Above MANE’s stand, a cloud of colour hangs over the fragrance collection. French artist and architect Emmanuelle Moureaux built it from one hundred colours, in layers that spread from a central point. From a distance it reads as a single composition and as visitors walk beneath it the layers overlap and separate. Moureaux notes that fragrance can’t be seen and colour can’t be touched, yet both change how we experience a space.
Where you stand changes what you see and Maysoon Younis says the same applies to scent across the Gulf. She is general manager of MANE Dubai and has spent 21 years in the industry. From outside the region, she says, the GCC is often seen as “one collective fragrance memory” made up of very similar markets. The closer you look, the more the differences appear, between Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE and even between cities within Saudi Arabia. “
In the west of Saudi Arabia, you have Taif rose. People there are very familiar with rose and they grow up with it,” she says. “While in Riyadh, for example, the wild lavender is very common.” Ask people in Riyadh about their childhood and lavender comes up and those early memories carry through to what they choose to wear as adults. She adds that Gulf consumers have “trained noses” and can pick out ingredients and quality, which she says is not common globally.
That personal connection is also changing what luxury means. Laila Iskeif Ferrero, who leads fine fragrance development, evaluation and marketing for MANE in Dubai and Saudi Arabia, says a luxury scent can mean many different things now. It used to rest on how rare or unusual a fragrance was and today, in her words, it is “really what the scent means to you.” Luxury can be your own moments, she says and in the region it is closely tied to performance. “Luxury has been completely redefined,” she says, “and performance is one of the biggest attributes.”
The perfumers behind PRISMATIC each began with something personal to them, usually a memory of somewhere. Cristiano Canali returns to Tuscany each September and Tuscan Fields recalls walking through golden wheat with his hands brushing the grain, with pink pepper for brightness and bran absolute for the wheat itself. Cécile Muller, who works in Dubai, grew up by the sea in French Polynesia and Caustic Dance follows the patterns sunlight casts across the ocean floor.
Benjamin Bélizon built White Infusion around a trip to a white tea plantation in northern India, where he watched light reflect through the clouds below the mountains. Maxime Exler’s Wukang Wood is set on a Shanghai street where sunlight filters through plane trees and he describes it as a woody portrait where Middle Eastern and Asian roots meet.
Some began with an idea. Ralf Schwieger, a chemist by training, thought of how dangerous light can be and chose fluorine, the yellow and highly reactive element. His Fluorine opens with clementine, bitter orange and lemon pitched so high that it feels almost aggressive on the strip. Mathieu Nardin took vanilla, usually imagined as rich and dark and made it luminous with ginger and watery freshness.
The brief also reached into everyday products. Mariam Bairi, MANE’s Director of Fragrance Creation for Consumer Goods, creates the scents in the things we use daily, from fabric and home care to air and personal care and she believes they have a lot of impact on our mood. Olfactory memory is the strongest memory we have, she says, because it helps shape both our memories and our emotions. Her examples come from an ordinary day, the cosiness a candle or reed diffuser brings to a home after work and the feeling of clean sheets at bedtime.
She also points to newer technology that releases lasting fragrance with movement. “It is invisible around us but it has a tremendous impact on us,” she says, from feeling reassured to feeling energetic and confident. Her team’s side of PRISMATIC includes Sophie Truitard’s fig hair and body mist, Christelle Heyraud’s shower foam, Anastasia Molina’s candle and reed diffuser and fragrances for laundry.
Beneath Moureaux’s canopy, the colours change as you move. The collection works the same way, because each perfumer looked at the same light from a different position and came away with a different composition.
