A meeting with Maria Candida Gentile

Yesterday's meeting with Maria Candida Gentile was an opportunity to learn more about a true artist of perfumery, whose works are among the most exciting you'll ever smell. Her fragrances radiate familiar feelings (like a walk in a botanical garden, a love for a certain blues voice, the longing for a child who moved into a far country) in an immediate and very direct way, without any apparent effort. In fact, behind such simplicity is a solid compositive technique obtained through decades of training, and a taste for raw materials which amazes me every time I smell her perfumes.

Introducing in a fragrance thirty top quality essential oils and absolutes won't authomatically grant you a nice scent: you need to find the "right" raw materials and treat them for what they are, helping them express their full personality. 

Maria Candida told us she works accords separately and puts them together only afterwards, refining and modifying those which, introduced in the general context, refuse to cooperate with others or "work" in an unexpected way. Gathering and mastering a group of wild children crying loud with different voices, respecting them and leaving them a certain amount of freedom is a work that only a mother can do that lovingly way...

She presented her works one by one, with components and inspirations from which they originated. For example, she was moved at the memory of her unexpected meeting with the last representative of the Hanbury family, while composing the perfume bearing that name. 

In addition, MC has brought us some of her beloved raw materials, including mandarin and bergamot of outworldly quality, produced by a well-known calabrian brand specializing in citrus essential oils: I rarely smelled citrus fruit of such outstanding quality! Yesterday, participants to our usual Degustation course were more numerous than usual and flooded Maria Candida with questions, curiosities and, above all, affection. Maria Candida is a really talented speaker and the few who didn't know her yet, certainly fell in love with her scents.