Old English clubs

For an interview I am doing (or getting done ….depending the way you look at it) I checked how a perfumer is defined on wikipedia; this in order to figure out what others think. Not that I would care too much about how my fellow human beings define the term perfumer, more out of curiosity. To make things short: A nose must know a lot of smelling compounds, distinguish them alone or in mixtures and know how they develop over time in presence of other compounds.

Ok, so far so good. Sometimes I wonder how others and also I do this. How do you come up with a memory concept to capture how a sent (let’s take lavender) develops over time in presence of a multitude of other compounds (like rose, tobacco, benzylsalicylate,…)? To me this looks pretty much like an N-dimensional problem with lots of non-linear factors. Thus, a pretty tough task.

Could I pack what I think I know into an excel file, a matrix of lavender on one side, rose, tobacco, benzylsalicylate on the other side? No. I couldn’t. Maybe others can. I can’t, because I think this knowledge (if existent) is present in a sublime way. It is about a feeling that lavender with tobacco will cut the tips out of lavender, make it dull on one hand, but keeps it down on planet earth, takes out the airiness,… hard to describe. Describing it in a picture, lavender in this tobacco company is like on old English club, where well-nourished old men would smoke their cigars, and ask the youngster new member with his lavender eau de toilette to please sit down and wait until his time has come to talk.

More on English gentlemen clubs on Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentlemen's_club_(traditional)