CAP DE CREUS, Spain — Among those wishing for a speedy end to the pandemic, few have reasons as obsessed with olfaction as Ernesto Colado, an actor turned fragrance producer whose workshop is located in a north-east corner of Spain. She sits in the village.
The pandemic brought masks that stripped humanity of its sense of smell, “the sublime that is right here,” as Mr. Collado puts it. And it brought with it the possibility that the virus might leave him unable to smell anything, which happened to him a few years ago and created an existential crisis of sorts.
Then there was the future of his scent tours, which he had pioneered in his native Catalonia, and which also seemed to be in danger for some time.
For now the tour was back, and Mr. Collado was recently with a group that had been to the top of a hill in Cap de Creus, a rocky headland above a deep blue sea about 15 miles south of France. But he was following her. They stopped in a wild rosemary bush, where he crushed a twig between his hands and asked the visitors to breathe.
“The smell goes straight to your feelings, you’re crying, you don’t know why,” Mr. Collado explained as the others nod. “Smell has a power that none of the other senses have, and I must tell you now, it is molecular, it goes down to the essence of the essence.”
Mr. Collado pointed to the person next to him. A hot wind from the rocks suddenly carried millions of molecules between them.
“When I smell her, I’m actually entering a level of deeper intimacy than when I’m sleeping in bed together,” he said.
The rocky shore where perfumers used to walk, and philosophize, is best known as background of pictures by the surrealist Salvador Dali, and Mr. Collado, in his own way, also sees himself as an artist leading a movement. They aim to recover the “fragrant culture”.
“What is that plant?” asked a woman passing by.
Mr. Collado stood in front of a sour bush with a crisp, earthy smell. It was loved, he said, by the monks of Sant Pere de Rhodes, a ruined monastery above the cape who pour it into their tea.
It was Vitex agnus-castus, also known as the “sacred tree”. This was ironic, Mr. Collado said, because it was “probably the aromatic plant with the highest aphrodisiac power in the Mediterranean basin.”
The woman pulled some leaves and patted her husband. “Take it,” she said.
There is no shortage of fragrance in the world, believes Mr. Collado. But it lacks the authentic fragrance. Channel number 5, designed to wake up roses and jasmine, is also full of synthetic compounds. Few people now know the smell of real vanilla, he lamented, only because of the artificial flavoring.
“We’ve never had such a scent around us,” said Mr. Collado at his home one afternoon. “But at the same time, we have no idea what life really smells like.”
As Mr Collado observes, this has to do with the fact that unlike our more “privileged” senses such as sight and hearing, smell has been pushed aside, “discredited for centuries entirely because smell reminds us of That we are just animals,” he said.
He launched into a brief history of smell: the root of the word “perfume” in Latin means “smoke”, a reference, he imagines, to the juniper burned by cave men; how the colonization of the New World filled Europe with previously unknown aromas of chocolate and coffee; And how the foul smell of London and Paris marked a turning point during the Industrial Revolution.
“There came this sudden obsession with sterilizing and disinfecting,” he said, adding that “now everyone should smell absolutely neutral.”
Mr. Collado has tried to make real The world smells at his fragrance factory, where he draws inspiration from Catalan nature. His company name, Bravanariz, translates to something like “brave nose” in Spanish.
Part storeroom, part laboratory, it sits on the lower floor of his home in Pontos, a rocky village north of Barcelona. There are cologne bottles and vats of oily liquids—but please, don’t call it “perfume.”
“These are olfactory captives,” Mr. Collado sniffed.
if cast paint Melting clocks with these landscapes In the background, Mr. Collado has made the scent of the scene his subject. He is a cultivar rockrose, a Mediterranean shrub with evergreen leaves and white petals. He makes a tincture from sea fennel, an edible plant with a salty tang that recalls the sea.
He mixes these and other fragrances together to produce Calla, a fragrance he sells.
Rotten seaweed pulled from shore and the resin pressed from lentisks, a tree described in “Don Quixote,” are also part of their search for local scents.
“His fragrance hit you here,” said Juan Carlos Moreno, an amateur perfumer, sniffing his chest vigorously.
Mr. Moreno said he cried the first time he smelled one of Mr. Collado’s scents. It was muga, a scent that, according to its marketing materials, could cause “to feel the silent sensuality of rosemary, amaranth, thyme and lavender”.
Mr. Collado grew up listening to tales of perfume from his grandfather, Jose Colado Herrero, who created some of Spain’s best-selling perfumes of the early 20th century. But Mr. Collado first made his name like this an actor on spanish television, and as a theater director.
The turning point came when Mr. Collado began experiencing phantosmia, a condition also known as olfactory hallucinations. She lost her ability to smell except for an unpleasant odor that was visible on everything, even her children.
Mr Collado was told that he would need to learn to smell through practice, just like a stroke patient must learn to talk again.
He started with a sprig of henna.
“There was nothing for two or three weeks,” he said. “But then one day the smell struck my mind, and I was immediately brought back to childhood, feeling like someone had slapped me in the face.”
Mr. Collado trained himself to smell the other plants around his house. It was the beginning of a passion that inspired him not only to mix his own fragrances, but to become a sort of evangelist of noses.
On a hot summer afternoon, Mr. Collado was in another landscape, the scent of which he was trying to catch.
In this region, stretching to the foothills of the Pyrenees, was Spanish lavender and rosemary, used for the “head notes” of its fragrance—the ones you smell after you first apply the scent. And there was a flower known as the Immortal, which creates the “middle note”, the smell of which persists after the first one has disappeared. A plant called jara, which is cleared by farmers as a weed, called a “fixative” by odor makers, is used to slow the rate of evaporation.
He grabbed a bunch of dried leaves and crushed them between his palms.
“I prepare with my own hands and what I have is almost a perfume,” he said and extended the leaves for a sigh.
His approach is the exact opposite of most perfumers, he said. They isolate the aroma, making some artificial. He mixes them, embracing the strange smell of it all.
“Why I do this is because there is nothing more complex than nature,” he said. “We must be complex, but we have a problem accepting our complexity and contradiction to ourselves.”
Roger Tol Pifare contributed reporting from Barcelona.