Anya's Garden Perfumes + The Natural Perfumery Institute

This is a wonderful article, from a Dragoco Report circa 1986.  Some of the parts of the article are a bit dated, yet much of it still has a lot of relevance to perfumers in 2010.  The title is The World of French Perfume. How did we get where we are? Where do we go from here? The link will take you to a page where other, previous articles are available for download, along with this latest one. I had a bit of trouble scanning this article.  If I scanned it in color, to capture the beautiful illustrations, the text suffered.  I'm not an Adobe expert, and if anyone would like to help me rescan this, please contact me.  In color, it was 116MB, and in black and white, under 3MB.  The only problem is that the photos are very distracting in black and white, and will use a lot of black ink. The article is scanned in landscape format, due to the size and orientation of the pages.  It will print out very nicely in portrait format. Many thanks to Michel Ro...

The latest in the series of articles in English has been uploaded to Anya's Garden Perfumes, and in it Mr. Roudnitska shares his thoughts and philosophy on "Concerning the Circumstances Favorable to the Creation of an Original Perfume" from Perfumer and Flavorist Magazine April/May 1984. Just click the link above to view it and the four previous articles in PDF form for download. The next article is quite large at 48 pages. It will take me some time to scan it all, and I hope I figure out the way to create PDFs in bits and pieces so I can scan over time, not having to sit down for a marathon scanathon! If anyone can help me with the logistics, I'd appreciate it.

The third of six article in English by famed perfumer Edmond Roudnitska has been uploaded to Anya's Garden Perfumes website. Titled "The Novice and His Perfume Palette", it was published by Dragoco in 1982. In it you will find a methodology that I believe is still used in perfume classes at Givaudan, pioneered by Jean Carles and Roudnitska. If any perfume historian can corroborate this, I would be happy to publish the information. Both self-taught perfumers, Carles and Roudnitska pioneered a strict methodology to teach novice perfumers how to learn the scent/memory association. In the Dragodo article, Roudnitska strives to share his take on how the context of fragrance families helps the beginner learn both context and association. I have used a method like this since the beginning of my classes in natural perfumery. I devised forms to record the information gleaned from the study, and progressed on to the methodology I formulated to take the beginner step-by-step into th...

Second Edmond Routnitska article available for download at Anya's Garden - "Perfumery and Marketing" Written in 1970, "Perfumery and Marketing" is the second in a series of six articles by Edmond Roudnitska that are being made available for the first time on the Internet. Michel Roudnitska, Edmond's son and a renowned perfumer in his own right , was kind enough to share them with me when I inquired about the availability of English language writings by his father. The articles are available in PDF format, which requires Adobe Reader. Please feel free to spread the word about these treasures, because for so long those of us who only speak English, or have English as a second language, but not French as a first, have been unable to take in his wisdom. I have scanned the articles to the best of my ability while still attempting to minimize their size for those with slow downloads. I have found that with the two articles so far that even though they are a big...

Edmond Roudnitska image courtesy Art et Parfum site Many English-only-speaking perfumers have commented on various internet forums that they are frustrated by the fact that they cannot read the written works of famed French perfumer Edmond Roudnitska. His books, L'Intimit du Parfum and L'Esthtique en Question and L'Esthtique du Parfum, when they are available, are only in French. An essay in English was published in the 1974 book Perfume by William I. Kaufman, and that is where I first became acquainted with his writing, and I have reread that essay many, many times over the years. A chapter from Perfumes: Art, Science and Technology edited by Lamparsky and Muller is available via Google books but I was very frustrated at only able to see a portion of a page at a time, so I gave up trying to read it. Reading off a screen really strains my eyes. So I wrote to Edmond's son, Michel, a renowned perfumer in his own right, asking if he knew of any English language articles b...