The Smells of the New School Year

Ahoy, ahoy, it’s back to school! For many, the holidays are ending. Perhaps you are getting ready to return behind a desk and to take up the responsibilities of the working world again… Not so fast. Master Parfums invites you to fall back into childhood for the length of an article about the smells of school—those that have the power to transport us into a classroom, between dictations and playtimes.

The Pencil

HB, B, 2B—we didn’t always know what it meant, but is there a more classic piece of stationery than the pencil? This essential of our pencil cases, which came into being at the end of the 18th century, was first made of juniper wood, then red cedar. Today, it is incense cedar that is mostly used for its manufacture. At the end of its wooden body, there is of course its grey lead composed of graphite and clay.

To evoke the woody, gently mineral scent of the pencil, there is nothing like cedar, then… but not just any, because not all are equal. Atlas cedar, for example, exhibits a leathery, even animalic facet. Not really the thing to take us back behind a desk. No, the star is Virginia cedar or red cedar, whose wood shavings are distilled in order to extract a rich essential oil. The cedrol molecules this oil contains confer on it a green woody aspect, soft and dry at once.

If cedar has become the darling of many olfactory families thanks to its immense power to fix the notes it rubs shoulders with, place it in a woody perfume, and it truly shines, especially in contact with other woods. Light Blue by Dolce & Gabbana and its bamboo wood, Tam Dao by Diptyque and its sandalwood, or Super Cedar by Byredo where vetiver joins in are a few fragrances built around cedar that have managed to recapture the smell of a freshly sharpened pencil ready to be used… which brings us to paper.

Paper

Whether in a brand-new large-squared exercise book, a novel read reluctantly during the summer or a second-hand textbook, who has never found comfort in the smell of paper? The slightly sweet wafts that emanate from it and strengthen over time are mainly due to two components: cellulose and lignin.

Indeed, trees are mostly composed of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. When a wood is treated to make paper pulp, the cellulose is extracted from it, but the other two are shown the door. Lignin can notably make the paper too rigid and difficult to handle. But never mind, it does not have its last word, because the separation is never done completely: some of its essential oils cling to the cellulose, and it is they that make the olfactory signature of the books and exercise books that quickly made our satchels a little too heavy to carry.

Lignin, which previously contented itself with being a residue of paper mills, is today used in perfumery, especially to synthesise vanillin and recreate the sweet smell of vanilla pods more quickly and at lower cost. Paper also contains acetic acid with its vinegary scent, aldehydes recalling dry grass, or benzaldehyde, evoking for its part bitter almond. With the passage of time, these components degrade… to the great delight of our nostrils, because the smell of paper that we love so much is then exacerbated!

The powdery delicacy of Amande Persane by Roger & Gallet, of L’Eau d’Hiver by Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, or perhaps of Vanille Exquise by Annick Goutal will thus plunge your nose between white pages. And if you prefer the smell of pages yellowed by time, Old Books by the house The Perfumer’s Story by Azzi recreates the woodier, more resinous side of ageing paper.

The smell of a book will vary according to its age, then, but also according to the type of paper used, the ink that appears on its pages, as well as the glue used to bind them. Speaking of glue, many of them today boast of being fragrance-free; an aberration for former schoolchildren for whom the smell of Cléopâtre glue is an unparalleled Proustian madeleine. Let’s return to the pencil case with this product with the orange cap and its famous almond scent with chemical accents.

Cléopâtre Glue

In 1930, Pierre Chamson founded the Cléopâtre company and made, in his Parisian apartment, a glue of the same name based on potato starch. But faced with sometimes tough competition, one has to reinvent oneself. In no time, the pot armed itself with a little brush and, above all, in 1934, with the almond smell that would make its success. The molecule that delivers the characteristic smell of Cléopâtre glue is the benzaldehyde mentioned above, also called amandol, because it is found in bitter-almond essence. At the time, the aim was not, however, to confer any fragrance on the glue, only to make its texture easier to work with and to be able to preserve it longer.

In the cologne Gentlewoman by Juliette Has A Gun, Cléopâtre glue is brought back to life by an almond intensified by orange blossom and enveloped in ambroxan and musks. Doudou by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac also claims Cléopâtre glue as inspiration. Unsurprisingly, it is the union between a green almond, orange blossom and bitter orange. In the same vein, Serge Lutens delivers with Louve a pared-down, powdery almond.

A Pot-Pourri of School Scents

There are still so many smells of the new school year to rediscover! Perhaps you remember enthusiastically choosing the colour of your exercise-book covers as September approached… The scent that emanates from them comes from residues of vinyl chloride, a toxic gas when present in large quantity, which is fortunately not the case in exercise-book covers—good news for those who liked to inhale their ethereal smell.

Fountain-pen ink, for its part, owes its smell to the small dose of phenol that serves as a preservative in it. Also suspected of having harmful effects at high concentration, it was prudently replaced. Farewell, then, to its slightly leathery smell sometimes evoking mushroom and even tapenade. Le Messager by Courrèges, Téméraire by Givenchy, M/Mink by Byredo, or L’Eau Papier by Diptyque are all fragrances reviving the ink that sometimes ended up more on our fingers than on our sheets. L’Eau Papier also presents an accord of rice steam suggesting, you’ll have guessed, paper. Let us also mention Comme des Garçons 2, a woody perfume showcasing Japanese Sumi ink, accompanying it with a whole host of spices, incense and cedar.

Tempted to recapture the harsh, mineral scent of chalk on a blackboard? Take a look at Royal Bain by Caron or De Bachmakov by The Different Company.

Has this overview of schoolroom notes made you want to learn more about the composition of a perfume? With its 120 questions about the fascinating world of perfumery, the Master Parfums game has the solution, and that’s not all: with its scented pencils, sketching out your own fragrance becomes child’s play!