In our 10 Minutes With ... Barnabé Fillion, the nose behind Aesop’s new perfumes, shares how he became a perfumier and why bare skin is his favourite smell
French perfumer Barnabé Fillion, who’s the nose behind Aesop’s fragrance lines such as Othertopias, has built a career by approaching perfumes as more than an olfactory experience. Instead he understands scents through textures, his unique take on fragrances stemming from his synaesthesia—a neurological condition in which one’s senses get cross-wired.
“I experience images, sounds and scents as textures. It affects everything I do creatively, from painting and sculpture to how I communicate with my creative team and do art direction. It’s a very important “filter” in my life,” he says.
Fillion has also used this “filter” to develop Aesop’s Othertopias collection, including the most recent release, the Ouranon eau de parfum, which was inspired by monoliths, barren lands, and the idea of “an end without an ending”.
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How did you become a perfumier?
My interest in perfumery began when I was studying photography at a visual art school. I used to take pictures of botanicals with a Polaroid camera and became fascinated with how their patterns and repetitive structures revealed the architecture of nature. Today when I create a perfume, I explore this same style of in-depth photography as an inspiration.
How do you translate your ideas into smells?
Scents evoke associations and create images and patterns in the mind. I always start off with a blurry image which becomes more focused over time. For the Ouranon eau de parfum, I researched different frankincense notes and added ingredients that evoked associations with rocks and stones. Then, I dived into this imagery of the desert, something almost volcanic. The concept behind it is a monolith, and it represents civilisations through the ages and a structure that connects us to that time.
During the process, we faced the problem of the perfume being a little too static and lacking movement, perhaps because it was inspired by a monolith. We brought softness to this powerful imagery by adding lavender flower and petitgrain [an essential oil extracted from the orange tree], which bring joy and playfulness with their sparkling notes.
A crucial part of my creative process is to wear the fragrances on different textiles, as well as my own skin, so I can smell them at different times of the day repeatedly to understand their effects in different contexts. Each time you move, a new ingredient may come to the surface or maybe you notice another layer of complexity.