Put the odors of the plants of the Corsican maquis in bottles, without distorting them. This is the challenge of this chemical perfumer, which distills wild and powerful juices.
by Lionel Paillès
Born in Morocco in the middle of family orangeraies -its Azemour perfume tells this childhood to breathe wild herbs, the sand of the dunes and the citrus fields -Marc -Antoine Corticchiato also carries Corsica in his heart. In Cutuli è Curtichjatu, a village near Ajaccio, he spent his holidays in the house that saw his great-grandparents born. His olfactory heritage is a patchwork of these two places and his passion for horse riding which he hesitated to do his job. Small, it is the smell of plants that fascinates him, much more than the perfume in the bottle: “I tried to understand how a wild plant that does not pay for mine could exhale a powerful and perspective perfume.” p>
His analytical chemistry doctorate in his pocket, he works for research laboratories to dissect the smell of plants to discover the mechanism. On his journey as a chemist, he met Lucien Acquarone (died in 2008), specialist in the distillation of perfume plants, with whom he travels in all directions the Corsican maquis and the more distant lands of Vietnam, Reunion and Madagascar. “Lucien had the talent of extracting the smell of plants without distorting the original scent,” recalls Marc-Antoine Corticchiato.
Folle grass
A performance, as the extraction techniques, which use heat to capture the smell of the plant, destroy part of the fragrant compounds, making the aroma of the final extract often more disappointing than that of the plant on foot. This botanical enthusiast nevertheless chooses to become a perfumer and makes his classes at Isipca, the perfume school and the trades of the Versailles perfume. With a single idea in mind: to found your own brand.
It will be perfume of Empire, ode to the perfume plant, its truth and its brutality. He does not hesitate to use plants like the Inule (queen of his unloved fragrance), a crazy grass that grows on the parking lots and on the edge of the paths, that the perfumery had always sulk as it is devoid of nobility. “I never resolved to tear it away from my garden in Corsica,” he laughs. Nice way to complete the loop, the distillation of this “bad grass” was made with the two sons of Lucien Acquarone. Veiver Bourbon, the latest creation by Marc-Antoine Corticchiato, demonstrates once again that his perfumery displays rigor and sensuality.