Francesca Bianchi - The Code of Emotion
Even before I launched my first perfumes, I was obsessed with the idea of an “Emotion Generator Machine”. This is what drives me during my creation process: building fragrances with that specific purpose of igniting an emotion. Like a mechanic fine-tuning a powerful engine, I carefully place each note in order to trigger specific emotions — i.e. the intensity of passion of lovers, a memory of the smell of skin, a sense of nostalgia for an imaginary place, etc.
For this particular creation, my focus was to dig deeper into the very mechanism of the emotional response to my medium of expression, the art of perfumery. How can I make it work? Are there methods that can be replicated? And can they spark the same emotion in different people?
I experimented in different directions, focusing on a method that I used many times already, but this once with more focus and intention. The goal was to decode an emotion, to deconstruct the input that ignites it, in other words to write a ‘Code of Emotion’.
In this experiment, I started with the classic fougère structure — a green, aromatic, woody accord, which is familiar and recognizable. Besides, this is an accord that I only recently started to emotionally connect with. But I wanted to push it further, challenging its traditional boundaries by introducing an unexpected twist: a vibrant accord of tropical fruits, with juicy, mouthwatering mango at its heart.
This exotic note disrupts the predictable accord of the fougère, rewiring it into something both familiar and surprising. The result is a scent that feels recognizable but also refreshingly different, requiring a moment to detect the familiar fougère footprint beneath the luscious and original facet of fruitiness.
To me, this fragrance sparks a joyful sense of surprise—a contrast between the grounding comfort of the fougère and the playful brightness of the tropical fruits. It feels pampering yet invigorating, deep but never heavy, mouthwatering without slipping into gourmand territory. Additionally, I set a secondary challenge for myself: to avoid using iris or iris-like accords altogether and to keep animalic notes to a bare minimum, limited to only a couple of clean musks.
