The Plan

Following Jean was first conceived as a summer project that would detail my efforts to work through the publicly published trainings of perfumer Jean Carles (Ma Griffe, L'Air du Temps, Shocking, Miss Dior) to the best of my ability.  There are many obstacles to this goal: among them the resourcing of materials, time, and my own current lack of technical knowledge.  As a result, there will likely be some aspects of the teachings that I will be fudging my way through, and others that I will likely be skipping entirely.  I will, in these instances, be making an effort to supplement the blog with other, perfume-related discussions that might be of interest.

My motivation for doing the blog is my passion for chemistry and for fragrance.  I got seriously interested in fragrance around the end of my junior year of high school (to provide some context, I am now in the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college) and started reading everything I could on the topic and testing all of the fragrances that I could get my hands on.  Taking organic chemistry this past semester cemented my appreciation of and amazement with the interaction between fragrance and science- to the extent that I may have taken some of the compounds we utilized in lab (non-hazardous ones, of course!) Learning to distinguish notes, developing an understanding of the chemistry of aromatic molecules, and exploring the complex and multi-faceted world of perfume have become great passions of mine.  I plan to major in chemistry and hope to eventually work in the fragrance industry, though in what capacity I am not yet sure.

This blog is mostly for my own personal record keeping, but I will always be happy to receive feedback about improvements that can be made- or just to chat about perfume.

Happy summer,
Connie