Marie Salamagne

“I love dark, mysterious materials, I’m not really into little flowers…”

Marie, tell us a little bit about yourself, about the fragrances you’ve created.

I’m 30 years old, and I’ve been designing for the past six years. When I was little, I was crazy about dancing, to the extent that I couldn’t imagine life without it. Then I went to medical school, to become a child psychiatrist, but I soon realized that my vocation lay elsewhere. A good fairy told me about the ISIPCA, the perfumery school in Versailles, where I wound up enrolling. I finished my training at Charabot Co., then, in 2001, I started working for Firmenich, in Switzerland, as a trainee perfume designer. I worked in the States for a while, and for the past two years I’ve been working in Paris, where I do fine fragrances. Before that, I mostly worked in the body-care sector. I created formulas for various, the best-known ones were the American body-care brand Bath & Body Works and L’Oréal. Among my fine-fragrance creations, I’ve worked for several Italian fashion brands, like Krizia and Miss Sixty, for whom I designed the perfume Elixir. Then there’s Mandarine Basilic for Guerlain, a fragrance in their Aqua Allegoria line that’s coming out this spring.

What are your influences as a designer?

My main influences are the things from my daily life. The smell of my fireplace in the Périgord, (NB: a region in southwest France), the smell of my attic, the putty around the windows. Humus, fresh-cut pine, the cracking of a match… Any of life’s little moments can be the starting point for a new creation.

How can we recognize one of your fragrances? What are, in your opinion, their characteristic features?

I have a thing about textured, woody notes, resins, patchouli… I love those dark, dense, mystical and mysterious materials. Their androgynous side brings mystery and sensuality to fragrances... I’m not really into little flowers! (she laughs) My juices often have an ambiguous side….

What other designer’s fragrance(s) do you wish you had created? And why?

Lots of them! Even if I don’t really want to pierce the secret of fragrances I admire… I would have loved to have designed Shalimar, which, by blending freshness and sensuality, incarnates perfect femininity. Which reminds me, I have a lot of respect for fragrance designers who have the nerve to reinterpret classic scents, or to really overdo one note… Everything revolutionary is a source of inspiration…

How do you envisage the future of fragrances and fragrance brands?

I picture them in two worlds. On the one hand, the ultra-creative types, no limits, where you can allow yourself to be inventive to the extreme, to lay bare your creativity. Then there’ll be another, more mass-market category that will use extremely high-tech techniques. Each of those future genres will feed the other one; technique will aid creativity, creativity will inspire mass-market fragrances.

Do you have a wish for the future?

That the technology available will let play with natural scents more… An excellent challenge for the future would be to make fragrance accessible in emerging countries, which would allow us to learn about their cultures. That would give perfumery a new élan!