Forest. City. Fragrance. This is the motto under which the latest two-day watercolour workshop, organised by the Symrise School of Perfumery, was held. For this workhop, the five young apprentices took part in a kind of artistic safari through the city of Berlin. The young apprentices were guided by two artists. The two of them captured their impressions of the forest and the city in watercolours and, in turn, in fragrance creations.
Symrise has included this type of cross-cutting element in the curriculum for its trainee perfumers. These kinds of inspirational techniques are designed to help integrate creativity as a strategic approach to fragrance creation for young perfumers from the very beginning.
The fragrance market is rapidly growing and constantly changing. Hundreds of new creations are launched on the market every year. Manufacturers want to offer the right fragrance for every taste, which places high demands on the creativity of the perfumers. That is why Symrise pays special attention to the design of its training. It includes classic elements such as learning about fragrance raw materials, chords and technological aspects. Included in this year's curriculum, Symrise Perfumery School has offered a selection of artistic workshops to learn inspirational techniques.
"Artistic activities, such as painting, can enhance a special gift," explains Marc vom Ende, head perfumer at Symrise and director of the Holzminden School of Perfumery. "We wanted to achieve this effect with our art workshop for our budding perfumers. They learn to develop their special gift, i.e. the ability to draw inspiration from a wide variety of sources. That will help them to come up with creative ideas for our customers in their future creative work."
Back in Holzminden, the trainees used these impressions to create five fragrances that creatively reflect the diversity of the group:
Alicia De Benito Cassadó from Spain calls her fragrance "Saturno 100101". Her accord combines the scent of outer space with that of new technical devices in the form of cool amber notes. The American Christopher Pickel was inspired by the contrast between nature and industry. In "Pig Sneaker", the olfactory impression of new trainers blends with the gourmand animalistic notes of a street food vendor. Gabriela Gerbi from Brazil combines elements of nature and the city in her fragrance "Ash Garden". For her, opposites have something unifying: nature as a source of energy for urban life. Attiya Lebogang Setai from South Africa highlights the soft powdery notes of lilac from the Spandau City Forest in her fragrance "Lilac in the Berlin Forest". Shangyun Lu from China dives into poetry with her fragrance "Forget-Me-Not". The scent of lilac on a gloomy day reminds him of a poem by Dai Wangshu, a Chinese proponent of the symbolist movement.