A collaboration. PICTURES Monty Coles Photography. WORDS Janice Breen Burns
Emma Leah leads her charmed and rather lovely life behind an elegant, unassuming shopfront tucked into a sparse retail strip on the lip of Melbourne’s CBD. She is a rarity in fashion, one of a handful of professional perfumers in Australia. Even rarer, Miss Leah supplements online sales of her own perfumes – the largest independant range in the country – with bespoke scents designed for people like you and me. “People looking for new connections with ideas of beauty and joy,” as she puts it.
A few weeks ago, Voxfrock stumbled on Miss Leah‘s Facebook and Linked In pages. She is “Fleurage”, roughly meaning “of flowers”. Her bespoke perfumes are concocted with up to 100 impossibly romantic, rare ingredients. “To create a sensory portrait of you,” she says. More recently, she began teaching ordinary mortals just enough of her exotic arts to concoct their own scent with, admittedly, a more practical fraction of those ingredients. Her classes were an instant hit (think hen’s parties, baby showers, morning teas particularly) and, she realised, she had tapped into a new and increasingly widespread hunger for knowledge about this ancient fashion accessory.
“Her bespoke perfumes are concocted with up to 100 impossibly romantic, rare ingredients…”
Voxfrock was intrigued by Fleurage. A perfumer! we thought. How lovely. But, weren’t perfumers Genoan? Or Parisien? Or extinct? Or, at best, strapped to the labs of mega scent factories operated by global designer brands? Voxfrock’s historic knowledge of the profession was pathetically limited. We knew of Ernest Beaux who concocted the legendary No. 5. for Coco Chanel. And, there was the mythical, murderous “gifted and abominable” Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, lead character of author, Patrick Suskind’s small, disturbing literary masterpiece, “Perfume”. We knew about him. But, that was about it. So, on a cold, quiet Friday morning, with legendary Vogue photographer Monty Coles, we arrange to meet Miss Emma Leah in her little Fleurage empire on South Melbourne’s wide, tram-tracked Park Street.
The perfumery’s slender Victorian glass door is opened by a sleek, wide-smiling, well dressed woman who could not resemble the mythic or cliche perfumers of our imagination less if she’d worn a stained leather jerkin and bi-focals. “This is my passion,” she says brightly, by way of introduction, and gestures around Fleurage’s attractive, but by no means exotic, interior. There is a frequent click of glass on glass as she moves about its glossy shelves and delicate displays, picking up tiny parfum and essential oil bottles here and there from the hundreds fastidiously arranged into classic scent categories. As she circulates, she passionately describes the perfumer’s typical scent “accords” or groups of essences that work together, and the vital “wheel” of scent types (pictured), from floral to chypre.
The perfumery’s own scent is nose-filling – complex and marvelously, floraly chaotic – but, if we had also hoped to encounter a shamozzle of glass flacons, flower presses, distillery coils, pipettes and other paraphenalia of the historic perfumer’s art, we were disappointed. “I source my essential oils from all over the world,” Miss Leah says simply, “Through an oil broker.” And, she shows us how the modern perfumer works, by sinking into a comfortable chair at a wide table set with banked ranks of a hundred-odd tiny glass vials, each containing one or several essential oils or synthetic scents. The work of extraction and distillation, or synthetic mimicry, is already done, in France, Croatia, India, China, a dozen other countries. She has only to wield these scents now, like an artist wields paint and brush. “Blending is where my skill lies,” she says, “Taking ingredients, putting them together into new sensory ideas, new scents.”
In the vials, her raw materials range from tuber rose and jasmine, frankincense and myrrh, violets and lily of the valley and a hundred spiced, mossy, woody, fruity and floral others. Among them, there is also a salting of miniscule, unexpected labels like “leather”, “smoke”, “chocolate”, “baby powder”, “clean cotton”, “fresh snow” and “metal”. “A lot of these are memory scents,” she says. “Powder, for example, a lot of people associate with love. It makes sense if you remember that the scent you take into the olfactory bulb at the top of your nose, is directly linked to the limbic system in your brain and forms an instant memory file.”
For bespoke clients particularly, she applies that remarkable palette with a classic perfumer’s skills: mathematics, chemistry and psychology underpinned by intuition that can’t be taught. “A bespoke (perfume) is a unique sensory portrait,” Miss Leahs says earnestly. “It is what I love doing most; what I am most devoted to. But it’s also quite an ordeal for most people. Some get totally freaked out by the number of subtle, complex decisions that have to be made.”
Every bespoke perfume begins with an interview: “What music do they like? What colours? What food? Their favorite places, favorite memories.” Miss Leah teases out the essence of a person and, as she does, takes notes, sticks paper tapers into dozens of tiny bottles and sniffs, filling brain and heart with as many possibilities as there are music notes, or words in a language. Later, she continues to experiment alone, with blends and quantities; one drop, half a drop, of one scent can shift a perfume from the sublime to the binnable. She splits the original 50ml or 100ml vial into several smaller experiments to spread the risk.
There are infinitely more variations relevant to a bespoke perfume, than the person’s locked memories or favorite flower to consider. “For example, every person wears scent differently,” Miss Leah says. “We each have a unique smell, like a fingerprint, that works with some scents and not with others. Vanilla, for example, I love. But it smells like vomit on me! Some smells we absorb, some we repel, some we radiate. That all has to be taken into account.”Miss Leah presents several of those “drafts” of a perfume to her bespoke clients before their final, unique blend is ready for bottling – often in hand-sculpted art glass from a local craftsman – and named. By all accounts the naming is a particularly thrilling task. Miss Leah says brides, for example, will often name their perfume for the date of their wedding.
Miss Emma Leah
Miss Leah says the majority of her clients are corporate men buying for “someone else”. The elaborate process to produce one 50 ml or 100 ml vial of unique, bespoke parfum, is expensive, from $3,000 to $7,000 for the most complex, 100 ingredient formula. “But, I also have a lot of clients who are not wealthy,” Miss Leah says. “They’ll save and save and save for their own bespoke perfume because they love the idea of it.”
It’s quite obvious that Miss Leah is particularly tickled by this motive of passion without practicality, perhaps because her own olfactory history is so steeped in a near-irrational devotion to scent. “Since I was very, very young, I’ve been obsessed,” she laughs, “Always had my face buried in something; the cinnamon jar, herb garden, kitchen spices, the camphor wood blanket chest..”
As an adult, she plunged into the study of aromatherapy, the most accessible science relevant to her obsession. But, she is aware, aromatherapy is also scorned by some classic perfumers. “There’s a certain snobbery, yes, but aromatherapy is where the research is, about the ingredients of perfume,” she says. After a succession of related studies including soap-making, cosmetics, skin care, she decided on a narrow, risky and rare course of work for an Australian so remote from Paris or, even more specifically, the heart of perfume making in Grasse, Genoa. “I decided,” she says. “I loved this: traditional high class perfumery. It’s all I want to do.”
Fleurage Perfume Atelier, 280 Park Street, South Melbourne, (03) 9036 0326.
