Snippets: memory, bespoke perfumes & more

But she says it's not so much her nose that creates the scents, but her memory – trained to recognise thousands of ingredients, and summon them up as she desires, with all the emotions and memories they provoke.

— Columnist Caroline Wyatt, writing about perfumer Isabelle Doyen in “How France Makes Sense of Scents“, in the BBC News.

Gauloises, garlic and pissoirs have long defined the olfactory essence of Paris. But there is another, more appealing odour wafting along its tree-lined boulevards. It's a smell like no other. The scent that only those with money to burn and a desire to smell truly individual can afford. It's the smell of a bespoke perfume.

— Columnist Louise Roddon in “On The Scent In Paris“, in the Telegraph.

“Everybody can smell,” he maintains. “It is merely a matter of work. When you smell different raw materials day in, day out over many years you will come to recognise them. The most difficult area is creativity, how to work with the imagination. Here the power of the family is important, not least when you are born into one where the talk is mainly of perfumes. My great opportunity was that I was only 16 when I started to work with my grand-father. Our job is wonderful, but it needs a tremendous amount of patience and work.”

— Columnist Hannah Betts talks to perfumer Jean Paul Guerlain in “Picking Up The Scent” in the UK Times Online.

The Vatican meets Chanel No. 5.

In a San Rafael kitchen, a 69-year-old doctor says he has re-created the custom cologne worn in the 19th century by Pope Pius IX, the longest-reigning pope aside from possibly St. Peter.

— Carolyn Jones of the San Francisco Chronicle talks to Dr. Fred Hass, who found a recipe for the Pope's cologne in an old cookbook.