Career paths in perfumery: Édouard Fléchier, Nicole Benitta, Noël Guihot and Pierre Dinand look back on their first steps.
Whether they chose to go into perfumery or not, training in perfumery at school is not (always) the guarantee of a successful career in this field of activity, which is only open to passionate people.
Édouard Fléchier, by his own admission, followed in his parents’ footsteps by choosing perfumery as a profession, having been cradled in this world since childhood. It is quite naturally towards a classical training that he goes to learn the profession of perfumer and enters the school of Roure to follow these teachings and to acquire the required competences of the environment. He tells us how Jean Carles, director of the school at the time, created the Roure method to train his apprentices. According to his testimony, the training and apprenticeship at Roure is done in 3 stages. First, a time is devoted to the assimilation of the raw materials, then once this knowledge is mastered comes the training and the learning of the chords. Finally, once the base of knowledge is established, we come to the schemes, during which the apprentices have the mission to reproduce the formulas of the most famous perfumes.
A long and complete apprenticeship of 3 years of rigor, delivered by Roure, which was the basis of his future formulations as a perfumer.
Nicole Benitta, his assistant at Roure, trained in weighing and learning the equipment necessary for chemistry before becoming a true perfumer’s assistant during her years spent at the side of Édouard Fléchier. A trajectory started by opportunity that she has never regretted.
Noël Guihot did not follow the classic path of perfumery school since he arrived (by chance) accidentally at the Trévise workshops and as the 13th employee of the small structure as a dishwasher, he evolved with the growth of the company. At the beginning, he started weighing to help his colleagues and little by little, he trained himself in weighing to become today the expert in the field of application.
For Pierre Dinand, his trajectory was to be quite different but once again, perfumery knows how to open its doors to those who love experimentation and refinement. Initially thinking he had wasted his years of study at the Beaux-Arts, Pierre Dinand was happy to see that his apprenticeship was not in vain and that, on the contrary, it constituted a solid base for his work as a bottle designer. The “man of 1000 bottles” even confides on the proximity between the making of a house and the elaboration of a perfume bottle.
To each his own, the history of perfumery has been written through all the stories left behind.
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