Diary of a broke nose

Maxwell Williams of UFO Parfums on Jean-Claude Ellena, good bottles, Marx, and the never-ending quest for ethanol.

Jean-Claude Ellena published The Diary of a Nose: A Year in the Life of a Parfumeur in 2011. It’s become canon fume-lit on an olfactory bookshelf, next to Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and Chandler Burr’s The Emperor of Scent. In it, Ellena, the longtime perfumer at Hermès, muses about villas in Messina, taking high-speed rails to Kyoto, going to the Louvre for inspiration, and having meetings with “the foremost producers of fine perfumes.” Where Ellena works and lives, near Grasse in the South of France, is a place of elegance and money and refinement. L.A. must seem vulgar to him—his is a book of delicacy.

I’m not from the same caste as Ellena. My dear mother is a retired elementary school teacher and my late father worked in construction. Still, it felt like I grew up naught for want. I always got to go to TJ Maxx for new clothes every school year and my grandfather started an account that paid for me to go to a state school for college. I was a journalist for a long time before I took up perfume, and that’s been getting worse and worse for the past 10 or so years, as many writers know. Nowadays, I do writer-ish jobs on the side. Ellena will never know what it’s like to not make enough money in a month (and even he talks about being bad at the business end of things), to have to rely on credit cards until they're nearly maxxed out.

I love Ellena’s perfumes. They are gorgeous and they are everywhere. I dream of a life like that. I don’t know if I’ll ever achieve it. But there’s a place for me, a little role player—I’m okay with that. This is a response to Ellena’s diary.

Lisbon, Wednesday 5 June 2024 — Evening

I feel comfortable talking about my money. My money is not right.

I got kicked off Obamacare for making too little and my Medi-Cal hasn’t kicked in yet (if they even approve me). I never got my tax return. I barely made rent last month by training AI at a shady company but I might’ve recently been let go from that—they stopped returning my emails.

Some months, I earn a few hundred bucks as a perfumer. Once in a while, it’s a few thousand. I make perfumes for tiny companies; it seems like no one can afford to make more than a couple hundred bottles these days. When you’re broke you don’t know how you’re going to make rent let alone how to source a kilo of Exaltenone, a high-tonkin musk compound ($6144 at perfumersapprentice.com).

I just got to Lisbon (on credit card miles). I’m staying at a shared Airbnb paid for by the Institute for Art and Olfaction, the non-profit I’m on the board of. Each year, we hold the Art and Olfaction Awards in a different city. Lisbon feels old but it doesn’t feel rich. It’s St. Anthony’s festival and everyone is out drinking Super Bock along the winding narrow streets of Alfama. Thank god the beer is 3 Euros a pint.

Lisbon, Thursday 6 June 2024 — Morning

It’s a recession. Others are broke too. My brand, UFO Parfums, is naturally (unintentionally) geared towards and enjoyed by broke Gen Zers. I’m 42 but I don't act it. I don’t have money; you think they do?

I look out the window of the Airbnb and see the big Jesus with his outstretched arms across the river that’s filled with those massive cruise ships that call themselves floating cities.

Lisbon, Thursday 6 June 2024 — Day

I give a talk at the Experimental Scent Summit about a project I’m working on with Sean Raspet that’s going to be an exhibition at Olfactory Art Keller in New York in November. It’s about genetic mutations in our olfactory bulb. We made a fragrance made of materials known to be related to those genetic mutations, so people commonly smell those materials differently.

Thankfully, I had most of the materials except Trans-2-hexenal, which Sean had, so I didn’t have to order anything. It’s easy to spend a lot of money buying perfume materials. The high overhead is probably the biggest roadblock for people who want to become perfumers. I don’t know if enough people understand that you need a big perfume organ full of hundreds if not thousands of materials to even get off the ground.

DEAR DIARY

THE SCENT OF DIRT