Do you have any idea what a goatskin glove smelled like in the 16th century? Very bad. Borderline putrid. Pretty much like a dead goat. Also, lye. And because the French town of Grasse was all about selling leather goods, this was a real problem for residents. "So we started taking the plants that grew naturally here — lavender, rosemary, thyme — and using those to scent the leather," explains Antoine Leclef, a horticulturist from the region. (He uses the first-person quite broadly.... He was born in Grasse several hundred years later. Leclef is 34.)
As the story goes, Catherine de Medici made it known that she was a big fan of her sweet-smelling gloves, and soon Grasse couldn't scent its leather fast enough. After a while, the town got more ambitious about wielding the power of fragrance: Why not try to cultivate flowers and plants from other parts of the world? Jasmine and tuberose and, above all, roses. It turned out they all thrived in these hills, about 12 miles north of modern-day Cannes. Today, if you have ever heard anything about Grasse, it is probably that it is the "cradle" or "birthplace" or "capital" of perfumery. Take your pick.
By the last century, though, this cradle was showing serious cracks. Where there were once hectares upon hectares of flower fields, only a few parcels remained. As convincing synthetic versions of Grasse's crops were becoming available, urbanization was also overwhelming the French Riviera. Buildings grew more abundantly than bushes. According to Grasse Expertise, a group created five years ago to support and offer a trademark for local growers and perfumers, by 2008, the region (which officially extends beyond the town itself, down to the Mediterranean coast and west toward Marseilles) had only two producers of perfume plants.
But in recent years, a renaissance has taken hold: As of 2022, two has become 29. And one of those new farmers is a little fragrance company you may have heard of: Lancôme. In November 2019, Lancôme's global brand president, Françoise Lehmann, visited a 9.8-acre parcel of land that was for sale in Grasse. "[The property] was not that well-organized at the time and it was pouring rain," she recalls. "I fell in love." Her father, who comes from a long line of farmers, had come along and gave his enthusiastic approval. The owners had farmed the land — mostly vegetables, with a few flower patches — organically for decades (a wacky idea in the 1950s), so the soil was free of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, a rarity in the region.
In October 2020, the ink was dry and Lancôme was in the farming business. Leclef was hired to run the show. Several thousand rose bushes were planted, along with irises, jasmine, and lavender.
Just as those bushes were beginning to flower this spring — the start of their second annual, three-weeklong heyday — I stepped through a wrought-iron gate and was enveloped by a clear, honeyed scent. This is what Lehmann was after: "terroir." It's a buzzword in the wine world (I've heard it translated as "somewhereness"), but it also applies to fragrance; perfumes, too, can be an expression of the soil, sun, and air.
To capture the aromatic essence of the rose requires months of fertilizing with manure, watering, and pruning. And then: speed. At 8 a.m., several harvesters were getting to work, cupping each blossom in their fingers and freeing it from the stem with a quick flick of the wrist (and an audible snap). They would gather a dozen silky blossoms in one hand before dropping the fistful into their ankle-length aprons. Before noon, the rows of bushes, covered with pink when I arrived, were solid green, picked bare. I stopped a woman with a burlap bag full of petals swung over her shoulder, just to ask a couple of questions. "Je dois y aller," she said ("I have to run"). Then she did indeed take off — up the hill to a van waiting to whisk the petals to the LMR Naturals by IFF (International Flavors & Fragrances) facility in an industrial park only 10 minutes away. (IFF is one of the world's largest fragrance producers and, like its competitors, has a location in Grasse.)
A delay of even one hour can mean a significant loss of scent for these flowers. The
petals begin to ferment; their oil dissipates. At the facility, the petals are quickly shaken from the burlap into far less charming plastic, orange crates and are soon dumped into a giant metal vat. A solvent, usually hexane, follows, the lid closes, and the vat becomes, in effect, a petal-washing machine. When the cycle ends, the solvent is evaporated, leaving behind what is called a "concrete." That waxy solid, dense with the scent of thousands of roses, will be mixed with alcohol and heated to extract all that fragrance into a highly concentrated, liquid absolute.
When I returned the next day at 8 a.m., the harvesters had not yet started their work. Fields that had been a wall of green the previous afternoon were again punctuated with pink. This dance would continue for another two weeks. By the end of May, at least three tons of roses were harvested (Lancôme wouldn't share the exact amount). A ton of roses generally yields about 35 ounces of absolute. In other words, a 1979 Volkswagen Beetle's weight in flowers gets you about three tall latte cups' worth of rich and powerful rose juice, to be meted out by perfumers, drop by precious drop.
The process is magical. But among the bees and beetles and butterflies, we must also acknowledge the elephant in these fields: climate change. Temperatures are rising: "This year we had three days of frost. When I was growing up, we had one or two months," says Leclef. And water is getting scarcer: "When I was studying agriculture, this region got about 800 millimeters of water per year. In the first four months of this year, we had 45."
Lancôme is working with IFF and Leclef to develop rose plants that require less water, but that's several years away, says Lehmann. In the meantime, the property has two basins that collect water from the hills above and the river below; it uses no water from the town system. Leclef's team has devised a schedule in which they give the roses more water less often, to get hydration deeper into the roots — and ultimately use less water. The main building on the property, used to host visitors and educational sessions, is insulated with the lavender straw that grows a few meters away and doesn't have air-conditioning. (Lehmann walks the walk — she doesn't have air-conditioning in her Paris apartment either.) And everything that is grown here is used: The rosewood from the bushes is being upcycled into Lancôme's skin care; the fruit of the 800-year-old olive trees becomes oil (for the time being, it's only for salads, not serums); and I walked away with two jars of jam (fig and jasmine).
In 2018, UNESCO put the fragrance savoir-faire of Grasse on its Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list, along with the bobbin lacemaking of Slovenia, the Rukada Natya string-puppet theater of Sri Lanka, and the Mooba dance of the Zambia Lenje ethnic group. What started as a solve for a goat-stench situation evolved into a rich tradition and an art form — one worth preserving for as long as we possibly can.
(Sources: Allure)
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