The House of Roure founded by the French Amique family is one of the world's oldest perfume houses, responsible for the creation of some of modern history's most unforgettable and enduring fragrances. A transatlantic company based in France in the Parisian suburb of Argenteuil, Roure USA has been integrated into the worldwide operations, and is headed by President and C.E.O., Geoffrey Webster under those direction Roure USA has established two separate divisions: fine fragrance and toiletries and, household soap and detergent fragrances, each with its own team of perfumers, evaluators and researchers.

"I think that we have a lot to offer Europe", Webster says. "The American market is fiercely competitive and independent and we don't want to lose sight of that". A glance at the glass display cabinet indicates Roure's justifiable confidence in the American market. Tatiana by Diane von Fursternberg, Navy, the new fragrance from Cover girl, Safari, Guess, Misha and Bijan are just some of Roure's USA's successful fragrant output which sit comfortably next to Roure's European classics including: Fracas, the new Versace fragrance for women, Elizabeth Taylor's Passion, Oscar de la Renta, Carven's Ma Griffe the enormously successful Obsession and the timeless L'air du Temps.

The operations are based in a specially designed open plan facility that is constructed to reflect the esprit of both the company's corporate philosophy and the products it creates. Created by the architectural firm of Der Scutt which designed the Trump Tower, Roure USA is located in leafy Teaneck, New Jersey a calm respite from the City just across the bridge.

Innovation and forward thinking are at a premium and where Roure USA is spearheading the current American designer fragrance domination, they are also making inroads into the study of the essentialities of olfaction, the most puzzling and elusive of the senses but one which sees millions of dollars annually outlayed in the creation and promotion of fragrance 'gambles'. The odds of establishing a classic in the minds of the public are 1 in 100 and the work of Olfactive Scientist Avery Gilbert, Director of Foure's Olfactory Science department affords him fascinating explorations into human nature, in an effort to remedy the balance. Avery's work has taken him from the lofty realms of academia to the private sector: The Monell Institute Centre in Philadelphia, Berkeley, a Doctorate of Psychology and a masters in Evolutionary Biology. For lay purposes, he is a Bio-Psychologist, who has devoted his professional studies to the human perceptual aspects of smell. Perfume is the human sexual holy grail, according to Gilbert and Roure intends to actively succeed where across round tables countless King Arthur's are still waiting for the elusive cup to runneth over.

VIVE: We all know what smells bad to us but it must be difficult to discern from the 'good' smells, what will then be a successful fragrance.

GILBERT: Well, we go beyond good and bad very quickly and that is where I have a problem with the common stereotypes about smells and smell response. The idea that it is a very emotional experience, very visceral and sort of reflex-like, that is a bias that you find everywhere. Everyone on the street believes it and you find it also in the scientific world. For example, if a male were to actually sample the fragrances that people are inundated with in department stores, he might find them very pleasant. If they were on an attractive and would say then that they were generally good smells. It is the context of threatening his masculinity and applying them to his body and messing with his own olfactory signature and self awareness that it becomes very anxiety provoking and thus you find the behaviour of avoiding it. Already, we are getting beyond whether it is a good or bad smell but what is it to me? We are getting into meaning, into interpretation, into images, into social communications and stereotypes - what if I get some on me? What will the boys on the construction site think when I go back? These are all the undercurrents which are far beyond just whether the fragrance is rated pleasant or not. That is what I want to get at - at these emotional undercurrents, get at the more elaborate thinking that goes on. I think that it is very cognitive when it happens. I want to know what happens in the cortex - 'the thinking part'. Everyone says, 'oh well, it's down in the hypothalamus, smell is a direct route to the base of the brain'. come on, we don't have fragrance addicts, people mainlining fragrance. What we do have is people who wander around stores, sniffing, choosing, comparing, wondering if it will be right for them ... all very heavily cognitive processes.

VIVE: What about when people first smell a new fragrance - instinctively, they try to put it in a place in time, perhaps it jogs their memories of a past experience or of another fragrance. Is that not an emotional response?

GILBERT: Don't be fooled. Because it is emotional and not available for conscious thought it doesn't mean that it is not quite well-organised. People can be very explicit about their emotions. People can be very specific about assigning exact amounts of emotion to their state - 'I'm a little bit anxious', 'I'm a little bit sad'. They can be very quantitative in discussing it. My basic scientific question is: How does the information that comes in the nose get processed by the brain and is that processed in a quantitative way, or a visual analogue kind of way? Imagine if I asked you whose picture appears on the Australian penny? Or, how many windows do you have in your house? You would have to visually analyse it. It is a rare person who says, 'seventy-eight', or 'fifteen'. Usually you would have to image the house and walk yourself through the rooms in your mind. And so, that kind of spatial information is kept in a kind of visual memory and there are a lot of different types. What I want to know is how is odour information categorised? Does it bear an analogy to any of these types of thinking?

Right now that is not being explored - everybody is content with the directly emotional explanations but that doesn't tell you anything about how it is dealt with.

VIVE: How then does one begin to deal with explaining the process?

GILBERT: You can do it their way. You can compare types of imagery and see how people go about imaging, there is a lot of standard psychological testing - a lot of which I can't divulge because it is still under wraps.

VIVE: What do you suspect then that you will discover and how in turn will that reflect back on the industry in determining the 1 out of 100 fragrances that will be the enduring classic?

GILBERT: Any information we can get to be more predictive about it, in terms of preferences and tastes will help because at this point it is very much a game of taste, creativity and feel. There is not a lot of predictive value in what we know about olfaction. I expect that olfaction will continue to be a slightly odd sense - it is odd in everything; in the type of receptors it uses, it's odd in the way that nerves are wired in the brain. It doesn't obey any of the rules - there are different amounts of layered cortex and the olfactory cortex is totally different to any other. Any rule that you make about anatomic generality in sensory input - the olfactory system is out there on its own. So when it comes to seeing what kind of thinking we use when we compare odours, when we remember odours, judge their quality ... it is going to be some sort of odd combination or at the very least unusual. but it might bear analogy to how we deal with other senses. To the degree that it does, this is where the commercial payoff comes in, we will be able to engineer fragrances ahead of time to be consistent in their statement - with what they do, to be consistent with how they look, how they are given to you, the situation in which they are used - in the home, on your body, in the air; we will be able to make at least a kind of generic level statement about types of fragrance; types of visual or auditory information - moods. There are some cross links there - are there happy moods - in the way that people describe 'happy' colours, are there happy fragrances? Are there happy colour/fragrances? Are there happy colour/fragrance matches? Anything along these lines allows us to package better, to sell better, to put together a fragrance that makes a statement consistent with the rest of the product.

VIVE: It is very interesting as a consumer to note that the promotion of new fragrance takes into account almost all of the senses in that you see the product and the packaging, you hear the music associated with the advertising - automatically your attention is grabbed and perhaps you don't even realise that all your senses have joined together to promote smell ...

GILBERT: The fragrance had better not be sedate then. Unless we get to the point where we could actually have an intentional clash. If we do that then we would be ironical, in the way that we assemble our clothing, for instance - wearing a tuxedo with half your head shaved. You can do that sort of thing but you are making a statement so unless it is clearly apparent it is ironical. I think that there will be regularities but there might be silly permutations - a pine note reminds people of green, that will not surprise anybody, but there could be others that are less expected.

VIVE: The way that fragrance language borrows from other areas like colour is interesting - the way that people seem to be able to smell 'green'....

GILBERT: Perfumers use it as a word, for them it is a whole category but that is like the category of fruit to a winemaker.

VIVE: How do you as an olfactive scientist work with the perfumer?

GILBERT: I don't get involved in the creative process because my work is basic research so what I am doing is science driven research with a 3-5 year time line. We do some applied research which is more product oriented for a particular category such as shampoos, detergents ... What I do with the perfumer is largely to get from them how one goes about experiencing fragrance. I talk to them about how they image it, how they remember it, how they feel about it - and I get anecdotes and a feel for how it is to be involved on a day-to-day basis creatively with fragrance.

VIVE: So again even the perfumer describes his/her reactions anecdotally....

GILBERT: They tell me very straight forward things also. I have done papers in animal behaviour on biological rhythms - oestrus cycles in rats and on air flow cycles in the nose, that sort of thing and then I hear from a perfumer that he is sure that he is more acute olfactively in the morning than in the afternoon. Then you go three doors down and the other guy says, 'No, no, I'm much better in the afternoon than the morning'. Maybe there are peaks - people have time of day peaks when they are best at doing this work. Does it correspond with some mental state of being bright and alert or is it strictly something about saturation of the nose. So, I've spoken to two perfumers and already I have gotten an idea for two more experiments.

VIVE: That would obviously have repercussions on productivity within the company, in that if perfumer A is more acute in the morning then the bulk of his work could be done then whilst perfumer B fires in the afternoon.

GILBERT: Perhaps send them off on rostered golf time! Actually some of what I do will hopefully have payoffs on how we go about our business internally as well. Not just in how we select the particular fragrance. I wouldn't dare tell a perfumer anything now, nor would I ever creatively but if we can give them another perspective on the creative process that they are involved in, that might be of some help. You know controlling creativity is a tough thing even as a scientist you have to come in first thing in the morning and it is impossible to be a creative, active scientist at that time all the time!

VIVE: How far have we come in terms of our understanding since the first modern commercial fragrances such as Jicky or Mitsouko? Were they conducting fundamental research into the sort of questions you are addressing or is this a relatively new field?

GILBERT: The first really good quantitative scientific research on smell began with the great rise in German Psychophysics around the late 19th century when all experimental psychology began. And interestingly, it rose about the same time as organic chemistry - the Germans also got a leap on that - and that is where a lot of the new ingredients came from - all the aldehydes etc. So it was only really in the 1880's that the beginnings occurred but it stayed at a low level for quite a long time. I think only in the last 15 years in the United States and Western Europe has it really taken off and even then, it was mostly in the last ten.

VIVE: Apart from the projects you are working on now, what do you see as the longterm relationship between the olfactive scientist and the perfumer?

GILBERT: I work from both the physiological standpoint and from consumer mentality to quite a large degree. What I do is based on populations, what they do is very much a pas de deux - a connection between the perfumer and the evaluator, a rather private, small scale thing. Perfumers do not go out and test 300 people and see what the response is. They are one step removed from the marketplace, from the actual consumer, which is probably good - it has to be that way. But my link might be to provide a window on that world, in a way that makes sense to them. Not just another survey of taste but to use the kind of fragrance type that the consumer is looking for this particular application: Here is what it should do for them psychologically and here is how previous creations of yours have worked. It is a dynamic back and forth.

VIVE: We were discussing previously the affects that certain climates and differences in various cultures have on the response to a particular fragrance. Taking these considerations into account, how then does one create a universal, cross-cultural fragrance - one that is going to not only smell the same everywhere but have the same attractive appeal?

GILBERT: This is the great dialectic of the fragrance industry. Do you tune your appeal to the average taste across one culture or across many cultures, or do you appeal to a small but vehemently favourable minority within it? Part of the answer which is the commercial objective is, that you can do well with it both ways. You can use the verbal minority to set the standard for a new kind of taste - a spearhead group. The group that went for Chanel No. 5 in the twenties was a pretty weird group but now it is perfectly acceptable, it doesn't rock anybody's boat, so you can use them as a wedge like that. The maddening thing is that you don't live in a world of just a set number of fragrance elements that can be assembled into a perfume. The number of raw materials is changing and increasing all the time; the palate is getting bigger and the interpretations that people give to a particular fragrance changes over time so what is a vastly different, exotic couture fragrance one year will ten years later be in a dish detergent. It has that sort of cascading effect. You change the definition of the fragrance over time, and you are constantly running just to keep even with it, like Alice in Wonderland running from the Red Queen. The envelope of taste that defines what is acceptable in one culture for fragrance in a shampoo product for instance, that envelope is changing shape all the time.

The cascade effect starts with the fragrance, which then becomes body lotions, bath oils and soaps, then more toiletry products like shampoos and hair care. Then in a household market: it might burn up in a fabric softener and on and on. The ultimate end of this path might be floor wax!

VIVE: If a product has a purely functional purpose, like a dishwashing liquid why is there so much emphasis put on making it smell as nice - over time - as a couture fragrance?

GILBERT: There are functional reasons why we use one fragrance in a product and not another in the same way that you would not wear a velour bathrobe to work. There are just rules and interpretations. Some don't extrapolate out others do. People may not feel that a stove cleaner is doing its job if it doesn't have a strong odour. and knowing where to probe the envelope of acceptability, that is the question. That is what brings me into it too because it involves matters of population wide taste and interpretations and I can put a handle on that, I can quantify that.

Fragrances are really tied to one point in space in time which means they have interpretations and that is why you are always going to come back to this cognitive aspect all the time. What was a fresh and revivifying fragrance in the 1920's is stale and old-fashioned now. There is a life cycle to the actual product but then at the next level of generalisation, you have all the heavy Florientals each of which has its own life cycle - some of them here enjoyed a very long ride at the top. But then as a group this heavy floral top note with the incensey, balsamic middle note has had its time too. There was an ascendancy: You get very much into history seeing these trends change, these things disappear, then they come back and then any one customer has been living a lie through geological strata - one customer may well have experienced Schiaparelli's Shocking as shocking back then. And when Shocking comes back now, that is going to mean something very different to her than it will to a nineteen year old.

VIVE: Does one's sense of smell deteriorate as we age like eyesight and hearing fall foul of the years?

GILBERT: Well, actually that is a sub-interest of mine. Does it fade over time? By analogy with our other senses it ought, but not really. All the insults, pathological and environmental take their toll on the other senses, because the nervous system cells do not replace themselves. You don't get new nerve calls except in the olfactory system where there are new cells standing by ready to transform themselves into sensory cells to take the place of damaged ones.

So given that, you might think that you could definitely extend acuity into old age and in fact, no perfumer has ever been fired because he was too old - usually their noses get better with accumulated experience.

VIVE: Is this replacement a throwback to some primitive function that the nose had to perform?

GILBERT: Yes. The olfactory receptors are relatively uncomplicated - it is just a sheath of mucus layer - not organised in a highly sophisticated setup, like the ear which is a coiled arrangement with a special viscosity and structure. The olfactory jut kind of hangs out there - it is primitive in an evolutionary sense in that it is simpler and ancestral. What we came up with in this National Geographic survey that we did is that decreases in odour performance with age probably are specific to odours - it is not across the board, it doesn't just fade generally. It is more that particular notes don't have the impact that they used to. Maybe not just in total level, they could change qualitatively and maybe the response in the latter years to a particular scent is less positive than what it was in middle age even.

VIVE: That brings up the whole issue of 'fragrance infidelity'. If a particular perfume is so much a reflection of one's self, why do people seem to change their perfumes so often? Can it just be mode because perfume seems to weather the passage of fashion time much better than clothes, for example?

GILBERT: I agree with you there. I think that a fragrance that you wear regularly becomes more a part of your 'core identity', it is part of you. Not like this tie, which I will get rid of when I go back to the lab or change for another one. It is not integral to my view of me, it is just a accessory. Fragrance is more 'you'. That is where I have a hesitation with what Annette Green of the Fragrance Foundation wants to promote, this idea of a fragrance wardrobe in the way that you have work clothes, after work clothes, party clothes, you should have a fragrance for every hour of the day, every day of the week. but there is a limit, I think because if one subscribes to what you are saying, the hypothesis is that your personal fragrance becomes much more of a feature of yourself - you look in the mirror, you see yourself, you inhale, you smell yourself. And you are not going to change that as readily. There are some products that you are going to be very promiscuous with, and shampoos are one. It is like a cheap thrill, you get in the shower you suds up your hair and you have this burst of fragrance. It is nice and pleasurable and then washes away.

VIVE: Fundamentally, why is the fragrance industry so successful: Why do people want to mask their own natural smells with the products of the perfumer's workshops?

GILBERT: Does everybody? I think that they want to blend it, they might not say it but I think that people like their own body odour, by and large. Some people are really in love with their body odour. Body odour is a category yet other people's is offensive. In very primitive terms it is narcissistic. It is an assurance that you are you, you are there, it is an assurance that you are masculine or feminine. That is part of the reason why having your scent changed forcibly is so repelling.

VIVE: Why do we have such an immediate knee-jerk often physical reaction to something that smells offensive where if something is visually upsetting, we often, perhaps perversely want to look at it again?

GILBERT: Olfaction as a mechanistic system is tuned to reject. It is a filter - it keeps bad things at a distance, it is the first screen before we ingest something - we look at it, it smells alright, it feels O.K., it tastes alright ... there is a whole sequence. And that rotten smell is what we and a lot of other mammals look for as a tip off that something is bad: food is spoiled, if you eat it, it will make you sick and having eaten similar things like that and having gotten sick, you anticipate the nausea ahead of time. Odour is also a signaller of change: it tells you when the cake is baked; when the cookies are done, when something has outlived its use by date.

It is interesting when you get a lot of fine fragrances that have fruity, and food-like odours. There are some new ones out that have a very gingerbready smell - again it is that envelope of categories, where you have defined that group as being indicative of something O.K. to eat and now you are going to wear it and it will be sexy!?

VIVE: The olfactory system is such a fascinating area and so little is known about it, can it develop any more and what can research ultimately tell you about it?

GILBERT: If I can somehow categorise better, the mental processing that goes along with olfactory information, then the next thing to do is to figure out how to enhance that; how to make people specialists faster. Maybe we could become perfumers in three years instead of five years. People can study the eye and vision; they can put you in a darkened room and shoot beams of light or give you spatial grids or after-images because they know how many photons of light, at what frequency they are thrown - they have a way of talking to each other. How can I begin to describe what I am giving you when I have to smell something? There is no common physical continuum; there is no way to discussify. That has been what has put off all this study for 100 years because you couldn't quantify the stimulus.

Taking a very diffuse route, my strategy has been to take from other academic areas - social psychology; facial expressions or placebo effects for instance. If you tell someone that there is an odour in the air you can get effects. So I come at it from a lot of different areas and not strictly from a Psychophysical one. but I enjoy it everyday, I have a stack of projects to do and I can keep at it for a long time. The most fascinating part of what I do is making the unconscious conscious whether it is talking to people or testing people, making conclusions, it is getting people who have always enjoyed fragrance, who have always had these thoughts about it but they have never verbalised them, described them to anybody - it is bringing that out that is quite enjoyable.