PARTICULAR TRAIT:

OUT OF THE NORM

DIVIDING HIS TIME BETWEEN PARIS AND NEW YORK,

Ralf Schwieger is a free and magnetic electron that knows how to capture trends as well as how to repel them: “The perfumer is the interpreter of the desire of others. It’s necessary to be attentive to numerous participants and to play the intermediary between different worlds. In this role of orchestration, you integrate your own vision.” For Ralf, he puts a lot of himself into a creation: "as a creator, you are in constant evolution. The learning process is permanent,

just like the desire to outdo yourself."

OLFACTORY SIGNATURE:

TRANSPARENT SILLAGES FOR GREATER ELEGANCE AND ATTRACTION

FROM CHEMISTRY TO PERFUMERY

It all began in Germany, in a forested region outside Hanover. In the summer, the young man helped the parents of a friend create window displays for a perfumery. He collected factices. For his university studies, while he could have gone into applied arts and created jewelry, he instead opted for natural sciences and moved to Berlin. He specialized in fragrance chemistry during the course of his program. He was then admitted to the Roure school in Grasse, where he was initiated into the profession of perfumer. The only French words he knew at the time belonged to the vocabulary of his favorite cuisine, which he readily compared to composition: “In both cases, one acts as an enhancer of sensations, often with spices or seasonings, starting with a raw base.” After a stint in chromatography, Ralf joined the fine fragrance team in Paris.

FREE THINKING

He developed a taste for ingredients that evoked skin, like mosses with woody, phenolic facets and also notes reminiscent of animals, which contributed a vintage and sophisticated side. The notorious addictive character of his creations makes you want to smell them again and again, without ever being overwhelming, a subtle equilibrium that neither satiates nor stagnates. Consequently, he often avoids materials that are a little too much in vogue. He likes to turn to forgotten ingredients or seldom-used notes. It’s in this unexpected palette that he finds ever more modernity for formulas that breathe and rise up. His work forms a parallel with Philip Johnson’s streamlined architecture or that of the more organic, dreamlike structures of Frank Lloyd Wright or Antoni Gaudí. Anachronistic, Ralf likes to blur the borders of masculine and feminine genres in his compositions, as for him, they were artificially affixed: “What counts is that there is sufficient tension to form a nucleus of attraction.”

HIS INSPIRATIONS : NATURE & ART, WITH A TWIST...

Ralf is fascinated with astronomy and images of galaxies.

He loves the rain. Watching the rain, walking in the rain, being in rainy places. He dreams of cloud-forests filled with waterfalls, and longs to visit Cherrapunji, India—the wettest place in the world.

He also appreciates Japanese culture for its distinctive aesthetic approach to courtesy, to design, to precise arrangements of objects for aesthetic harmony.

Ralf practices the art of cooking, and confesses a strong weakness for pastry...