Scents and the city

The new range of unusual and beautiful perfumes are inspired by Indian experiences — an afternoon tea, a day at the movies, or a stay in a city. “The line is a celebration of the lovely ingredients that go into the fragrances or a strong memory associated with a certain place or an experience. 

We’ve worked with spices like cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon and black pepper — all of which we source from South India because of the richness of the essentials produced in the region. We go to Coimbatore and Madurai for the tuberose and jasmine. 

My idea with the fragrance range was to use Indian ingredients and work with them in a unique way so that each bottle has a hint of something familiar yet something totally unimagined or unique,” begins Gandhi whose family owns Associate Allied Chemicals which has been supplying to fragrance houses around the world for over 40 years now. 

The choice of scents includes Calicut, which has pepper as one of its main ingredients, and Madurai Talkies, that reminds one of a woman with flowers in her hair with a suitor dressed like the hero from the movie they’ve both come to watch, or rather, live. There is also Chai Musk that takes transcends one to the tea plantations in Ooty. Another ingredient that is widely used is davana oil sourced from Tirupati. 

The process of creating these fragrances was exhaustive, having started out with about 300 directions. Gandhi went on a tour of South India and beyond to discover local sensibilities and things that are a trademark of the respective regions. 

“One of the biggest revelations was the large network of flower gatherers and distilleries in Coimbatore who have been extracting jasmine and tuberose absolutes for generations together,” he adds. 

Not just the new line, Gandhi says India is home to most ingredients used in international perfume labels. “I travel once a year to Les Cayes, which is a small port town in Haiti to source the vetiver, to Sulawesi in Indonesia for the patchouli and the months of July and August always bring me back to India to Coimbatore in time for the jasmine harvest. 

We work with experienced French perfumers to combine these ingredients into the scents that they are today. It takes months of iterations and trials before you finally hit upon the one scent that works out. So it was a long process of nearly two years before we were ready to sample the final scents,” adds Gandhi. 

While it’s no secret that some of the best fragrance ingredients like jasmine, tuberose and sandalwood come from India, Gandhi says “all these ingredients get exported because there are no contemporary Indian brands to pay homage to them.” 

Another interesting aspect of Gandhi’s line is that there are no gender labels on them. “It’s important not to typecast what type of fragrances men and women “should” wear and rather, just to go with instinct and pick fragrances based on how they wear on the skin and how good they make you feel,” he finishes.