Culture in France is not just an idiom. It is all around you and in all aspects of the French way of life. "Culture" is the manifestation of human intellectual achievement and, at risk of sounding pretentious, the French are really masters at this. They are passionate people who take their art and expression very seriously. In the US, there are sub communities with this level of cultural saturation but here, it is seen everywhere and in everything.
In terms of culture, everyone knows the French are serious about their food and language. But there is also the fine art (of course), architecture, theater, fashion labels, wine and... perfume.
Today we experienced the latter in such a fun way. Fragrance labels that originated in France are very well known (i.e. J'adore, Jean Paul Gaultier Classique, Chanel Chance, etc). But today, we visited the Fragonard perfume factory, took a tour, and even joined a fragrance making class! It was SO COOL!
We first took a tour of the factory which was led by a young man with a very strong French accent. He did know his stuff though. I thought it was interesting when he explained how they extract the essences from the flowers in order to make the perfumes. Something like 2 tonnes of roses are needed for a liter of rose oil. We saw people actually bottling perfume and he talked about the chemists and their job in making the products. We smelled LOTS of fragrances and he tried to get us to identify the different scents (vanilla, musk, etc)..much like a sommelier leads a wine tasting. I made the connection between the two processes right away.
Their bottling assembly process:
After the tour, we were led to a "atelier" where we were able to craft our own fragrance. The base of the fragrance and what they are focusing on at the moment is Lilac, so all of the scents we made were lilac based, but we could choose how much of each essence we want to use. The smell DIVINE!
Another super cool check off the list :)
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