A late afternoon in spring 2010 I had one of the most memorable chance meetings of my life. My ex-wife, Kira Nova, and I were wandering along a canal in the centre of Amsterdam when we came to an unmarked storefront display window with an elegant installation of glass beakers, pipettes, curved tubing and an assortment of other objects incongruous enough to the chemistry theme to make us want to puzzle it out. I rang the doorbell, and a dapper, mischievous man with wild salt and pepper hair, a perfectly coiffed moustache and beard, and thick-rimmed glasses popped out from behind the door, looked us up and down suspiciously, and asked in a heavy Italian accent, ‘Who sent you here?!’ We told him the window had caught our eye and we were curious to know what this place was. He deliberated for a moment and said, ‘OK, OK, come inside.’ And then, ‘I make the best perfumes in the world!’ This is going to be good, we thought! But a few minutes later, our sleeves are rolled up as far as they will go, and he’s talking to us about lichen and spraying things up the length of our arms. ‘I was at an orgy, and someone tells me I have an amazing smelling groin, so I went home to try to recreate the smell’ [spray, spray]. We left smiling, in a delightful daze, smelling our arms the whole way home. This was the beginning of a lovely friendship and eventual collaboration, as well as my personal opening to the world of contemporary fragrance.
Courtesy of SNOTbv
Alessandro Gualtieri is one of the reigning madman auteurs of niche perfumery. He is the creator of two highly successful independent lines, Nasomatto and Orto Parisi, featuring intoxicatingly bold, sui generis hits such as Black Afgano, Seminalis, Bergamask and Stercus, as well as a maker of scented wall sculpture, olfactory performance and, recently, clothing.
Michael Portnoy: Hey, Alessandro, where are you now?
Alessandro Gualtieri: I’m in Radicondoli, which is about an hour and a half from Florence, an hour from Siena – it’s in Tuscany in the countryside where we’re just starting a wine project. Well, we started a few years ago, and now this year after a lot of experiments we’re going to get the first product in the bottle.
Michael: What kind of wine are you making?
Alessandro: That’s a secret! No, it’s not a secret – I found this vineyard with three different varieties of grapes and I’m expanding it, adding new ones. My idea is to make a single-varietal wine, meaning using only one sort of grape to do one wine. We have a small piece of land and we’ve been experimenting a lot since 2019 with this red wine, through the maturation, fermentation and so on. I think we’re going to have a fantastic product. We just came out from an evaluation. I don’t do evaluations generally, I just do stuff that’s close to my heart, but we took the best American, French and Italian wine that is from the same grapes, from very famous and super-expensive other producers, and we just basically beat the shit out of them, so we’re ready!
Michael: Unlike other perfumers I know of, who might be content to stay in their labs and order aroma chemicals online, the way you live seems to me from another era – like a medieval alchemist or 17th century spice trader meets an Italian Indiana Jones, but with much better fashion sense! You travel to India or the Middle East, to hunt down the finest raw materials in markets or the desert. When the canals overflowed in Amsterdam and flooded the basement of your studio, you were studying shit from the sewer! Tell me about the relationship between this spirit of adventure and the journey to create a new scent.
Alessandro: It all starts with the materials, and I have a visceral relationship with material itself. For me, material is everything, it’s both the expression and the essence. The materials come from many places around the globe, and my initial search is to look deeply into where they originate. I’m fascinated by the stories around the materials and by the people who work on them. Whether these are natural materials, synthetic natural identicals or aroma chemicals, whether they come from a lab, an animal or a plant, it is all material. When I start a project, it’s always about gathering materials. From there you have a second journey of trying to understand what you have in mind, how to play around with it, and trying to surprise yourself – it’s a long process. Sometimes you start from an idea, but it’s always related to material for me. Whether I get ideas from a shit, from a dog or from a person, I try to go to the root of the material. Think about a flower, it’s beautiful – but what do you want to do? The flower already exists, so why try to copy what is already here? It’s always about going beyond what nature offers and how you can play with that.
Michael: Composers have chords they ascribe special beauty or power to, like Scriabin’s ‘mystic chord,’ or the so-called Shostakovich scale. Is there an olfactory accord you find yourself always coming back to or which holds a big place in your soul?
Alessandro: I get quite bored by repetition. They say everybody has a signature, but I’m always trying to escape from whatever I find myself repeating. I work more with my stomach, and when I go to the shelves of ingredients in my lab, I sometimes pick up a bottle that I used maybe a year ago, and it’s like I smell it for the first time. I tend to change ingredients when I work because you never really master them since there are so many combinations. It’s nice when you can surprise yourself. It’s a safe play to use accords you’ve worked with in the past, but how boring! It’s similar when they say to an artist they should keep making these things because they’re selling like crazy, and you say, what the fuck, I want to change and do something else! We all go through these moments and then change course, so why repeat yourself? I’m obsessed with what I do, but sometimes by changing a little nuance, you make a difference, even though the starting point was the same. That’s why it always takes me time to come up with something different, because otherwise I’ll just be making a replica of the same shit with a different high, low, loud, soft, fat, skinny, whatever.
Michael: What are five of the most intriguing things you’ve ever smelled?
Alessandro: A cadaver in an autopsy, the anal gland of a muskrat, the underground corridors of Central Station in Milan, a Russian saleswoman and monguba flowers in Brazil.
Michael: I’ve seen perfume blogs referring to the ‘unmistakable DNA of Gualtieri’ and how often your perfumes are ‘nuclear AF’ – is there any truth to this? Do any of your scents have a shared DNA? And do you think people are picking up on certain combinations of notes or your style or approach?
Alessandro: I don’t really follow blogs, but in the end the point is to create a question. Either from you or someone else. When someone reacts to an olfactory aura, whether it’s from me or another perfumer, that’s when you think, oh wow, something is happening …
Sadonaso. Courtesy of SNOTbv
Michael: About certain perfumes of yours, I come across statements like ‘You need to be a real alpha character to pull this off.’ Do you think that certain scents can be worn by only certain people? Or does wearing a scent like one of yours immediately impart an air of luxurious experimentality, charisma and sex appeal to any old shlub? Can you fix someone’s personality with smell?
Alessandro: Sometimes people say, ‘Please give me a suggestion! What should I wear?’ But it’s so subjective, you should choose for yourself.
I made things, for instance Seminalis, with bourgeonal, which is a chemical that smells a bit like rotten lily of the valley, but it’s the same chemical that’s produced in the female reproductive tract to attract sperm to the egg, through a vibration. I thought Seminalis should probably work for females to wear, but then most of the people who bought it were male. I started working on Duro, which announces male strength, with my own groin smell. I thought this was more for men, but there are a lot of women wearing it. So when people ask ‘Is this feminine or masculine?’ it doesn’t really matter now that we are completely genderless. All my perfumes are unisex. So you go with your emotion, you go with your stomach. It’s very difficult to say that by wearing a particular scent you’ll become an alpha, but definitely it can help, because it brings a certain mood to yourself. I’ve seen people who are introverted turn extroverted by wearing certain perfumes! That’s the magic of smell. In the 1980s, I was working with a company that made tests about choosing a colour, shape or smell from a library of categories divided by olfactory families in order to understand whether people were more extroverted or introverted. All the introverts went for a more floral chypre or floral animalic, and the extroverts for an oriental spicy, etc. It was interesting, but I don’t really base my work on that sort of thing, or at least I have never done it so far. But it’s all marketing in the end.
…The parts of the body that carry more smell are those where more soul is collected…
Michael: In your manifesto for Orto Parisi you write, ‘The parts of the body that carry more smell are those where more soul is collected. The strong smells have become unpleasant to us, because the excess of soul is intolerable to the extent that our innate animalism is repressed and breaking from civilisation.’ The line is dedicated to your grandfather’s garden that he fertilised with his own waste. In thinking about the smells of the body and especially your new perfume Sadonaso for Nasomatto, do you think adding skank to the mix is some kind of universal law of art? Putting noise in, mistakes, distortion, dirtying up the canvas, etc.
Alessandro: I think good work always has strong contrasts. There is no beauty without ugliness. So I love raw material ingredients like animal musk, dirt, urine, horse hair and wet dog. I love these things because they are extremely powerful, very difficult to control and balance. But when you find a way to do it by working very hard or through mistakes, what comes out is always quite magnificent, and that’s why those smells are extremely attractive. The manifesto of Orto Parisi for me is about how we’ve lost contact with our own body smells. Maybe men don’t realise, but they’re always touching their balls, and women do the same to their genitals, but we take two showers a day, we bleach our anus, we have to shave completely in order to put on deodorant. We don’t allow ourselves to understand what our own smell is, and we deny our smell because of whatever society says. We’re marketed products to stay clean and attract a partner, but the best attraction for someone else is your own smell. Sometimes I visit clients that sell my products, and the most successful employees are the ones who have an exaggerated body odour! Many people have a problem staying near them because of the strong smell, but they are the most successful in sales. You would think it should be the other way around, but it’s not!
…this is strongly connected to smell, to the brain and to desire, because the erotic is very much about desiring without doing
any physical act – it’s a lot about fantasy…
Michael: With Seminalis, Duro and Sadonaso, you dive head first into the erotic much more than a lot of other perfumers. Tell me about how your conception of the erotic relates to your perfume work.
Alessandro: Well, the erotic for me is the world of senses. You start with yourself, by finding your erogenous parts, and playing around with what you like as a sensation. You bring it to a certain limit and see how far you can go, and then when you are confident about your own eroticism, you share it with other people. Of course, this is strongly connected to smell, to the brain and to desire, because the erotic is very much about desiring without doing any physical act – it’s a lot about fantasy. There is a huge world that opens up, and we as human beings have been playing in many different directions with the erotic, through literature, philosophy, art and smell. It’s a field which I’ve always been very attracted to. There are so many aspects to it, and I also find a lot of eroticism in nature, in plants and animals. In every season there are animals fucking each other in different ways – nature is changing, seeds are falling, there are all these processes that you see. The erotic is also very interesting to me because I’ve played with a lot of things that we as hypocrites consider taboo, starting with drugs, our own bodies, sex and so on. These things have now become kind of cliché and common, but it depends from which side you see them and how you want to explore them. For instance, the amazing video work that you made, Progressive Touch (2020) – it’s very strongly erotic, but the humour is so well balanced with the performance itself, and you come out thinking, ‘Whoa, this is a journey of theatre, dance and the visual,’ and it touches you everywhere. So you see how far you can go with something that might be a worn-out subject like the erotic or sex, how many new forms you can bring to it and how you can play with all those forms together. Also, the erotic for me is always about skin, it’s about being naked, and being naked means that you have to cover yourself, and then uncover yourself, so it’s always a sort of game.
Michael: Sadonaso, your latest scent, was announced to the public in a provocative trailer set in a sex club, and the special edition black bottle has the head of a glossy cock for a cap. Tell me about the journey to create it from its very first inspiration.
Alessandro: It all started from a coincidence. I saw this Finnish movie, Dogs Don’t Wear Pants (2019), an erotic black comedy. Part of the plot involves the use of perfume to recall a memory. I was strongly inspired, and started thinking of beginning a project on emerging from trauma to reveal something else. I began collecting materials that were contrasting – I didn’t go for typically sensual ingredients, or musky notes, or something that resembles leather or latex. I wanted to go beyond the typical smells associated with sex or BDSM. A desire grew to include something super nice, cozy and completely different from the starting point. I was looking into understanding what sort of meaning or purpose we have. I came out thinking there’s no fucking purpose in life, there’s no meaning, we’re just here, period. We are here to go on, we’ll clearly disappear, we’ll become extinct, and in a few million years we’ll be sucked into a black hole, so basically what is life beyond the sense of pleasure? Then suddenly I found a combination that was kind of powdery, cozy and sweet. I remember one night out at a big party in a club, I was dressed in 1920s style, and found myself at this bear night with all these giant guys half naked with chains, gear, leather, plastic and long beards. I started talking with a few of them, and they were super sweet and gentle people. They looked like they could have killed you in a second, but they were incredibly nice. I had two other experiences in a sex club in Berlin and Milan with different sorts of scenes, and again it was amazing that these people were so kind. The complete opposite to how they are generally portrayed. That’s why I came out with a combination that’s a total contrast to what people would expect, like leather or so on, something that is kind of nonsense as a joke but which in the end is very comfortable. Also, I don’t know if you’ve ever dressed up in latex, but I did when we shot the trailer and it’s a nightmare! From putting on the talcum powder and lube to wondering who will close my zipper, it’s like you need three or four assistants! Am I still enjoying this? I don’t know!
Michael: It seems culturally that our appreciation for skanky smells only increases over time. I just read an article in Dazed magazine titled ‘Anxiety, Credit Cards and Meth,’ talking about a niche perfume designed to evoke fear and anxiety which people thought smelled like a torture chamber! In both of your lines, though, you’ve never gone in for these kinds of blatant provocations. Although deeply experimental, you have a strong classical strain. Aside from revulsion, where can one go in perfumery in terms of boundary pushing?
Alessandro: Well, there is no limit, the limit is only in us. More and more we are looking for new experiences, whether expressed through smells that are repulsive or smells that are well accepted. I think what was repulsive ten years ago is less repulsive or more widely accepted now. Also, fragrance companies are now starting to use AI to invent new sorts of extreme formulas, so it will be very interesting in the future to use this technology to see how far we can go. Just like in food, the combinations are infinite. New things always start very niche – it takes a very long time until the wider public catches up. We are still not extremely developed as a species, very primitive, just above the baboon, so we’re still at the beginning. But I think we are living in an experimental period, pushing boundaries, mixing things that are not supposed to be mixed, creating things that were not there before, whether we use AI or our own brains. The problem is that, being in a capitalist game, we’re still promoting the copy of the copy of the copy because we can’t afford to have something that doesn’t sell or isn’t successful, which happens anyway because there are too many things that look alike – but it seems we don’t even notice. All cars look almost identical because we create legislation that says there must be certain standard technical details, etc.
Baraonda by Nasomatto. Courtesy of SNOTbv
Michael: I’m sure you were half joking, but I always found it funny when you commented on some of your new creations, ‘I would never wear any of that shit!’ Bergamask has been your signature personal scent for some years now. What is it about Bergamask that you connect to?
Alessandro: Well, Bergamask, not the existing formula, but a 95% similar formula, was the third perfume that I ever created when I was very young. Lots of ideas come when you’re young – you throw one idea after the other, writing a formula a day, because you think every single shit that comes to your mind is genius. Bergamask didn’t have that name at the time, but I was always fascinated by all these citrus notes. But they don’t last because those terpenes and citrus ingredients – orange, lemon, mandarin and petitgrain – are very volatile. My idea was: how can I create something citrussy that lasts forever? And though it doesn’t last forever, it’s one of the most persistent citrus notes on the market. At that time in the 1980s, I was looking at Eau Savage, Kölnisch Wasser 4711, Jean Marie Farina and so on, but I wanted to come out with a citrus power thing – that feeling of freshness when you grab something, like when you kill fresh prey, or pluck an apple from a tree and put it into your mouth [makes a sound of biting down]. Something that happens right away like when you bite an object or person, that sort of feeling.
Michael: I love some of the public olfactory performances you’ve done, like the time you secretly added scent to the holy water in a church in Vatican City and filmed people’s reactions as they started to notice it on themselves.
Alessandro: My dream now is to come out of the bottle – I’m kind of done with bottles. The idea is to go more public in a different way, like in the square. I did a very cathartic performance last year in Florence, very physical and mental, that I hope to repeat in a sort of tour. About the holy water, I do these guerilla actions because sometimes I like to also push boundaries, so I go into a place and explode a balloon full of smell and see how people react. People hardly say hello now in towns on the streets, nobody even smiles, so I just want to be a bit disruptive. I’ve hung an IV drip bag with perfume on a tree and let it drip, just so people ask ‘what’s this?’, and start smelling or touching it and the police arrive. Or I go to a church and add perfume oil to the holy water, so when people make the sign of the cross on themselves they get the smell. I was going to do something in St Peter’s in Rome, but because Bill Clinton was visiting the following week they’d put up all this security, so I had to cancel. I’m very much trying to explore the idea of how to come out from the container. All of us want to change our frame, but when you change one frame you enter another, so I don’t know. I would like to be in an open frame, even though it’s still a frame. I think I could still do things that people could enjoy, or not – it’s about creating a question.
Michael: You have two successful perfume lines, do olfactory performan-ces, and create scented wall sculptures, and drinkable perfume, with a recent foray into clothing and now wine. What else are you working on and where do you imagine your crazy nose will wander in the coming years?
Alessandro: The main thing I’m 100% focused on now is my vineyard. After these last few years, I think I can finally say something to the people who are working in the wine industry, which is as full of bullshit as the perfume industry. With the Orto Parisi robe, I always wanted to have a piece of clothing for when you come out from the shower and could just walk out of your house in and wear for the whole day. I thought it’s a nice idea to make maybe only one piece every year, whether it was a pair of shoes, a hat or whatever. In terms of perfume, I just came back from an ayahuasca retreat in the Amazon in Peru, and there is an idea I’m trying to experiment with, kind of going into another dimension. I would love to create something that helps us to cut and break bad vibes. We are all full of trauma. Most people don’t wake up with a smile, and during the day most of us create bad energy. In the jungle, certain plants are used, whether burned or made into a liquid, to help cut the energy around you, to block and clean it, to reset yourself, so I’m looking in that direction.