“Like painting, cooking is an art that fascinates and inspires me. I experience an incredible pleasure in discovering and tasting the dishes of great chefs like those of everyone, in France and when travelling. It is an art that feeds me, literally, and feeds my creativity.
When I arrived in Paris, my first creation was a perfume for the Poiret brand and, during the press launch, I was speechless in front of the buffet, fascinated by the tastes and combinations available to us.
It turns out that the author was Alain Passard, a starred chef himself very sensitive to the arts, music, painting, sculpture. I started chatting with him about cooking, ingredients, associations. I went to visit him at l’Arpège, his restaurant. He made me discover, smell and taste all kinds of food, and I understood at that moment that everything that tasted good was good on the nose.
Since then, I have exchanged regularly with chefs, in particular our cook in house, Elisabeth Larquetoux-Thiry, because we can nourish each other: it always amazes me to see how we combine flavors and smells, it’s very different, fascinating, inspiring.
Food has always held an important place in my family. I was born in Geneva, from an Italian mother who taught me to cook and even enrolled me, at the age of 15, in a cooking class, so that I could master the basics. She herself had learned from her mother, an excellent cook.
When I think of my grandmother, I see great moments of happiness, hugs and little attentions. She could travel miles to bring me a snack, but her specialty was gnocchi. We often went to eat at her house, and when she had spent hours making her gnocchi, her little apartment smelled of roasted garlic (very different from raw garlic), basil, tomato, and the mixture of all these odors formed a new one. It was the alchemy of perfumes and materials that was implemented.
A meeting between the senses and matter
This is how I work in my laboratory, freely, without a brief. Thus, to create a Hermessence, I seek out my emotions, the encounter between the senses and the material – and the thread unfolds. Recently, I’ve been working on violet, which is the smell of beauty (because it’s often the smell of lipstick) but can’t be captured. This is called a mute flower.
In perfumery, you must use its leaf, which allows you to have an airy, powerful and enveloping extract. I had fun pairing it with Volynka leather, and this pairing worked wonders. Violet, light, plays hide and seek with leather.
I talked about it with Elisabeth, and we decided to make a frozen dessert with a structure as airy as the taste of violets. The result is divine, resulting from a crossing of the senses and our ideas. »