Lifestyle

With Nagercoil’s lotus as the centrepiece of her latest work, the Paris-based perfumer reconnects with memories and art

The desire to create a fragrance where one of the ingredients is the mythical lotus; this makes it the most personal of all my fragrance creations. Perhaps because the analogy of the flower blooming from muddy waters is the way I see myself currently — a deeply felt meditation on life in a flux, punctuated by perfect memories. It is a journey that took me in different directions, travelling from Tamil Nadu (where the lotus fields are) to Delhi, Paris, London and finally Mexico City, a journey full of surprises and learnings, both olfactive and philosophical, quite like the lotus.

Certainly, while creating it, I never thought of all these references because a composition is almost always intuitive. I did not think either that the lotus from Nagercoil and Kanyakumari would find its way to Mexico City in June via Delhi and London, a sort of passing the baton from me to my friend, artist Olivia Fraser — for her show dedicated to the lotus at the Grosvenor Gallery — and then to Mexico, in conversation with the writer Alberto Ruy Sanchez.