From Paris with perfume

When Carol Borodinsky finished matric in 1988, she told her parents that she was going to go to Paris to work in the perfume industry. And she did.

“It was crazy, ridiculous in fact! A family friend of ours, Yves de Chiris – a seventh generation French perfumer – took me under his wing in Paris, but he told me I had to learn French before I could work for him.”

She became an au pair, went to the Alliance Fran- çaise and had to get used to la vie en France.

“It was not easy at first. The French are rude, arrogant, passionate and fiercely proud and they have every right to be.” She started working for De Chiris at Quest International, doing everything from fetching coffee to dry cleaning until she was allowed to sit with the “trained noses”.

“I spent all day with the perfumers, smelling different fragrances that they created from the thousands of little bottles they worked with. I was never trained to be a fine fragrance evaluator, but I had a knack for it.”

Borodinsky became the link between the perfumer and the client and so her career took off.

“I got a brief from the client and then worked with the perfumer to develop the fragrance. I then selected the top fragrances from the 20 or so that the perfumers created and took them to my clients – including Procter & Gamble, Gucci, Prada, Hugo Boss and Lacoste – in Paris, New York and Japan,” said Borodinsky, who spent 17 years in France.

She said De Chiris, who lovingly called her “duckie”, was her boss, dad, mentor and biggest fan. “It was an incredible time. Yves let us be industry rebels. Our perfumers took risks and were outrageous with their choices. We came up with Tommy Girl using Darjeeling tea, which no one ever thought about submitting before, went to Estée Lauder without being officially briefed and they were blown away!”

She said the perfume industry was very small back then, male dominated and incredibly competitive.

“Perfume is not just about what is in the bottle. The process of getting a fragrance onto a shelf is insane, costs a fortune and takes a long time. There is all the testing of the fragrance to make sure your skin will not react, then the packaging and marketing plans.

“Perfumers are extremely passionate, emotional people, who are highly trained and paid. I had screaming matches and had perfumers throw bottles at me. It was insane, but so exciting. If you do not know the industry you would think we are a bunch of nutters smelling each other all day. Once I ran out of space on my arms and they joked that they would start using my legs – can you imagine!”

Regardless of the fun she had, the lifestyle became too stressful with the continuous traveling, ever-increasing pressure to deliver and the rising big companies buying out the smaller ones.

“I left at a good time. The industry has become less creative and more commercial now. There are less and less niche fragrances, as they are now made according to consumer tests to see what will appeal to the masses.”

Together with her husband (who she met in the perfume world) and her daughter, they came home to South Africa, settling in Ballito.

Perfume however, will always play a huge role in her life and every time she sniffs one of her many exclusive perfume bottles, memories are unlocked and emotions are evoked about her “Princess Paris days”.

>>> Need some ideas for things to do? Check out Holiday Vibes.

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