Perfume Scoop! Ineke Perfumer San Francisco

Lilac on the air brandishes its showy olfactory display, then softens into a tender presence the way light fills a room.

Emerging from the San Francisco fog with an exquisite touch, classically trained perfumer Ineke Ruhland is launching her eponymous line of fragrances, Ineke at Studio at Fred Segal, Bergdorf Goodman and Art and Flowers in Virginia. Ineke perfumes are now for sale on the website, www.ineke.com.

One lucky day in July, Ruhland graciously introduced me to her abecedaire of fragrances and fine conversation. In the coming articles, you will find snippets of our conversation and evocations of the four fragrances now available in full bottles and the deluxe sample collection from Ineke Perfumer San Francisco.

The Education of a Classically Trained Perfumer

Ineke Ruhland started her fragrance career working in marketing for Quest International, one of the major fragrance and flavor suppliers, in the Netherlands in the late 1980s. With Quest, she transferred to England for a year and then to France in the early 1990s, where she worked in international fine fragrance marketing.

Said Ineke, "Along the way, I decided that by far the most interesting job in the company was that of the perfumer, and was lucky enough to have a wonderful boss and mentor, Yves de Chiris, who helped me get into the perfumery program at ISIPCA in 1996, and continue my apprenticeship at Quest afterwards."

Asked to mention some of her mentors at ISIPCA, she said, "I studied and worked with a lot of talented perfumers along the way. Of particular note were Isabelle Doyen, the chief perfumer of Annick Goutal, who taught a two-year course focused on raw materials called “Education Olfactive”, and Dominique Ropion, who taught us the creation of basic fragrance accords “Travail Pratique." Ineke also mentioned her admiration for Quest perfumers Christopher Sheldrake and Maurice Roucel.

Abecedaire at the Intersection of Story and Scent

After My Own Heart, a lilac soliflore, was Ineke's first creation. Second, she created the airy green freesia scent, Balmy Days and Sundays. C came to stand for an effervescent citrus cocktail called Chemical Bonding. Derring-Do for Men is Ineke's fourth fragrance in her debut lineup of the abecedaire. Now that the first four are on the shelves, she will continue to release scents at a more leisurely pace over the next ten years. E will come out in 2007 and Ineke plans to release products outside the abecedaire framework including a line of candles.

When asked why she chose to organize her perfumes in an alphabetical collection, Ineke said, "In a practical sense, I like the abecedaire as an organizing technique. It indicates the perfume chronology, and people will immediately be able to see which is the latest perfume. I also like that it has never been used in the perfume industry. More importantly, I like what it adds to our storytelling. The first letter acts like a swash letter to our little stories, a literary technique that I find visually arresting. In general, the alphabet can make an attractive visual element in graphic design."

Ineke turned a longstanding love of literature and the visual arts into what she calls a "storytelling approach to perfume." Where many niche perfume companies create around raw material themes, like Bergamot or Osmanthus or "Angeliques sous la pluie." Ineke has made each perfume into its own story.

It's a feat to make each perfume into a story, Ineke said. "Of course, the story you can tell using perfume packaging is quite limited because your canvas is very small, so they are more like little vignettes." Ineke has used collages of images and lyrical phrases on her cartons and etched desgins in glass on her perfume bottles to tell each perfume's story.

Ineke's First Creation: After My Own Heart

A few minutes after application of After My Own Heart, it's like a soft warm light has just been illuminated. There is such a tenderness to the scent's heart. Lilacs have a high-pitched breathless sort of voice. After My Own Heart captures the way that lilacs start with a theatrical sigh of scent then turn warm and tender.

Yet lilacs can smell awkward, as Ineke observed. "I find that the scent of lilac flowers changes quite quickly after they’ve been cut. They definitely smell best on the air, where the scent is indeed very showy and beautiful. They quickly become more indolic and petroleum-like when they’re cut, an effect of their decomposition."

In After My Own Heart Ineke sought to render an impressionistic lilac with fleeting top notes of bergamot, raspberry, and crisp green foliage around a winsome lilac accord that dries into a soft base of sandalwood, heliotrope and musk. Ineke said, "In the perfume I added green notes to give a foliage aspect to complement the lilac, but most green notes tend to be quite ephemeral, evaporating more quickly than the lilac accord. That’s not quite the experience you get smelling fresh lilac outdoors, but I think it’s probably better not to try to emulate Mother Nature too directly anyway. That’s a losing proposition, and I think not very interesting."

Soliflore?

According to Ineke, composing a soliflore poses a special test for the perfumer. Lilac is particularly challenging because it can't be distilled and thus must be conjured by the perfumer. "I think the most challenging thing about a soliflore is that people will make the comparison with the natural flower, so it has to be well-crafted. In the case of lilac, there is no distillation or extraction of the lilac flower available, so it needs to be recreated with other materials."

Work in Progress

Ineke's perfumes throw a spotlight on the sensual details in a moment of scent. She explained the relationship of her olfactive idea to her story design in her work:

"I like to work on the fragrance and story design iteratively and simultaneously to make sure I end up with a cohesive finished product. For example, Balmy Days & Sundays started out as a very general idea of wanting to do a fragrance in the “green floral” family. Combining a fresh, outdoorsy story with that was a logical extension, and since I wanted a name starting with “B”, Balmy Days came out pretty quickly. To make it more interesting, I added “& Sundays” to the name, a riff on the old Carpenters’ song “Rainy Days & Mondays”. From there, the rest of the idea unfolded: those perfect moments on the weekend, when you get on your bike and go to the park, and stop to read a book. It is the scents all around you: the foliage, grass, fresh flowers, trees and earth."

Check back for more perfect olfactory moments in the coming days, including Ineke's thoughts on the importance of being Canadian, transparency in perfumery, her favorite smells in San Francisco, her affinity for package design, and more reviews of the individual scents.