Top image: Alberto Santos-Dumont tests his airship

“I wanted to create something that represented the elevation of mind and soul,” says Mathilde Laurent, Cartier’s in-house perfumer, in reference to the house’s new men’s fragrance L’envol de Cartier. Having first joined the storied Parisian brand in 2005, Laurent has continuously pushed boundaries and sought new.

Seeing a shift in the attitude of men away from strength of body and towards strength of mind, Laurent wanted to capture this outlook in fragrance form. Cue inspirational tropes from artists’ explorations into drug experimentation and exotic notes that harmonise and evolve with one another.

For this latest fragrance, Laurent took her inspiration from the mythical ambrosia of the gods on Olympus, believed to confer immortality, and also aviation legend Alberto Santos-Dumont, who is one of the Maison’s enduring sources of inspiration dating back to 1904, when Louis Cartier granted Dumont’s wish to be able to tell the time while flying, resulting in the birth of one of the first ever wristwatches.

Marrying Cartier’s storied history with a progressive outlook, Laurent’s imagination may be absent from the ingredient list, yet it is the vital catalyst that conjures from nothing. Here, the acclaimed perfumer talks us through her references and the process behind creating a fragrance.

Alex James Taylor: Talk us through the starting point behind L’envol de Cartier…
Mathilde Laurent: I knew that we had to create a new masculine fragrance and I didn’t want to create as usual or with the same idea as most other masculine fragrances on the market. I was really fed up with all these perfumes that are created to appeal to a man who is strong and sporty and with muscles. I found it so old and I think that men today are also fed up with that concept. So I tried to think of something more modern and as I meditate a lot I know that men today are more interested in the power of the brain and neurosciences and everything surrounding the mystic of the brain. I wanted to talk about that and L’envol is in fact meant as a flight of the mind, flying in your head. So it’s really how you can elevate yourself, go to unknown places in your head, and also an analogy of creation because to be a creator, or to create your own life – which is what everybody is trying to do – you have to always alter and expand your way of thinking, your dogmas, you really have to invent the life you want to lead. This was my idea behind the fragrances so I tried to think about what could help to allow free-thinking, every creator has to renew themselves at some moment and it can be great anxiousness and, for example, Delacroix created a club with other artists, it was a rather French club [laughs], they had a doctor with them and they tried different drugs, for example, hashish. This is how I came to the idea of magical or helpful ingredients and it’s how I met the theme of Ambrosia, which was a magical drink of the Olympic Gods. 

AJT: How did that influence the actual ingredients?
ML: When I decided to work on Ambrosia I tasted hydromel (the famous nectar of the gods of Olympus), it exists in fact and is a wine that is made of wine and honey called mead. So I ordered some hydromel on the internet and I found a very good one in Canada. It was amazing, I tasted it a lot of times and I tried to imitate the taste in the fragrance because I wanted to have the refinement of it, the sweetness of it and also the variety, the variety of it was astonishing it contained so many different facets and many different notes. So that was the way I developed the ingredients.

AJT: And how long did it take to develop the fragrance?
ML: Around one year.

AJT: How does that compare to others?
ML: It’s not too quick but it’s not too long either, I think two years is really a good period of time to work on a fragrance. In such a house as Cartier, you always start from nowhere. Nothing is prepared and nothing is already done, so you really have to start from zero and invent everything, so it’s very long. It’s like a work of searching, like a scientific search, you never know when you will find the solution.

AJT: And how difficult is it to know when you are finished with a fragrance? Many artists say that they just instinctively know that a piece of art is finished, is this the same for you?
ML: Exactly. Sometimes you want to finish but it is incomplete and you can try but it doesn’t come, other times at the end you want to finish but you can see that each time you add, it is wrong. At the end you have to understand that the perfume will say, ‘Leave me alone, I’m done.’ You can’t do anything anymore. There is a harmony that has occurred, you don’t quite know how but it is there and it tells you that it is ready, and I really like this moment. I then know that the balance is perfect and it has its natural form. At the beginning it is me choosing the ingredients, but at the end there is a kind of ideal harmony that has occurred and I have to leave it. 

“At the end you have to understand that the perfume will say, ‘Leave me alone, I’m done.’ You can’t do anything anymore… an ideal harmony has occurred.”

AJT: You’ve been at Cartier for eleven years now, in terms of technology and innovation, how have you seen things change over that time?
ML: In perfumery you don’t have so much technology, in fact, people will try to find new ingredients and new molecular structures, but there is practically no innovation in terms of ingredients. Sometimes you have innovations in terms of process of extracting the oil or the absolute from a plant, but really the innovation is a bit like fashion almost, it’s not new fabrics that make a collection, it’s the imagination and the creativity of the designer. 

AJT: Cartier has such a rich and storied heritage, do you try and reference that in the fragrances?
ML: In fact, putting a history or the style of the house in a fragrance, I don’t know how I do it. When I joined Cartier I had spent eleven years at Guerlain, so I had already seen what it is to be in a house with such a history and such a style. When I joined, I ate all the information I could to try and really understand the house, so it influences your work in subtle ways. You have to understand a brand not only in an educational way, but also in a visceral way, in an unconscious way. So when I entered Cartier I devoured everything I could. I don’t always know where the history and style is in my work, a journalist recently wanted me to say a sentence about the style of the perfumer and I told them that it’s the unconscious part of the perfumer that everyone sees except for the perfumer. So everyone can see the style and the history in the perfume I do, except me, and I feel like this is the best explanation of the style. 

AJT: You mentioned earlier that you wanted to move the fragrance away from the stereotypical idea of men needing to be this muscled, strong person. Do you think that is something that is happening in fragrance across other houses?
ML: No I don’t think so, I think that on the market everyone is still doing the old masculine concept with the same notes because they don’t know, or want, to reinvent masculinity and they don’t pay attention to the current climate and how people are involving, men or women. This is what I call ‘brands’, I can’t call them houses. In perfumery there are a few houses like Chanel, Hermes, Cartier, and then there are many, many brands, ninety percent of perfumes are created by brands and they have no perfumer and don’t really pay attention to the perfume they put in the bottle or the creativity of the perfume. So they don’t ask themselves such questions. 

AJT: It’s interesting because in fashion there is very much this shift away from that old-fashioned masculine stereotype and towards a more unisex, androgynous and modern character. Maybe fragrance is a bit behind that.
ML: Maybe yes, if the fashion is doing the movement probably perfumery will follow because when brands don’t know what to do, they follow fashion. It is much easier to understand fashion because there are a lot of articles and books and people working at agencies to give you advice for the style, so for those brands it is much easier to call Nelly Rodi, the famous agency in fashion who advices all the brands in the trends and the future of fashion, some brands in perfumery do the same, they ask Nelly Rodi. So if the fashion does this shift, you will probably see it in perfumery too.

AJT: When an artist creates a painting they can often picture it beforehand, and the same with a designer, can you imagine a fragrance before you create it?
ML: Yes I can, I’m often asked what is the real difference between a perfumer and someone else, and I think the real difference is that a perfumer can really smell things in their head. So when you tell me the name of an ingredient, I smell it. When I think of a perfume I often have an idea in my head that is rather precise and that is the most difficult part, after that you just have to go to the laboratory and pick the ingredients that you think will mix to realise the smell in your head.

L’envol de Cartier is available now.