Blind Russian perfumer designs fragrances with music in mind

Alexander Yashin hears opera in the smell of clover.

Blind from birth, the 31-year-old can see only light and shadow. Perched on his work stool in the laboratory of the Moscow perfumery where he designs fragrances, Yashin's face breaks into a wide smile as he deeply inhales a new sample.

Yashin is one of a four-person team of perfumers – two of whom are also blind – who work at a Moscow-based fragrance brand called Pure Sense.

Founder Ekaterina Zinchenko hired blind perfumers when she founded the company five years ago, seeking to foster an inclusive atmosphere that would allow her designers to show off their creativity.

"Inclusion is about everyone being able to do what they are good at," says the 29-year-old.

Lining the shelves of the laboratory where Yashin works are dozens of little white vials of essential oils and elixirs – what he calls his "perfume organ."

"Perfumery is like music: we have notes – separate elements of perfume; we have chords – a combination of perfume notes," he says.

The final composition is the fragrance itself, Yashin explains.

With his olfactory and auditory senses heightened by his inability to see, Yashin, a philologist and ethnographer by training, draws from his time as a member of a travelling folk music ensemble when he sits down to create fragrances.

"Perfumery, like any art or craft, is a thing that you learn all your life," he says.

As her company eyes international expansion, Zinchenko highlights the diversity of the catalogue and her employees' unique compositions.

"What's important for me as an entrepreneur is that (the perfumers) all have their own character and their own fragrance style," she says.

"I can guess whose new fragrances are whose without looking (at the label)."

Reuters