Fanny Bal

"I'm passionate, uncompromising, I'm not black and white, but I'm almost young too, so I think I can win everything. It's not true, of course, but it's what drives me and fuels my passion".
Fanny is young and alert. Her youth and calm, together with her slight detachment from circumstances, almost invite a form of contemplation.
Fanny became a perfumer by becoming a pupil of Dominique Ropion. She was Dominique's pupil, apprentice and assistant in the project to reorganise the IFF's in-house perfumery school, which Dominique directed. But for that you had to be bold Fanny was on a study programme at IFF as part of her course at Isipca when she was recruited to work on Isipca's perfumery project. When the project finished, Dominique offered to train Fanny if she wanted to be a perfumer and that's how it all started: "He gave me lists of raw materials, I went to the lab to make my solutions and in the evening we smelled them and he asked me questions. We drew up a classification table of raw materials by family, natural and synthetic, my particular periodic table. We redid the perfumery school syllabus. In addition to the ingredients, he had me draw the structural formulas of perfumes such as Trésor L'Air du Temps, short formulas that he had developed with ten ingredients, which are the essence of these perfumes, their skeleton, their structural formula. He would give me one of these short solutions and I had to smell it and recognise the ingredients, write my own short formula, go to the laboratory, weigh the ingredients, smell and correct. Today, the IFF perfumery school is based on that work.
In addition to offering Fanny this technical apprenticeship, Dominique was the figure of the perfumer who materialised the profession she wanted to pursue: "When I started my training, of course I wanted to be a perfumer, to create perfumes, but I didn't know exactly what that was, what it meant. Working with him, seeing all that rigour and precision, made me understand.