Mark Crames about new Demeter fragrances

by: Evgeniya Chudakova

Like perfume God, decided to show Esxence 2015 explorers that perfumery has many faces, an incident helped me to meet head of Demeter - Mark Crames, who came to Moscow with bunch of new fragrances. 

Mark Crames: We have several scents being released this year. Ok, let's start withChipotle Pepper. I love working with peppers. It's a strong jalapeño pepper. It's a Mexican flavor that became extraordinary popular in the USA. So, I love working with peppers because smell and taste don't really match. The taste is very spicy, the smell is very clean. [we try Chipotle Pepper scent]

Evgeniya: Here we can find this transparent clean note with some sweet accord and even powdery one.

Mark: Yes, that's why I enjoy working with peppers - they are surprising. There is always something that I don't expect in the extract.

Mark: Well, the second one is Mountain Air. It's very personal fragrance for me. Because some of my scents are just ideas. But this one was really a big deal. And I will show you why. In August I went to Alaska, I went there to the fishing village that can only be reached by plane, sea-plane, two hours from Anchorage. You can't drive there, you can't hike there...only one way in and one way out. And this place is just exquisite and unspoiled. I knew that went there and I brought some material with me, I knew that I'd wanted to capture that mountain smell of the air, that was fresher and crisper than anything I've ever smelled. And that what we did. So, I worked on it when I was there. And we've finished it when I got home. And this was the result. [we tryMountain Air] It's get little bit green, it's get lake, it's as fresh as I can make it.

Evgeniya: I really like fresh scents, but without too watery freshness.

Mark: I didn't want it either. I wanted ozone fragrance.

Evgeniya: But you did a god job, as it recalls home for me. I'm from Northern Caucasus and it really reminds me this feeling of crystal fresh air when you come to Elbrus mountain.

Mark: Now it really means that we did a good job))

Ok, next one is New Baby. New Baby was being developed when I bought Demeter. The creaminess of the newborn baby's skin is almost impossible to recreate and I think we came very close to it. Or close enough for me to be finally happy.

Evgeniya: Here I can just believe you and admire, as I can't compare to real life experience)

Mark: The hardest work here was to create this human creaminess of a new skin. [trying New Baby]

Evgeniya: Usual powdery note that you expect in such fragrances is not very evident here.

Mark: There is very little powder. We didn't want to repeat the scent with this talk note, and the most important here is the skin.

One more thing that I'm interest in for years is different smell of different fabrics. We have already done one cotton-smelling fragrance - Sunshine. New one is much cooler, but Linen is fascinating, because it goes from hot to cold and backwards, so it's almost a chameleon.

Evgeniya: [trying Linen] it's...funny, I don't know why. I wore Sunshine and I can say it's comfortable, but Linen is somehow funny, it's just an unexplainable emotion.

Mark: So, this is what really interest me. Plus, this is the area that's done very well for us. White transparent fragrances that no one else is doing so much, so right now it's really very well for us. Everyone else is doing gourmands etc.

Evgeniya: With which companies do you work on your fragrances?

Mark: We've done a few things with Givaudan and we work with a lot of different houses. About 25% we do, we blend ourselves, like, for example, Mountain Air and New Baby. Givaudan did about dozen fragrances for us. But I don't think we need to specialize it. We work with small houses and each one has their own specialty. So we work with who is best for particular project. It gives us a possibility to develop the broader range of olfactory ideas, than you have while working with two or three big houses.

Evgeniya: Evidently, it's a reasonable approach.

Mark: Ok, next one is Caribbean Sea. It's probably slightly misnamed. It's not the idea of the shore, going to vacations etc. It's when the water is already up to your knees, you experiencing the ocean. [trying Caribbean Sea]

Evgeniya: You see, it's very gentle scent, I really would buy it for children.

Mark: And this is what I think, when I think of the Caribbean. We have several ocean fragrances. The Pacific Ocean was a warm breeze and salty water, Ocean was a cold ocean of the north-east of the United States. And the Caribbean is like home for me, that's why it's soft comparing to other oceans. Very often you don't even got waves.

Evgeniya: Yeah, the first word that came to my mind to describe this fragrance was 'friendly'.

Mark: Oh, I like it. Accessible is good. Honestly, we don't want to capsulate what we want to be. I find so many complex plans, inaccessible. We want to be easy.

But this one [shows another new scent] is something a little bit different for us. About five or six years ago my Korean distributor asked me for more traditional scent targeting to 15-17 year-old girls. Korea is really very interesting culture, it's sort of America in 1955s. Girls go to college, they work for three years, they get married. There is no desire for continue to work, there is no goal except to find a husband and to have a family. It's absolutely America 50-60 years ago. So, they wanted something that would really reflect that culture. I wanted to do a fruity-floral, if I could do something really different for another people. And there is a couple of unique aspects. One of them is - there is no bottom note, it stops in mid-range flowers. But the top notes, I wanted them to be sparkling, almost effervescent, so I used the things like apricot flowers, peach skin, strawberry tops - unusual fruity notes. All that to try to create something that doesn't smell like everything else. I have nothing against fruity-florals, I'm against doing the same things over and over again in different packaging.

Evgeniya: [trying First Love] Strange thing, but for me it's rather sad and melancholic scent. It's just an impression, if you don't mind.

Mark: Maybe because it's incomplete, I mean, intentionally incomplete. And we never expect everybody to like all our fragrances. If you like one - it's already good.

Evgeniya: I don't think here is the question of 'like' or 'dislike'. Fragrances are emotional and if they awaken any emotions - it's good.

Mark: Next one. This is something I really - technically - wanted to do. Soft fruits. Do you know what is plantains? It's Spanish bananas. It's a green Spanish banana used in cooking, it's not for eating raw. If we talk about fruits, perfume is usually deal with something sweet and childish. I wanted to do something more sophisticated. We took this green banana to try to do sophisticated banana scent. This one is not going to be for everybody. It was something technically I wanted to do for a long time.

Evgeniya: [trying Plantain] It's interesting! Here is the pulp scent, even slightly rotten. On skin it would give even some carnal touch, I think. This is not this kind of sugary sweetness. No, it's really very interesting.

Mark: I think 'interesting' is right word. And it was good enough for me. I really don't expect to sell tons of that.

Asian Pear or Chinese pear. We have no pears in Library. I didn't want to do just sweet juicy pear, because there would be just one more sweet kind of things. So, I love cinnamon notes in the Chinese pear, I love oriental scents anyway. This was probably the most popular scent of the new collection among the press in New York.

Evgeniya: This one is strange, as it seems a bit unbalanced and attracts exactly thanks to this feeling.

Mark: Cardamom was a fragrance asked for all the time. I worked on it for a few years without any success, finally I stopped to deal with synthetics and made completely natural fragrance. The problem of doing Cardamom fully natural is that it's bloody fortune. We use a couple of our fragrances, that are completely natural like Patchouli,Vetiver and they cost seven times more than our usual fragrances and Cardamom was three times more expensuve than these natural fragrances. So, it make no sense at all except it's all about the smell.

Evgeniya: [smelling Cardamom] It smells so familiar.

Mark: This spice is used a lot in Northern European and Asian cooking.

Evgeniya: For me it's more woody, than spicy, as here is really the smell of wet spicy-wood. Cardamom note arrives a bit later, with a hint of cinnamon.

Mark: Yes, on the pyramid is just next door, it's as deep and spicy, as we could get. To make it wearable we had to use not only one ingredient, but the chord is natural cardamom.

And, for Christmas, as we do Christmas scents every year, we make Frankincense. Which one was one of three gifts to baby Jesus. The Frankincense will be very rough and dirty, this is not the pure frankincense.

Evgeniya: [trying Frankincense] Good, it's the cold side of frankincense. I remember to meet similar touch in D.S. & Durga's scent Siberian Snow - cold dirty incense with even chalky side. This one with Cardamom and Plantain are my favorites.

Mark: Among these three you picked up two the most controversial. And [shows three new bottles] this is something new. It's called Destination Collection, which is really vehicle for me to experiment something I love - relationship between places and scents. New Zealand, I think you know it, was the first destination scent we've ever done. It's the same scent, just a repackage. The other two completely new ones. Great Barrier Reef - the idea I was trying to capture was warm Pacific Ocean and also the exposed reef at low tide, with an interesting smell of the Reef itself, it's powdery and very clean and salty smell.

Evgeniya: [trying Great Barrier Reef] interesting mineral note, with the touch of white chalk. Powdery, but not sweet, so, it gives not smell, but structure to the scent.

Mark: Now, Cuba is actually what I really love - it's masculine, it's got the Spanish spices, the island smells, but the chord is tobacco. But instead of using dried tobacco, which is typical to use in the perfume, we used tobacco plant and it gave, I think, a richer, brighter accord. I've done a lot of tobacco scents, but never with the live plant.

Evgeniya: [trying Cuba] it's also extremely wearable and comforting scent. It's very cozy. I also feel the sweetness of rum here.It would be oerfect as home scent, I think.

Mark: Yes, the sugarcane, I kept this as well. And they are all linear, they are all in Demeter style. And what is important with this collection - my perfumes become more sophisticated. They maturing naturally. Even we are holding in the linear construction, what is really important for our proposition, the fragrances themselves, not in the traditional perfumery sense of complex, but they are more and more complex, more subtlety in the components etc. And honestly, when I'm looking back and backwards I see there is no something intentional, it's just something what happened. And now I think that these scents don't have to have traditional drydown to be complex, and if you keep your complexity linear, it will be much more accessible.