This is the only publicly available English translation of this important work by Edmond Roudnitska
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Edmond Roudnitska, 1938
“Revue des Marques” — “Parfums de France,” August 1938.
A fixative element ought simply to mean a tenacious body, but the term is sometimes granted too absolute a meaning, and one comes to expect of the function a virtue that, unfortunately, it does not possess.
Bringing into balance the various qualities an extrait must possess constitutes a series of investigations that are necessarily carried out in concert, for they represent so many factors acting upon one another. When the perfumer establishes a formula, he thinks as much of introducing the products that will bring “freshness,” “lift,” “blossoming,” as of including those which, through their slower evaporation, will constitute the base and ensure the persistence of the odour.
In truth, no fixative properly so called is known to us, and the expression “to fix a perfume” carries only the meaning one chooses to lend it. What would be the role — the sole role — of a true fixative? To render an extrait more tenacious? But this quality is only one among those with which the perfumer concerns himself in the extrait he creates.
To an extrait that is too fleeting, it does not suffice to add a fixative; tenacious products do not merely prolong the duration of the extrait, they contribute, in the same capacity as the other constituents, to the general note of the perfume and to its cohesion. To wait until one has obtained the sought-after tone before adding them is to expose oneself to unforeseeable modifications of odour, which risk denaturing the perfume. An extrait that does not hold has a defect; it is not to be fixed but to be finished, or even reworked entirely.
The ideal fixative, one that would permit subsequent addition, would rather be an odourless product possessing the property of prolonging the duration of odorant bodies without its contact altering the tonality of the odour. These qualities together, it would still be to be feared that this fixative might act unfortunately upon the lift of the perfume — that “fixation” might be achieved at the expense of vigour.
And here we enter a vicious circle: on the one hand, modern technique tends to stimulate the evaporation of perfumes, to obtain nervy extraits possessing lift, releasing themselves with vigour; and on the other, we are urged to add to these same extraits bodies destined to restrain that release, to retard evaporation. This contradiction, which in certain cases may be only apparent, nevertheless illustrates the necessity of not treating separately the small problems posed by each stage of the extrait’s evaporation.
At each of these stages, we must concern ourselves with the residue of odours from the preceding stage and, if one may say so, with the vanguard of the stage to follow, in such a way that we may oversee the odorant accords that come into being and ceaselessly modify themselves. The foregoing metaphor has, of course, only the value of an image; the oversight in question cannot be tangible (1), and it is only through practice, through experience, that this oversight becomes, in a sense, intuitive. But theory must be set down in figurative form if one wishes to attempt to… “fix” ideas upon points that escape both the exact sciences and even ordinary vocabulary.
It is true that the subsequent addition of tenacious products sometimes considerably improves persistence without appreciably harming the equilibrium or evolution of a perfume; but these are merely accidents that benefit from happy coincidences, and from which no general rule should be drawn.
Besides, the truth is that perfumers today have at their disposal, in the domain of natural essences as in that of organic chemistry, a range so rich in tenacious elements that they may find suitable products in it for every use, for every direction.
It would be regrettable if the present tendency to seek out particularly tenacious extraits should turn to obsession and lead one to forget that this otherwise valuable quality does not, all the same, suffice to confer class upon a perfume. The long period of material hardship through which we have just passed has incontestably imposed upon the female clientele a frugal taste for tenacious perfumes. But if the modern woman rightly demands that the duration of her perfume exceed the duration of her stay at the dressing-table or in the boudoir, she does not pretend that this perfume should hold indefinitely. In reality, it suffices her that throughout the day her passage should leave an agreeable sillage; her common sense lets her acknowledge that this is already no small thing.
We must guard against the technical error that would constitute the abuse of heavy essences and of bodies of low volatility — an abuse which, by compromising the vigour of the perfume, would bring about a delayed release. The danger, indeed, is to arrive at a perfume which is sufficiently odorous on the second or third day but which, owing to its slowness of evaporation, appears “flat” on the first day and risks never having given the vaporous impression of sillage. In such a case, the perfume has been “smothered” — the logical result of a lack of harmony between the tenacious elements and the lighter elements which, too restrained, were unable to release themselves quickly enough.
In sum, our attention must bear not only on the extremely tenacious bodies, whose role consists in laying the foundation of the edifice and often in contributing their own particular note, but also on the elements of medium volatility, which will be the effective artisans of the perfume’s practical tenacity.
We may grant that the stages of evaporation are not like watertight compartments — that the disappearance of volatile odours is delayed by less volatile odours with which the former associate themselves for a moment, and that, conversely, the appearance of the latter is hastened by the entraining action of the former. To cite but one example, Sandalwood essence — a fairly tenacious product — does not confine itself to acting upon the perfume’s final stage; it also influences the first portion, and one cannot disregard the contribution of its earliest waves nor the accord or accords that may result from them. It is, on the contrary, the speculation upon these superpositions of odour at the frontiers of two neighbouring stages that allows one to merge those stages and to obtain an evolution without jolts, passing progressively from the head notes to the base notes.
Age, through the intimacy it brings about, likewise contributes to rendering the various elements more solidary with one another. In a blend rich in Bergamot and Vanillin — as in certain Opoponax bouquets — the Bergamot stands out powerfully so long as the blend is recent, while the Vanillin makes itself felt only after the first stages of evaporation; but with the ageing of the blend, the Bergamot will lose much of its dynamism to the benefit of the Vanillin, whose odour will be perceived sooner.
The few reflections that precede bring this question of fixatives, we believe, back to its more just proportions, and they show, perhaps, that a modern perfume is not a simple assemblage of detached pieces, but that it forms an ensemble, a whole, and that one must entrust the care of coordinating its elements to a master other than chance.
(1) for now