Paul Guerlain

Paul appears that morning on the terrace of a Paris café, as the city awakens to a new life. He wears a leather jacket, his fragrance is a subtle blend of vetiver and orange blossom and, with his old-fashioned gentlemanly manners, he recalls Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Joseph Kessel and Romain Gary. It is a fleeting but, paradoxically, persistent thought.
He comes from a long line of perfumers, the Guerlains, who have become a household name. Not only in France, but all over the world, his name is synonymous with the absolute pinnacle of French perfumery. For him it has never been a burden or a relief, it is simply his story, his memories, who he is as a person. He tells me about his first trip with his grandfather. He was 5 years old when they travelled together to Mayotte to visit the vanilla, clove and kaffir lime plantations. He wandered around the house, smelling the distillations in progress.
Paul half-heartedly tried to escape his fate for a while, toying with the idea of becoming a lawyer. He couldn't sit still in class, his mind was always elsewhere. When he turned 15, a decade after smelling ylang ylang for the first time, he went to see his grandfather in his study and asked him for the keys to a small room in his house. "There was a small one-room laboratory in my grandfather's house. I asked him for the keys to the lab and I remember he gave them to me willingly. He never went into it, it was a rather absurd place, next to the old oil boiler and everything smelled of heating oil. It wasn't exactly the best place to smell, but for me it was totally new, I locked myself in the laboratory. As soon as I had the keys in my hands, I spent hours and days in that small laboratory. Those keys opened up a whole new world and gave me access to many raw materials. I was alone with all those materials, a vast open expanse of possibilities. It was a constant discovery. I didn't even know what the names on the labels meant, I didn't understand anything, apart from the natural raw materials like rose and jasmine, which were easy, and even then, but when it came to the synthetic raw materials, I had no idea, I just smelled and experienced them. It was as if someone had switched on a light. Being in that lab was eternal, like a cocoon, I just had to close the door".