By Anand Holla
 The mere location — a sun-swept office in a quiet Milanese neighbourhood on Via Savona — affords Atelier Fragranze Milano or AFM, an air of confidentiality that it seeks. Then, two thin flights of spiral stairs lead me down to its guarded laboratory where a cheerful young man is gingerly rifling through glass shelves lined with eyedropper vials full of essential oils.
Luca Maffei is not an ordinary perfumer; he is what the industry affectionately calls highly-skilled perfumers — a Nose. Standing before a magnetic stirrer and beakers filled with aromatic liquids, Maffei’s disarming smile lightens up the seemingly complex olfactory territories that we are about to enter.
“If you listen to two perfumers talk, you may think they are crazy. That’s because they speak in images,” he says, chuckling to himself, “They will smell something and say, oh yeah, this is my grandma’s room in her village home, or this is a sweet night by the Mediterranean Sea. I was always fascinated by the perfumers’ written formulas, the way they could combine various raw materials to create magic and the unique language of chemistry and olfaction that they would speak. I always knew creating fragrances would be my future.”
The affable 30-year-old is the trusted Nose for AFM — an Italian company specialised in fragrance creation and compounds production — and is the nose and mind behind perfumes of several high-end brands such as Acca Kappa, Pineider, Washington Tremlett, Perris Monte Carlo, Masque Milano, Tiziana Terenzi, Alyssa Ashley and Zippo.
Although perfumers sign confidentiality agreements with the brands that they work with and hence can’t disclose about the products or their formulas to anyone, some of Maffei’s famous past creations include Rose de Taif, Perris Monte Carlo (2013); Infinity Oud, Carthusia for Harrods (2014); Cuoio Nobile, Pineider (2011); and Empireo, Onyrico (2015).
In fact, only in April, Acca Kappa’s Black Pepper & Sandalwood, a rich woody spicy fragrance composed by Maffei, won the coveted Art and Olfaction Award in the Independent Category at Los Angeles.
“Actually, this perfume is my personal favourite,” Maffei says, beaming, “I used bergamot, elemi, artemisia, saffron, cloves, balsam fir and nutmeg for top notes; middle notes are damask rose, black pepper, cinnamon and agarwood (oud); base notes are patchouli, haitian vetiver, sandalwood, virginian cedar, cypriol oil and black musk.”
Inspiration can come from anywhere. “For this perfume, my inspiration was India,” Maffei says, “I imagined milky sandalwood enveloped in a veil of oriental spices… a journey searching the true nature of olfactory places.”
The pull of smell singularly rules the lab where Maffei works with master perfumer Maurizio Cerizza. “My mother’s perfume, Coco by Chanel, is my first olfactory memory,” he says, recalling how a floral spicy aroma of rose, jasmine, cloves and coriander would mark her presence.
For Maffei, waving thin strips of fragrance blotters under his nose appears as second nature as chewing on toothpicks seems for tough guys in movies. “The sense of smell is the strongest of the five basic human senses. It is not only the most sensitive but also the most closely linked to memory,” he says.
The mental associations that odours unlock can be as stunning as their mysterious capabilities to transport us back in time with just one whiff. Among Maffei’s other “scented memories” are of cruising through the Ligurian Riviera with his father and taking in the smell of the sea, smell of the wooden boat and the warmth of the sun that pieced together a feeling of freedom, or of his kid sister’s baby skin aroma.
Although Maffei can smell a whopping 3,000 notes as opposed to 1,000 notes that normal people can, it’s not that he was born with olfactory superpowers. “Everyone can smell the same way. It’s like going to the gym. If you practice your nose every day and improve its power to recognise various odours, you will increase your olfactory powers remarkably,” Maffei explains, “Of course, the fact that I grew up in this field helped me tune into this from an early age.”
Fragrance has forever defined Maffei’s life. His father Marco, who worked with the finest names in the fragrance industry and launched products for Italian fashion giants such as Versace and Trussardi, would bring home tons of lab samples before presenting them to customers. Maffei, therefore, got first-hand exposure to what he considers “the Golden age of Italian perfumery” in the ’90s, a period when perfume spelt glamour.
While he studied Economics in Milan, his father founded AFM. Maffei, then 22, moved to Grasse, the French town widely regarded as the world’s perfume capital. “In those four years, I learnt about everything from raw materials — synthetic and natural — to formulation techniques and extraction methods. At 26, back in Italy, I created my first fragrance — Cuoio Nobile for Pineider,” says Maffei, who then began working with Cerizza at AFM.
Throughout the conversation, Maffei is making me smell fragrance blotters dipped in all sorts of natural and synthetic oils such as the pungent Agarwood oil or Tuberose that smells like boiled plants. Italian beauty expert and journalist Mariangela Rossi, who guides guests staying at Excelsior Hotel Gallia through the exclusive Scents of Milan tour, stands by the side, smiling. Clearly, she doesn’t need to explain why a visit to Maffei’s lab is the tour’s first stop.
The odours of the oil are sweetly aromatic, softly floral, heavy on spice notes, citrus notes, or woody notes, and so on. Given how perfumes can unravel in a lyrical narrative, it’s no coincidence that perfumery uses a lot of musical terminology, such as top notes (the first impression), middle notes (heart of the fragrance), and base or bottom notes (the long-lasting effect). “To create a perfume, we usually use about 50 to 90 raw materials for these three notes. When you smell it, it unfolds like a story. It’s important to recognise the soul of the perfume,” Maffei explains.
 “Many a time, even the worst-smelling raw materials do well in accord,” says Maffei, before giving me a sniff of shockingly pungent oud oil, and dousing it off with softer odours, “So we use patchouli to push down the leather aspect, or rose to reduce the animal aspect of the material. Sometimes, we need to push up floral, fruity or citrusy notes. It’s like a game. You keep adding or replacing something to achieve a balance.”
Those endless negotiations with notes sure must take a hell lot of time? “We perfumers work with our olfactory memories. Since we have worked so much with these materials, we have a fair idea of the resultant fragrance when we mix them,” explains Maffei, “Yet, every day, we must experiment.”
Depending on the brief they get from the client, Maffei mixes and matches and chalks out a formula. “First, we hand them a trial sample, usually 20 ml, for testing. Once approved, we produce it in bigger volumes.”
The same applies for bespoke perfume for ultra-high-end needs. “First, I assess the personality of the person who I am creating the perfume for. I do a detailed interview to learn about their passion, lifestyle, what they want to communicate with the perfume, and then I choose materials that can best encapsulate their preferences,” Maffei says.
The product budget depends entirely on what materials the perfume demands — natural oils, for instance, are exorbitant. “Rose oil costs 10,000 Euros per kilo and it’s not even the most expensive,” says Maffei, smiling, “You need 40 tonnes of roses to make a kilo of that oil.” AFM imports oils from all over the world — the best Bergamot oil comes from Italy, while the choicest of Rose oil is sourced from Bulgaria and Turkey, Maffei says.
The average cost of bespoke perfume hovers around a staggering 10,000 Euros for 5 litres. “More the use of natural oils, more the cost shoots up,” says Maffei. As much as an advocate of pure ingredients that Maffei is, he is wise enough to embrace artificial concoctions.
“Chemistry offers great possibilities as synthetic oils help push the limits of the natural, by enhancing their strengths and bringing out their deepest flavours,” he says.
In the end, it doesn’t matter how you find those evasive notes, but it’s necessary that you do. “Perfumery, therefore, is like music,” Maffei says, his face lighting up, “you find those seven notes that fit together, play them and you get beautiful, sweet melody.”


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