Scent can solve a crime and send the perpetrator to prison (this perfumer knows this)

The sense of smell is an extremely powerful one, capable of resurrecting memories and awakening feelings . After all, the olfactory bulb, a structure located in the lower part of the brain , receives olfactory signals from the nose and sends them to the limbic system, which is where emotions and memory are processed. “Smelling is something very primitive, very animal, something rooted in the deepest part of our being. That's precisely why we're fascinated by scents,” says Paul Richardot , a graduate of the École Supérieure du Parfum in Paris—where he spent five years studying chemistry applied to perfumery—a leading figure in the French cosmetics industry and now also a successful novelist.

Fragrance , his debut novel, has been a hit in France, has just been released in Spain by the publisher Lumen and is currently being translated into nine other languages. Following in the footsteps of Perfume , the famous book by Patrick Süskind published in 1985 and which has sold a whopping 153 million copies , Fragrance is an olfactory thriller in which a company allows its exclusive clients to relive some of their most precious memories by recreating the aroma that permeated those moments: the smell of grease and humidity of the garage where an old man used to do crafts as a child with his father; the fragrance of chalk, wood, leather shoes and ink of the school he happily went to every morning; the scent of sea, suntan lotion and vanilla ice cream of the beach from the summers of his childhood. Something that seems ever closer.

“Technology already exists that allows us to encapsulate and recreate the scent of a flower, a wood, or a mineral,” Richardot explains. The process in question is called headspace , and it captures scent molecules directly from the air to create fragrances that replicate the natural smell of an environment, object, or plant. Once the molecules are captured, they are analyzed using technologies such as gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, which allow the aromatic compounds present in the air to be identified and separated. Through this data, perfumers can identify the exact ingredients that make up the fragrance and recreate it in a laboratory.

What if crimes also had their own distinct scent ? What if it were possible to solve crimes through smell?

This is another possibility that Paul Richardot raises in his book. And it's not something that can be dismissed as pure science fiction. "We all have our own body odor, a unique smell, different from everyone else's. That smell is like our fingerprint; it's something that defines us and differentiates us from other people. In France, there has long been a police division that works with people's olfactory fingerprints ," he asserts. This science is called odorology ; it was created by the Russians during the Soviet era (although they abandoned it in the 1970s due to lack of financial resources), and it's the French who in recent years have most invested in it as a weapon to combat crime . "It's a science that will continue to grow in the coming years," Richardot predicts.

This young perfumer, founder of Maison Violet, however, dispels a myth: that of pheromone-based perfumes that supposedly make the wearer irresistible. “Mammals produce pheromones, chemicals that, among other things, are responsible for sexual attraction. But humans don't function that way. We probably did in the past, but not anymore. Perhaps we still emit pheromones, but we no longer have the receptors in our brains to perceive them; we lost them with evolution ,” he says.

What does seem to exist in the scientific world is that we are attracted to people whose scent is most different from ours. “The more different we are in terms of scent, the more we will theoretically be attracted to each other. The reasoning behind this idea is that this difference in scent would reveal genetic differences, which is good for reproduction,” he explains.

What is clear is that perfumers are people with prodigious memories , capable of mentally memorizing hundreds and hundreds of scents. “Good perfumers can have 2,000 or 3,000 scents in their heads . And they are able to blend them and know what the mixture will smell like. Just like Beethoven, who despite going deaf was able to continue composing because he had the music in his head, perfumers can create perfumes in their heads. In fact, many write down the formula, send it to their assistant, and at the end, smell it and decide if they need to make any small adjustments.”

Paul Richardot himself tells an anecdote he experienced firsthand. “One day, as an assistant, I made a perfume for a well-known perfumer, the creator of Paco Rabanne ’s One Million . I didn’t have enough raw material of a certain product to make the formula, so I added a few drops of that same raw material, fresh, to make the perfume he’d asked for. And he noticed it immediately. It was a perfume that had 200 raw materials, and he was able to detect those few drops of fresh raw material. Some perfumers are true giants,” Richardot emphasizes.

The perfumer is already working on the second installment of Fragrance , a project he initially conceived in two parts. In the second book, scents will serve not to awaken pleasant memories, but to relive terrible events. “Scents also have the ability to resurrect traumatic experiences . If, for example, someone nearly drowned in a pool as a child, the smell of chlorine can make them feel terrible ; if someone was bitten by a dog as a child, the smell of a dog can completely upset them. Scents are capable of generating very, very strong sensations.”

The sense of smell is an extremely powerful one, capable of resurrecting memories and awakening feelings . After all, the olfactory bulb, a structure located in the lower part of the brain , receives olfactory signals from the nose and sends them to the limbic system, which is where emotions and memory are processed. “Smelling is something very primitive, very animal, something rooted in the deepest part of our being. That's precisely why we're fascinated by scents,” says Paul Richardot , a graduate of the École Supérieure du Parfum in Paris—where he spent five years studying chemistry applied to perfumery—a leading figure in the French cosmetics industry and now also a successful novelist.