Co-ripple: Parfumeide
Science of Fragrance: Emotional Therapy
By Allyson Volpe
Lady Ripple Speaks to Fragrance Designer Alba Chiara de Vitis
Tuscany has an abundance of young artisans, and it is a fundamental part of our Lady Ripple ethos to support them in whichever way we can. When there is synergy and inspiration, it seems to follow that a co-ripple with them ensues. These past several months, it has been a great privilege to work with fragrance designer Alba Chiara de Vitis PhD, founder of Florentine-based Parfumeide, who was inspired to collaborate with Lady Ripple to help us design our gorgeous Sentience Potpourri, launched in April of 2022.
Originally from Lecce, the multi-talented Alba started her journey towards perfume from a tender age. Surrounded by the wild bloom of nature in southern Italy, she found her connection to the scents of flowers, aromatic plants and the surrounding seaside. Her passion for botanicals was born and eventually her curiosity and studies led her to begin collecting samples of herbs and flowers, ancient books of botanicals and natural extracts of essential oils. Throughout her academic studies, her passion was further ignited for science, physics, and the true spirit and nature of mathematics. Her master’s degree thesis centered upon molecular design and math as applied to chemistry, science and life biology. Instead of becoming an anticipated pharmaceutical drug designer, her journey led her to Paris, and then in Nice, to pursue a PhD in applied mathematics. It was here in the city of love, where she found herself surrounded by some of the most famous niche perfume boutiques in the world and her love affair began in earnest as did her experience in the field. Her analysis and artificial intelligence research work in southern France, brought her closer to the intersecting worlds of science and fragrance. As fate and synchronicity would have it, Alba’s venture into her fragrance career began as she combined these two worlds: her love of theorems and molecules and her natural evolution into the world of perfumery and its applied techniques.
LR: What gives you the greatest joy or satisfaction of creating fragrances?
Alba: I couldn’t imagine my life without nature, without natural sciences, without math, physics, informatics, and applied math. In terms of perfume, I have the opportunity to combine the artistic part of the creativity with the technical part of science. Perfume has a close relation to chemistry. You can work as an artisan, but to create a top-quality balanced product, you need to follow scientific protocols and to have the ability, skills and expertise to do so.
The world of perfumery is my secret garden where I can create, where I can connect with beauty, and where I can capture powerful emotions and feelings – both encapsulating and conveying emotions to people that use perfumes -- while at the same time giving space to my mathematical soul.
My greatest feeling is when the last ingredient is added to a fragrance and the moment when all of the dissonance and discrepancies fade away. The rough edges are rounded. It is that very moment when both chemical compounds and the emotion you wanted to convey come together in a perfectly balanced and harmonic manner. It is like proving a mathematical theorem.
LR: You have a methodical approach that underlies your perfume design. Can you expound upon this?
Alba: I have a sort of Renaissance mind. I am very curious. Today, we live in a period when a Renaissance mind is needed. You cannot be too closed within a specific field of research. There has to be an overlap of technology with human sciences, creativity, philosophy and human emotions.
Scents are a language that nature uses to transmit information. Like when there is the scent of blooming flowers in the air and pheromones are released, this attracts our senses. This is the exact same process that attracts a bee to a flower.
Perfume has its own language that speaks to the most ancient parts of our brain. Similar to music or poetry, its notes convey the emotions and the messages. When we smell a scent, our first reaction is instinctive, and then we recognize the smell through images using the cortex of our brain. Our olfactory memory is further activated by colour, emotions, or a specific moment that we associate with a scent. Our minds connect through an experience that is strongly emotional. When you work with the perfumes and you work with naturally extracted oils, as well as the synthetic molecules, you can then create a structure that will produce a very strong emotional reaction for people smelling the perfume.
As the scents themselves are related to our instinctual minds, many scents can be combined to produce a specific emotion. On one side there is the component of creativity and on the other side is one of artificial intelligence and learning. When you design a learning method, you want to create protocols that will reproduce the way we think and the way we learn. It is finding a language for a specific emotional target.
LR: How was your first fragrance created?
Alba: When I was first experimenting a few years ago, I loved everything about molecules, the natural extract of scents, nature itself and applied math. All combined, the beauty I witnessed left a very strong impression upon me. It was an epiphany for me. In France, during my spare time in the evenings, I used all of my professional experience to begin creating scents in laboratories. I enjoyed it very much and was very passionate about it. Although I was very precise in combining and creating scents in a professional way, I never thought it would become my life.
While working at a famous research center in southern France, we were surrunded by the beautiful nature of Sophia-Antipolis, Alpes Marittimes. But, during the day I was confined to a very sterile and synthetic work atmosphere in front of my computer. I was enclosed in my office and I became frustrated at times because I was separated from nature. It was then that I would spray my diffuser of experimental fragrances into the workplace air. All my colleagues started telling me how much they loved the scents. Over time, I received a lot of encouragement from others to continue to create my fragrances, and that is when I decided to formally begin Parfumeide.
I began designing eight years ago. To date, I have created over 50 fragrances for both myself and hundreds for clients for whom I consult.
LR: How did you choose Florence to begin Parfumeide?
Alba: From Renaissance times, Florence has had a very strong tradition of aromatic herbs and distilling natural extracts that stems back to the ancient knowledge of the monasteries. I found a private perfume atelier laboratory in Florence that gave me the permission to use their premises. I would travel down on weekends from France to use the laboratory. Slowly, my life started naturally gravitating towards Florence and eventually I decided to move to the city full time.
LR: When you are designing a fragrance, what is your inspiration?
Alba: Most of the time I begin with the emotions. I want to recreate emotions in my perfume that people can experience. I try and create a shape with a complex composition where the final result will produce an emotion.
Creating fragrances is similar to a musical composition but goes a bit deeper. Hearing a piece of music, your mind expects something as the composition has an overall mathematical structure that gives ratios between the notes and has harmonies and melodies that leads the mind to have a reaction.
In perfumery, it is a bit different. Everybody has their own collection of olfactory memories. The art exists when there is an emotional connection between the one composing the fragrance and the one receiving it. I try to create a language that is purely emotional. That is the greatest challenge. The strong emotional reaction to my fragrance then becomes more universal, as many people become connected when they experience the same emotion. This is a beautiful thing for me. This emotional communication is similar to music, but more abstract and more emotionally immediate.