Isaac Sinclair, Perfumer

Australasian home fragrance and candle brand Ecoya is about to launch a range of luxury candles created with the help of Kiwi-born, Parisian/Sao Paulo based nose Isaac Sinclair. I got to pick his brains about the fragrance industry on his recent trip home.

BG: Have you ever done a candle fragrance before?

IS: “Yeh, normally I’ve just been doing fragrances so this was kind of an adventure for me, but Ecoya are doing luxury candles which is rare, I mean apart from Diptyque and what else is there? There are a few Parisian brands where they have expensive candles but in general it’s mass market and really cheap and nasty, like candles you’d buy in a supermarket.”

BG: How is it different?

IS: “Just burning can be an issue – like soot coming from some of the raw materials we use with fragrance. Especially citrus – anything like mandarin or orange it will burn a sooty black flame so that’s kind of obvious because you’re not burning in Eau de Parfum, you know. And then the other thing is just that with a normal fragrance you are putting it on your skin and so you have the top notes, the heart and the dry down, whereas candles in wax don’t really evolve so much, so it stays the same. So you know there is no top, middle, bottom. It’s linear. So it’s quite different actually. A lot of fragrances are really fresh on top, they can be a little bit too much but if you’ve been wearing it for a couple of hours you get this beautiful, really nice musky smell. Well that’s not going to happen with a candle. It is kind of interesting. Also – the strength… cos Parfum and Eau De Toilette is in water and alcohol so it’s actually more volatile, whereas a candle, it’s not evaporating so um you know of course that’s why you smell something because it’s evaporating, so being stuck in wax, the fragrance doesn’t come out as much, so you have to make them a lot stronger.”

BG: What was your brief from Ecoya?

IS: “Right so yeh, they knew they wanted to have a fragrance from the 20s and 30s Art Deco and one for Paris, New York, London and Shanghai,  so that’s the brief I got… which is great because basically they gave me liberty to do whatever I wanted which is incredible, normally brands tell you like, somehow its less creative you have to do what they ask for. Whereas here I had to think – what does London  smell like in the 1920s and 30s? I got no idea… from an artistic point of view it was like really interesting. Normally the fragrances we are working with are like blockbusters, so like a Hollywood blockbuster is going to be less creative than an independent film so this is like doing an Indy film for someone who is used to doing Transformers and stuff like that, so it was fun. Some of it came pretty obviously like the Shanghai one I was thinking well it’s Shanghai, it’s Asia, so I knew I was going to do an Oriental fragrance, so that’s in the oriental family, spicey and then London was kind of obvious cos straight away I thought London 20s 30s … Rose, English Rose. Rose smells so old fashioned cos it’s been so overdone so the idea was do a rose – you have the kind of retro aspect in a super modern fragrance so its actually a really avant garde fragrance but with this traditional rose thing.

The other ones were a little bit harder cos I was thinking what am I going to do with New York? Yeh well what I did was leather… and maybe a bit more serious…You know cos when you think Paris you think “ooh romantic”… when you think Shanghai you think….”oooh exotic”…. Somehow New York for me is a little bit more darker and serious. So I did that one.

And the last one…. Of course Paris… so I went romantic for Paris… laughs. Yeh so I was really happy. I didn’t even know there were any brands down here making fragrances cos all my clients are in Paris or New York and to a lesser extent Brazil.”

BG: Which is where you are based at the moment?

IS: “Yeh, I’m in Sao Paulo.”

BG: That must be fun. How did you end up there?

IS: “Well basically now Brazil is the biggest consumer of fragrance of any country in the world. They overtook the United States like two or three years ago. So Europe is still bigger if you put all the countries together but if you just take France or England or just Italy – Brazil is the biggest cos there’s 208 million of them. There’s China of course, there’s a lot of people but they don’t have the culture of using fragrance, they’re not into it so much. Most of the people in Brazil are like Latino you know, their bloodline will be from Spain or Italy or something – they’re crazy about fragrances and there’s lots of them.”

BG: What kind of fragrance do they like?

IS: “You would think because it’s tropical they would want something that’s kind of fresh – clean smells, but not at all they go for these really huge, heavy, opulent, woody vanilla-ry fragrances which is kind of a contradiction but yeh… so in that respect again it’s the Latino influence, it’s definitely more like the European market than the American market.

“Whereas NZ would be a lot more like the American market – everyone wants to smell sporty, fresh and clean, I think it’s like the anglo-saxon puritinism, whereas in France or Italy you don’t put a fragrance on to smell like you got out of the shower, like clean; you put it on to like seduce somebody so straight away you’re going to have fragrances that are heavier and darker. So yeh, in Brazil all the international brands are big but I have been working for quite a few local brands as well which are huge, much bigger than most American or European brands but nobody has ever heard of them because they’re only in Brazil.”

So my contract is actually with Paris – for my company I’m actually a French employee. They asked me if I wanted to go to Brazil for six months and you don’t really refuse an offer like that. I went down for six months and then at the time there was a boss down there… the new guy said why did you only come for six months you should come for another six months. I went back to Paris for a year after my visa ran and got transfered back to Brazil. I don’t mind – I like it. I figure if I’m going to be making fragrances in Paris for the next 30 years I might as well stay in Brazil for the next couple of years.”

BG: Did you know that you’d always do this?

IS: “It struck me. When I was a kid I was just smelling everything, just out of curiosity… I can’t really explain it, I was always smelling everything, just really curious about how things smell. I grew up in the bush in the Waitakeres and my Mum was like a really keen gardener but that was it really, I just loved smelling things and you never really think about it. It’s just this kind of thing you do. Anyway so then I started collecting fragrances, again, just because I love fragrances… that was out of curiosity, I couldn’t really help myself and then one day for some reason it just occurred to me that if I had all these bottles of fragrances someone must be doing this, someone must have designed the fragrances so it was like a lightbulb went off and I was like, why didn’t I think of that before… it was just really clear that that was what I had to do. So in New Zealand you can’t create fragrance so I was thinking what can I do? So as a first step I thought, just to be involved with fragrances I could sell them. Which was great – I worked at Life Pharmacy in St Lukes, and at Smith and Caughey’s. A lot of the time there’s no customers but I had a wall of fragrances behind me so like every minute there wasn’t a customer I would just be smelling all of the fragrances and learning them all. It was excellent. Really fun. But obviously after a while it does become a bit of a bore because I really wanted to be creating the smells not just selling them. So I had to go to Paris.

Well, actually I went to Grasse in the South of France and then to Paris and then I actually spent a couple of years in Milan going to the university there but it was through the company. So I would do like the term in Milan and then in the summer break I’d go and work in the company in Paris. After I finished the school I became a full time trainee perfumer in Paris, it was really cool, you get paid to smell all day. Now of course there’s a lot of pressure, you have to win projects but back then… there was actually not as much pressure and I was just smelling all day… it was fun.”

BG: There are so many new fragrances every year now.

IS: “Oh it’s ridiculous, now it’s like 500 every year. So the market is totally saturated.”

BG: Would you say there’s a backlash against the mainstream and there’s more interest in smaller/bespoke fragrances?

IS: “Probably for people like you. But in general there’s a lot of those perfumes like Katy Perry or Britney Spears – they’re just aimed at teenagers. And you know if you’re 12, probably all the girls wear the same thing and they’re proud of it.

But it’s true that all of the, we call them niche brands, they’ve grown a lot over the last five years.

You know like five years ago there was a few niche brands, it was a tiny segment of the market but now it’s really grown, even like the niche market is saturated. Of course it’s good for fragrance – it’s more creative, better quality but um, yeh I think if there’s anymore growth it’s going to be with those brands.”

BG: What do you wear?

IS: “ My own… well I never really wear fragrance because I work with it – f you’re smelling other fragrances all day and your wearing a fragrance it’s a little bit too much plus it could also just interfere with what your working on, so I never really wear one on a daily basis but on the weekends or after work if I don’t have to be evaluating fragrances I will test out one of my own.. give it a little market testing. So if I’m working on a masculine project and I just want to see what people think, I just yeh, put it on during the weekend and see if anyone comments on it and I get some feedback.”

BG: What have you worked on? Anything we’d know?

IS: ” When I was in Paris a lot! I had a mentor, after I finished being a trainee perfurmer, it takes forever ,it was 10 years basically. My mentor was this superstar perfumer, Maurice Rossell. He’s a legend. So during the time I worked with him he was working on like Be Delicious, DKNY, and a few other big ones. I’ve worked a lot for Calvin Klein but my fragrance didn’t win. And obviously because I was in Paris, I’ve never been as interested in the American market. As a perfurmer its more interesting to be in Paris so I’ve worked a lot with L’Oreal  – they have Lancome, Giorgi Armani, Diesel… so even now I do a lot of work for L’oreal from Paris. They have a robot in the laboratory and I just send it my formulas from the computer in Sao Paulo to the lab in Paris and the robot makes it. And then we have evaluators that select the fragrance – so the robot makes it and the evaluator will just smell it in Paris and give me the feedback, can you make it better? and I’ll tweak it.

Another thing that has happened recently is that there are more co-signed fragrances. Before, one Perfurmer would work on one project whereas now it’s like people are co-signing.  So some perfumes that come out there have been five Perfumers that have worked on it. So now whenever I have a whole project in Paris I ask one of my friends to work on it as well so if there are like short delays like maybe even with the robot I might not get feedback for a day, I can talk to them about it and still get it done.”

 The Ecoya Decadence Range is available from November at Department Stores, boutiques and Farmers. For more information go to the Ecoya website.