IF YOU PUT a rose in front of artists Henri Matisse or Vincent Van Gogh and asked them to paint what they saw, you'd get two different paintings. Perfumery is the same. The floral note in a fragrance is a perfumer's interpretation of that flower, and each will be different.
My first olfactory memory was when I was about five years old. We lived in the suburbs among new houses. There were hardly any gardens or flowers but my grandmother lived in the country. I loved going there. It was an old house with a rambling garden and she'd throw seeds everywhere, so it was a riot of vegetables and flowers. I still remember the colours.
Her neighbour, Margariet, owned a flower shop and I used to think: 'What a wonderful life she has owning a flower shop'. Margariet had a greenhouse at home. We weren't allowed in there, but I snuck in one day. The moment I stepped inside, a wave of mossy, humid and earthy smells swept over me, and because it was spring, there was the smell of geraniums in the air. It was dark, deep, beautiful ... absolutely amazing. I've always believed that it was this moment of awe that started my fascination with flowers.
When I had my own flower shop, I realised one day that I was buying flowers just because of the way they smelt and didn't care how they looked. That's when I thought: 'Maybe I should just be buying a fragrance that smelled like flowers!' I went to the best pharmacies and even to the biggest department stores in New York to look at the international fragrances, but I couldn't find any that smelt like real flowers. Everything smelt like versions of flowers, or more accurately, old lady versions of flowers.
So that was my calling - to make a fragrance that smelt like real flowers. The way flowers would smell in the wild, or in a garden or in a flower shop. It was going to give off a visceral feeling of the real thing, and not be a result of chemistry and perfumery.
A woman should always have an intimate relationship with her fragrance. You can always tell when a woman doesn't know herself if she needs someone to tell her what fragrance to wear. Confident women know what appeals to them because they understand who they are and know what they want to promote. I've only created fragrances with myself in mind. I don't know any better than what I like and I know there are women out there like me. They will buy the fragrance, but for others, it won't be to their taste. That's the way it should be. We should never be able to wear a scent that a million other women wear and be comfortable with it. That, to me, is odd.
