In the quest for the ultimate luxury, commissioning your own signature scent embossed with your name alongside that of Guerlain or Cartier must tempt even the most frugal. It helps, perhaps, that fashion, beauty and perfume houses describe their fragrances in language usually reserved for poetry. At Cartier, scent is ‘a diffraction of a woman’s beauty’. According to Guerlain, ‘perfume is the very colour of a soul’ and an early client was Balzac, who commissioned the company’s founder Pierre Francois-Pascal Guerlain to make an eau de toilette that would put him in the right frame of mind to write his novel Cesar Birotteau. ‘Of all the children devoted to perfecting the art of luxury and wealth, there is not one who produces such voluptuous sensations as the perfumer,’ mused Jean-Louis Fargeon, perfumer to Marie Antoinette.



No wonder, then, that it’s in Paris that bespoke perfumery is having a heyday. Which other art combines, so effortlessly, the two particularly Parisian conceits of desire and luxury? ‘The beauty of perfume is that it speaks at once to the intimate and the universal,’ explains master perfumer Francis Kurkdjian, who has created scents for many of the major luxury players in Paris, including Dior, Guerlain,Lancôme, Lanvin, Versace and Yves Saint Laurent. He is the ‘nose’ behind Jean-Paul Gaultier's first fragrance for men, the iconic Le Male, housed in a bottle the shape of a well-toned sailor’s body. Kurkdjian has also been conjuring up bespoke perfumes for 10 years for selected private clientele.



With an interior that lies somewhere between a miniature boudoir and a quirky art gallery, the tiny jewel-like Maison Francis Kurkdjian offers a host of sensory delights, including a selection of unusual ready-to-wear scents. Breakfast at Tiffany’s plays silently on a loop on a huge screen at the end of the corridor and Beatrice Ardisson’s interpretation of Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess tinkles like pearls.



Architects Yann le Coadic and Alessandro Scotto have instilled Maison Francis Kurkdjian with a sense of luxurious grandeur, and the incongruous yet beautiful window display, created by set designer Jean-Hugues de Chatillon, plays on notions of theatrical displacement and the surreal quality of desire. Bubbles blow in the breeze outside the shop, as a playful reminder of the curtain of bubbles installation that Kurkdjian created at the Château de Versailles in the summers of 2007 and 2008 for Les Grandes Eaux Nocturnes. At Versailles, guests would step through the bubbles, from reality to the fairytale world of the château’s gardens.



It is almost impossible to talk about perfume without talking about attraction. ‘Smell taps into our most primal desires,’ explains Kurkdjian. ‘You can close your eyes to something. You can stop touching it. But you can’t stop smelling because you can’t stop breathing.’



Smell is perhaps the most animalistic of all the senses. When we fall in love it is usually, subconsciously, because of smell, and our reason for liking or disliking a certain scent is often irrational. Scent can evoke powerful memories, and it is often the rekindling of these memories that we subconsciously search for when we look for our signature perfume.



‘Scent stirs up incredibly powerful emotions,’ believes perfumer Stéphanie DeBruijn, who launched her bespoke house Parfum sur Mesure in the Rive Gauche district of Paris in September 2008. In her consultations with clients she asks them about their dreams, who they admire, which herbs and spices they prefer, where they’d like to travel, and their saddest and happiest memories. ‘It is very instinctive. Often we want to wear the same smells we loved as a child.’ An olfactory memory is easier to retain and is often more powerful than a visual or audio one, which makes choosing a bespoke fragrance all the more complex.



At Guerlain, Sylvaine Delacourte encourages her clients to talk about colours, their dreams, the memories they never share, how they react to different fabrics and tastes and their most private secrets. One imagines that such a meeting is like a cross between a session with a psychologist, a dress fitting and having your portrait painted: everything must be exposed. ‘It’s about trying to get inside a person’s head and see into their subconscious desires,’ says DeBruijn. ‘A perfume is the most intimate garment a woman will wear.’



After the initial consultation the perfumer will create three or more scents over a period of months for the client to try. It’s essential that the scent smells good, technically, on the customer’s skin and that it speaks to their moods and to the image they’d like to convey.



 These appointments are termed ‘fittings’ and, like creating a couture gown, the fragrance is adjusted and adjusted again, by Guerlain’s ‘nose’ Thierry Wasser, until it ‘hangs’ perfectly. The process can take a year. The client receives two litres of their scent, which is presented in 23 Baccarat perfume bottles, and the client names the fragrance. The formula is then preserved in Guerlain’s prestigious directory, alongside some of the world’s most legendary fragrances.



The strict protocol of creating bespoke pieces that are absolute originals naturally translates into the same principle for fragrance. Formulas are kept secret and remain with the perfume house forever, like a treasured love letter from a secret admirer. What could be more Parisian than that?



Maison Guerlain, 68 avenue des Champs Elysées, 75008 Paris, +33 (0)1 4562 5257

Maison Cartier, 13 rue de la Paix, 75002 Paris, +33 0(1) 5818 2300

Maison Francis Kurkdjian, 5 rue d’Alger, 75001 Paris, +33 (0)1 4277 4033

Parfums Sur Mesure, 2 rue de l’Universite, 75007 Paris +33 (0)1 4734 5825