The New York Times T Magazine

Scent Notes / Menthe Fraîche by Heeley.
***** Five stars – Chandler Burr-

Discovering an extraordinary new scent is a joy in itself, like unexpectedly coming across a gift. Discovering an entire collection of extraordinary scents adds to this an element of awe, if not anxiety. Where has it been? How will you categorize them? (How will you pay for them?) Which will you wear first?

James Heeley, a young Englishman based in Paris, is a somewhat uncategorizable designer — he makes things that, while having a certain practicality, edge into pure art. Until recently, he worked uniquely in visual media. A few years ago he decided to creative-direct a series of scents. They are sublime, exquisitely done, and they, too, blur the line between product and art. Heeley’s collection joins a select few as among the world’s best.

None of his works are “masculine” or “feminine.” (“These are categories I tend to ignore,” said Heeley.) He has done a literalist postmodern ironic piece, Esprit du Tigre, which is the straight-up scent of the Tiger Balm you used to carry in your backpack; its artistry and the pleasure one takes in it derive from aesthetic transliteration, placing the familiar in a startlingly different context, like Roy Lichtenstein transforming a comic-book image into a painting. With another fragrance, Cardinal, Heeley worked in abstract expressionism, a scent that intentionally cites no identifiable landmarks and instead forces beauty into being on its own terms.

And he has done my current favorite, Menthe Fraîche. Like the rest of the collection, Menthe Fraîche is both cerebral and viscerally immediate. Its realism is deceptive. Technically, it is the scent of mint. In reality, it is a perfume that uses mint’s form to reconceptualize a material into a work.

Heeley’s first scent, Figuier Edition 1, was done for a candle that launched in 1998. “I got interested in creating a wearable perfume from Figuier,” Heeley said of his fig-tree scent, but the company that made his scents was demanding that he order an impractical volume of products. So he started looking for a perfumer to do his fine fragrances. Finally he arrived at APF, a small lab near Grasse in France, and began working with its perfumer, David Maruitte.

Maruitte indeed constructed Figuier as Heeley’s first perfume, released in 2001. But, Heeley said, “I had all these other ideas in my head, one involving fresh mint, which I adore.” He’d smelled a wild mint in Corsica. Before they’d finalized Figuier, they started working on the mint perfume.

“Almost everyone I questioned thought it was a bad idea,” Heeley said. “No one could imagine wearing a mint. I loved the idea. I couldn’t imagine anything better. Mint is very important in English culture. And yes, it exists in chewing gum, candies, chocolates, but I saw a mint perfume as beautifully sophisticated, avant-garde.”

Perfumers have had mint raw materials for years. (It is incomprehensible that no one before Heeley has thought to make a fine fragrance of mint, but there we are.) There are essentially two: la menthe crépue, spearmint, which is sweeter, and mint arvensis, peppermint, the mint in most chewing gums, which is greener and rounder, with an aspect of fresh-cut grass. They built the perfume’s foundation on a natural essence of peppermint for the more vegetal aspect. Peppermint also contains a great amount of menthol, “which gives you a frozen, blue mint,” Heeley said. “Its role is to bring freshness and cold to the perfume.”

From that base, Maruitte began construction. First, the synthetic steryl acetate, a green, lightly aromatic crushed leaf. “Unsurprisingly to anyone who knows perfumery,” he said, “the synthetic is what lends the fragrance a natural aspect.” Methyl pamplemousse, which is actually more lemon than grapefruit, for citrus lift. Alpha and beta ionones, which are generally used to create irises and violets, for conveying a powdery green tea and a refined quality. Maruitte then used the synthetic Hedione, both to refine the tea and to give the perfume air, to let the citrus materials breathe. There are 28 raw materials in all.

Menthe Fraîche smells like mint on a cool summer evening, green leaves refreshing after the heat of the sun, a crisp, natural smell borrowing depth from the scents around it: a lawn, some sun-dried straw, the cooling air. There is no trace of sugar, no paste. Menthe Fraîche is a radical departure from virtually all concepts of “perfume.” I would go so far as to argue that it is, potentially, a new school to be investigated, one that is informed both by quartz-clear minimalism and noir hyper-realism, but lighter, more raw and ethereal. What smoke, old wood and spice are to some perfumers, organic freshness and live vegetation are to Maruitte and Heeley. The scent wears like coolness, like clean white sheets. It is sharp as the prick of a tiny thorn. It is reassuringly good.

“People said to me, ‘Who wants to smell like toothpaste? This is never going to work,’ ” recalled Heeley. “But done correctly, every scent works.”


Menthe Fraîche by Heeley

(Five stars; Transcendent)

author: Chandler Burr
source: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/scent-notes-menthe-fraiche-by-heeley/