Among our five senses, it seems that smell has a direct connection with memories and emotions. Julien believes that our olfactive memory is the strongest. “When I think of my childhood memories, the smells come first associated with the feeling I had, then I see the images and eventually hear a sound or music” he says. For Julien, our nose is always in alert, even when we don’t pay attention, it prints sensations in the deepest parts of our brains.
Julien Rasquinet realized quite late, and thanks to the intuition of the famous perfumer Pierre Bourdon, that he was destined to creating perfumes. Since a very early age, Julien found in creative arts a way of communicating his feelings and thoughts. He loved to paint, to draw, to design and create costumes for theater and puppets. But it was only after graduating from business school that he discovered what would become his passion and profession.
When Pierre Bourdon met Julien, he instinctively discerned his sensibility and his potential to become a perfumer. He offered Julien to become his master. During 3 years of intensive training program, Pierre shared with him his creation philosophy, his techniques, his passion…. This encounter with Pierre Bourdon turned Julien’s life upside-down.
Julien also had the chance to work with Christine Nagel for 2 years before demonstrating his entrepreneurial spirit by creating his own perfume company. For 4 years, Julien has been creating independently for various internationals brands.
“The aim of a creation is to cause an emotion” says Julien. To achieve this goal, he likes to bring back personal olfactive memories or to create a story he would carefully translate into notes. His creations can be very figurative or very abstract, but they will always have the ambition to touch, to move or to make one to daydream.
Julien’s inspiration always comes from an encounter; whether it is a person, a song, a sentence in a book, or a place. From those encounters Julien extracts sensations -such as textures, colors, raw materials- that will become the base of the story he has been creating in his mind. “I always take notes when I am inspired by something, just like an author taking notes on from his everyday life in order to use them in his next script” he declares. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a new idea I just dreamed about. When this happens, I feel like rushing to the lab and creating it right away!”
When Julien first went to the Middle East, he fell in love with Oriental perfumery. He discovered new codes of creation, perfumes made with intuition and passion. When IFF offered Julien the opportunity to join the team in the Middle East, he accepted with enthusiasm, seeing all the potential and the new challenges the region would offer. “I knew I was moving into a region with a very rich perfume history, even more ancient than the French one. But if I had to be honest, I did not expect to fall so much in love with the region’s unique perfumery.”
As soon as Julien sat in the plane he got stroke by unmistakable trails: intense, rich, impactful, distinctive… Far from Dubai, he could already smell the beauty of the Middle East and the call of his new life…
