Anne Flipo

A tall, beautiful woman enters, a mixture of angles and curves. She is dressed in black, the luminous contrast of her skin and hair reminiscent of a classical painting, perhaps Dutch or Spanish Golden Age. The clothes she wears are simple but very fine, the fabric heavy and loose, densely black. She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes: she is happy to be here. She savours life, dividing it carefully into separate spaces and times, like bubbles, so that she can love and recharge her energy, to live life to the full. Anne is a master perfumer. This means that she has reached the pinnacle of her art and that she can, and must, teach others and that she strives, tirelessly, to develop her profession.
How did it come about? Anne is a firm believer in the idea that "everything that happens to us is our own doing". Anne is her own source of creation. She is also conscious. Obsessed with understanding and embracing everything, she seeks logic in her own path to connect with herself, to tap into her essence, to seek fulfilment. And she applies this process masterfully to the creation of her perfumes.
Anne is not a mathematician, but she could be. The rigour of formulation, the reverie of data deposited in sedimentary layers or disappearing in a cloud, ordered by an almost meditative state of mind to a rhythm that determines a form of harmony. It is these cosmic principles that give rise to the mathematicians' "well-formed formula", which Anne would learn to master: "I am very rigorous and self-disciplined. This is probably due to my upbringing, because until I was 15 years old I was not allowed to do anything other than what I had been organised to do".
"Today, after 35 years in perfumery, I still work at the same pace. The driving force at its core is that between 2 and 4 o'clock in the afternoon I am not active; I am present and absent; I am in an in-between place where my ideas can come and go. It's like a very orchestrated meditative process that allows me to play with my brain: let it all in and let it all out. Then I go through it all and select only what I need to keep, and I do that every day. Out of that fragile, suspended time that I protect from interruptions, in the morning I jump on the computer, I know exactly what my priorities are and what I have to do, and in the evening, once I've smelled everything, I organise the next morning". This rigour, these controlled periods of time, these protective circles around the spaces of her mind, the absence of walls, partitions or compartments, the passageways between all the ideas and impressions, are Anne's real creative springboard and what makes her unique. As for inspiration, Anne dismisses it with her hand: "Ideas are everywhere; you just have to use them".