who copied whom. One weird constant feature—biologists would say conserved—of all the different variations was the specification of exactly 144 parts sandalwood oil. Robert had asked a perfumer, who claimed to have replicated the formula himself by trial and error, “Why 144?” The guy had replied, “Because 143 is not enough, and 145 too much,” which Robert knew to be nonsense.

We are at the sunset end of the first school of niche perfumery. In the mid-nineties Bertrand Duchaufour and Mark Buxton worked at Créations Aromatiques, now part of Symrise, where they came up with a new style of perfumery. Buxton got there first with Anthracite Homme (Jacomo, 1991), a transparent woody-spicy structure, entirely novel at the time. Then Comme des Garçons decided to make this dry, dark, slightly medicinal style their own. Both Duchaufour and Buxton went on a roll, doing 10 perfumes for CdG in a decade, starting with CdG EDP Original in 1994 and culminating in Buxton’s CdG 2 in 2004, the same year as Duchaufour’s Timbuktu (L’Artisan Parfumeur), both miraculously good. I had a chance to ask them whether this had been a concerted effort and the answer was no; they apparently worked independently.

Duchaufour has composed over 300 fragrances since then and is one of the best-known perfumers of his generation, the first to achieve notoriety. So like Francis Kurkdjian and Dominique Ropion, he has launched his own line. On Michael Edwards’s database he is listed as both perfumer and art director of L’Entropiste. And that, in my opinion, is where the problem lies for all these perfumer-led lines.

Every author resents editing. Few are grateful for it after the fact, even when it saves their bacon. In all these years I’ve only ever heard one perfumer praising an evaluator to the skies, and that was Calice Becker reminiscing about the approximately 1,100 iterations of Tommy Girl. The world of perfumery is exceptionally crass, and a working lifetime spent appeasing evaluators and clients, frequently watching them reject the best idea in a lineup for something more banal, could drive anyone nuts. However, the antidote to bad editing is good editing, not no editing.

Duchaufour is incapable of composing a truly bad perfume. All his creations resemble him: urbane and affable. But in L’Entropiste he has missed an opportunity. True freedom should have meant unlimited formula cost, with great natural materials held aloft by bold synthetic accords. Instead the range feels disappointingly normal.

Samples kindly provided by Bloom Perfumery.

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