Each of us at terrain has our own favorite scent from MCMC Fragrances, so we had to ask founder Anne McClain more about her work. With each bottle hand-packaged in her studio in Brooklyn, NY, it's hard to deny the soul and passion behind this independent perfumery. In this interview, Anne tells us about her time studying aromatherapy in Southern France and her intricate process for creating new scents.
terrain: Tell us about your time studying in Grasse, France.
Anne: I applied to the Grasse Institute of Perfumery in November of 2008 and was accepted as one of twelve students to attend the one-year intensive training program. After I was accepted, I had just six weeks to move - which meant leaving my job as a project manager, leaving my beloved apartment, and leaving a new boyfriend! But becoming a perfumer was a real dream of mine, and I knew there was no better place for me to study than the traditional center for perfume in southern France.
terrain: What was the highlight of your experience in Grasse? What did you find most inspiring?
Anne: In some ways, I think the highlight of my time there was all of the solo time. I was really able to concentrate on this new art that I was learning. In New York, life is very hectic and in Grasse, my life was very meditative. I attended school 8 hours a day, and spent the evenings and weekends brainstorming about what has since become MCMC Fragrances. I got a lot done and that was a certainly a highlight! As for most inspiring, I was blown away by the realization that my nose could be "trained." We spent the first three months intensively memorizing individual ingredients and during the course of that time, my nose actually became stronger, and I was able to recognize nuances within scents that I couldn't detect before.
terrain: You’ve described scents as being very closely connected to memories and stories – what scent “story” is dearest to you?
Anne: All of the fragrances in The Stories Collection are very dear to me. Each of them is about a specific place, time, or person in my life. Noble is about the four months I spent living in Nepal, which is truly a spiritually beautiful country. In some ways, that may be the dearest to me as it's the first fragrance I began working on and the first time I really fell in love with ingredients - jasmine and vetiver - and understood how evocative scents are.
terrain: What is your process for creating new scents?
Anne: I actually let the idea for a new scent sort of marinate in my mind for a long time before I physically make anything. I like to have the whole picture flushed out - the feelings, the memories, any color associations, certain ingredients. Once I feel like I have a very strong image of the scent, I pull the main "backbone" ingredients and create the structure for the fragrance. Then I spend quite a bit of time using accessory notes and testing it until it becomes both the vision of what I wanted, and something wearable.
terrain: What is your studio like?
Anne: I have a studio in the Dobbin Mews, a small collection of artist and design studios in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn. It's on an industrial street but every person who walks through the metal gate the first time says something like "Wow, this looks like California!" or even, "This looks like Belize!" It has a very non-New York vibe to it, I think because the owners of the building are such avid gardeners (we even have a fruitful fig tree in the courtyard).
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