A Sense of Europe Exhibition

At the beginning of February IFRA hosted an exhibition in the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium.

The exhibition, titled ‘A Sense of Europe’ was designed to show members of the European Parliament the role that fragrance plays in Europe’s cultural, artistic, historic and economic heritage.

The exhibition captured key moments in Europe’s post-war history and illustrated them through a series of moments in time, olfactory sculptures and popular perfumes of the day.

A Sense of Community
The first moment in the exhibition was 1957, the place was the Palazzo dei  Conservatori on Capitoline Hill, Rome. The event was the signing of the Treaty of Rome bringing the European Economic Community in being.

Christophe Laudamiel, one of the world’s top perfumers, created a scent sculpture to represent the smell of the treaty’s paper and ink along with the woody, leathery musty smell of the room it was signed in.
The two popular perfumes of the époque were L’Interdit by Hubert de Givenchy and Vetiver by Carven.
The launch of L’Interdit was the first time an actress, Audrey Hepburn, became the face of a perfume. This beautiful floral fragrance has been representative of the elegance of Parisian haute couture for over 50 years.

The emancipated men's perfume house Carven launched "Vetiver" in the 50’s. This fragrance opened up a new olfactory track for men with its beautiful study of the essence of vetiver. It became a signature fragrance of Carven and many other creations have since been inspired by it.
After the success of such perfumes the link between European fashion and the dominance of European fragrances became inseparable.

Today the fragrance industry contributes 10 billion euro a year to the economy and sustains 35000 thousand jobs. And, of course, makes the lives of millions more of us smell a little sweeter.

A Sense of Well-being
The second moment in the exhibition was 1964. In a country experiencing the greatest prosperity in its history the British Conservative Party campaigned for re-election in 1959 on the slogan: ‘You’ve Never Had It So Good.'

The following ten years of healthy growth and low unemployment had also created West Germany’s Wirtsschaftswunder, France’s Trente Glorieuses and Italy’s IL Miracolo Economico. Bringing with them the new labour saving devices of the new consumer society.

None have had more lasting social significance than the washing machine. Alongside increased access to education and oral contraception it played a significant role in the liberation achieved by European women in the 1960s.

For this section of the exhibition, Procter & Gamble kindly donated the original scent of Ariel washing powder from the 60’s. This scent  is based on the philosophy that the perfumes in household products have a job to do. As well as being aesthetically pleasing they have to be functional. A perfume which does not perform technically well will not be acceptable irrespective of its suitability as a fragrance type.

This scent is a sophisticated woody floral aldehydic fragrance which is residual to fabrics. It was created by first selecting raw materials which are most stable in a laundry powder format and perform the best on clothes. Then the building blocks of Rose, Ylang and Liliy of the Valley were added, creating a ‘skeleton’ of the fragrance, which was then turned into the finished article.

With household appliances becoming more commonplace in European households during the 60’s, the European fragrance houses became more and more innovative and started to create ‘functional fragrances’.

To this day the original Ariel scent is still instantly recognizable providing the brand with instant recognition and loyalty.

As well as looking and feeling clean if laundry smells clean then our brain tells us that it is clean. That’s because our sense of smell is directly connected to the brain’s limbic system where our memories and emotions are stored.

So a clean smell motivates and rewards us for the regular cleaning that leads to a safe and healthy home environment.

And since fragrance is emotional it’s not surprising that the smell of clean laundry is the smell that we most commonly associate with the comfort of home.

A Sense of Freedom
In the summer of 1989 the opening of the Hungarian and Czech borders made the first holes in the ‘iron curtain’ that had divided Europe for 43 years.

During the autumn East Germany’s Montagsdemonstrationen (Monday demonstrations) grew in strength. And when Information Minister Gunter Schabowski was asked at a press conference on November 9th when his citizens would be free to travel the question took him by surprise.

He shrugged and replied “sofort, unverzuglich” (immediately, without delay).

That night the gates opened and hundreds of thousands of Ossis poured through the Berlin Wall to be greeted with champagne and flowers.

Our third moment in the exhibition marks the moment the Berlin wall came down in 1989.

When the wall came down many from the east had never experienced fresh fruits such as bananas and oranges. Christophe Laudamiel created another scent sculpture to illustrate this moment.

The scent contains Italian oranges mixed with the juiciness of blood oranges also from Italy and mixed with molecules found in bananas. There is no banana extract available for perfumery use: unlike orange peel, bananas contain very little essence!

Banana pulp is extremely fragile, it oxidizes readily in the air, so perfumers have to go back to the origins of the banana smell: the different banana molecules created by nature.  This scent contains seven banana molecules, a fine dosage from green banana to pulpy banana to ripe bananas, eight orange extracts and molecules to recreate the different facets of an orange as well. 

As a general rule, a natural extract rarely smells like the original fruit or flower "on the vine" or "on the branch".  It always has to be spiked to recreate the real thing, like figurative art. 
These two fruits represent what isolated Eastern Europeans were craving before the fall of the Berlin wall.  Upon the fall of the Wall, these citizens suddenly splurged on these fruits and famously emptied German supermarkets, especially of bananas.

The two perfumes representing this era are Joop by Wolfgang Joop and Samsara by Guerlain

Europe discovered German fragrance with Joop’s oriental, floral and very powdery perfume launched by fashion designer Wolfgang Joop.

With the launch of Samsara, Jean Paul Guerlain, continued to write the history of Guerlain, begun in the eighteenth century. This woody oriental, sweetly softened by iris is a great modern classic.

The fragrance industry was extremely innovative at this time and the number of new briefs was growing fast. At the beginning of the 90’s the average number was 60 to 70 briefs per year. By 2012 this has grown to 600 to 700.

Like any innovative industry, the fragrance industry needs to protect its intellectual property. The scent of flowers or the smell of oranges cannot be copyrighted. But, unlike a piece of music, for example, the composition of an original fragrance cannot be copyrighted either.

New substances and delivery technologies can be patented. And a single unified patent throughout the European Union will help to maintain European innovation in these fields.

But the best way of protecting the valuable intellectual property that lies in the composition of original fragrances lies in the harmonisation of the existing civil law of trade secrets in the EU.

That way their exact compositions remain known only to their creators but can be shared with regulatory or medical bodies confidentially.

A Sense Of Creativity
The next époque in the exhibition was the 1990’s. This was a tremendously creative period for Europe.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau announced their proposal to use hypertext “to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse” in Geneva in December 1990.

They created the three technologies essential to their WorldWideWeb; the URL address, HTML publishing and the HTTP transfer system. And in 1992 they published the first photograph (of a ‘high energy’ band) to appear on the web.

In Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, France and the UK HI-NRG Music, Italo-Disco, House, Trance and Techno were meanwhile being mixed together to create what became known as Dance Music.

The Fraunhoffer Institute in Nuremberg researched the transmission of music over telephone lines for twenty years before their MPEG Audio Layer III was patented in 1996.

With the MP3 all kinds of music became available to everyone everywhere. And laptops came to rival decks for DJs from Antwerp to Ibiza.

The pace of scientific discovery and creative energy encouraged an explosion of innovation in Europe’s fragrance industry at the same time.

New substances and new delivery technologies allowed more complex compositions. Evoking the spirit of the new age in sweet notes of vanilla or caramel or milk, or in the natural elements of earth, wind and fire mixing powerful memories of youth and of nature on the dance floors of Europe.

There are three perfumes represented in this section; Tresor by Lancôme, Angel by Thierry Mugler and Multiple Rouge by Humiecki & Graef.

The 90’s saw a ‘remix’ of "Tresor", originally launched in the 1950's. It was an immediate success with its ambassador Isabella Rossellini. Lancôme created a beautiful floral bouquet, which is a direct descendant of "Quelques Fleurs de Houbigant ", launched in 1912!

Thierry Mugler’s first fragrance, Angel, evokes the spirit of carnival sweets and treats. Fruit, toffee apple caramel and cotton candy all marry surprisingly well with the mysterious patchouli offering women a very unique fragrance.

Multiple Rouge is a fragrance about folly, inspired by ecstatic joy on the cusp of sentimentality. The intense, almost breathtaking aroma of wild, red berries united with frozen orange, peach kernel, green pineapple, Vietnamese coriander, green violet and “immortelle absolute” turn this scent into a visceral experience.

Christophe Laudamiel also created a unique scent sculpture for this section. He recreated the feeling of a sweaty, smokey nightclub at about 4am. This scent is a mixture of electric feelings, electronic music and sound systems. It evokes the freshness of the colognes and newly showered people mixed with the feelings of a crowd that has danced all night long in a building that has hosted many parties. It exudes body odors, earthy musty feelings of underground dance clubs, fresh laundry, fresh citrus, green fruity colognes.  Mystery is brought through with cardamom, cinnamon and amber, sweaty notes found in humans but also in grapefruit and yuzu, hairy notes recreated by fragrance chemists, electric notes from rhubarb or from the violet leaf family.

A Sense Of Apprehension
The final chapter of the exhibition brought us up to the present day 2012.

Like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand the implosion of the US subprime mortgage market was a largely unforeseen event that set in motion a chain of unrelated but far reaching consequences.

By 2010 Greece, Ireland and Portugal found themselves unable to service the growing costs of their mounting debts. They turned to the European Union for help and imposed austerity budgets. Wages fell and unemployment rose.

In Spain and Greece ‘The Indignant’ took to the streets. Elsewhere the Occupy movement established protest camps.

As the political debate about how to solve Europe’s sovereign debt crisis continued the crisis spread. The governments of Greece and Italy resigned and the future of Euro began to be questioned.

Europe’s protest camps may be mocked for their utopian agendas but alongside their belief in a fairer society they demand effective regulation of the finance industry.

The potential harm of derivatives, for example, has been shown to be so severe that some economists argue they should be as strictly regulated as alcohol or drugs.

Fragrances do not have the potential to crash the world economy. But the industry has always taken its responsibilities seriously and its safety programme is fully compliant with the world’s most comprehensive regulatory regimes.

It evaluates fragrance use for consumer and environmental safety. Implementing current scientific knowledge quickly, cost effectively and often in anticipation of any regulatory issues.

The scents chosen for this moment are tinged with irony. Christophe created a scent sculpture to smell like money.

To recreate the smell of friendly paper, this scent used the same notes as found in natural wood fibers, in hay and in blond tobacco leaves. It also draws on the smell of treated paper and solvents like chlorine and sulfur as found in saffron (in terms only of the odor. Real chlorine is not used). Finally it used the smell of ink from high speed printers and the smell of fresh solvent like turpentine oil, found naturally in Juniper oil.

Again, with a touch of irony, the two perfumes chosen from this period were Paco Rabanne’s One Million and Lady Million.

One Million was one of the best-selling men's fragrances for 2011 and the gold bar illustrates the success of the very powerful, amber and woody notes of our time.

The female version, Lady Million, appeared two years after the men’s fragrance. This scent has a floral accord of jasmine and gardenia combined with fruity and delicious notes.

Community
The final olfactive treat for the visitors to the exhibition was a very special fragrance called “Community”, developed specifically for this event by Christophe Laudamiel.

 “Community” is a rich citrus-based, fresh scent with Bergamot and mandarin developing into a fresh and elegant sensual heart.

Ingredients have been sourced from some of the best European factories ensuring the highest levels of sustainability and quality and promoting biotopes around the world.  The fragrance is meant to embody dynamism and optimism with solid reassuring foundations.  It represents a feeling of togetherness, to encourage people to rally to a safe haven.  It features European environments, from crisp Nordic air, off-shore sea breeze, wet stones and moss, majestic forests and sculpted woods combined with essences of Mediterranean uplifting and colorful feelings.

We have taken the extraordinary step of published the formula for this fragrance as a one-off. We did this in order to show the high level of creative artistry and know-how that goes into creating a fragrance giving it its beauty and value. 

The European Community happens to be one the most recognized cradles of creative perfumery and of ingredient expertise worldwide, just like in haute cuisine or contemporary architecture.  Its heritage deserves to be protected and its know-how further unleashed.

This is one of the very first times anyone can actually contemplate a genuine full fragrance formula, like a sheet of music. Formulas have traditionally been a closely guarded secret and still are an important piece of intellectual property for the fragrance industry.

Incentives to innovate, particularly within the European Union, have been weakened not only by piracy in Asia and other rapidly developing economies, but also by inconsistent trade secret protection offered by EU Member States’ legislation in this area.

The European Union has an extraordinary concentration of industries for which trade secrets are essential to compete successfully.  The fragrance industry is one and would like to see an appropriate place for trade secrets within the European Union’s intellectual property regime.

We hope that the exhibition with its blend of history, art, culture and scents has improved the understanding of how fragrances in all sorts of consumer products define our times every bit as much as fashion, or music, or film and how they mark our shared history every bit as much as architecture, or sport, or politics.