Perfumes de Maurizio Cerizza

Maurizio Cerizza lived among essential oils since his childhood. His family’s adventure in the perfumery world begins in 1946 with the creation of the company EMA (Aromatic Essences and Materials) in Milan. Ten years later, his father Aurelio opens a branch in Imperia where he distils and extracts natural products: jasmine, rose, orris, ylang-ylang, sandalwood, lavender and other precious raw materials. As a child, when visiting his father’s company, Maurizio was fascinated by the distillation instruments and the armoured chamber where the most precious absolutes were kept. His great passion for perfumes, over the years, would turn into a profession.

His training mentor was René Ricord, professor at the first prestigious Roure School of Perfumery. Ricord was the assistant of Jean Carles, the great perfumer who founded the Roure school in 1946 and created a teaching method based on memorising fragrances and classifying them into 15 olfactive families. This method was never patented and is therefore available to everyone. He claimed that a perfume is born first in the perfumer’s head and can be “written” on paper even before mixing any essential oil.

The perfumer is essentially “an artist who has to use raw materials the way a painter uses colours and a musician uses notes, imagining first the combinations and then carrying them out”. For this reason, Maurizio Cerizza considers it fundamental to continuously create mental associations between essential oils and what their scent evokes, also in a completely personal way. Thus, for him sandalwood has a nuance that recalls milk, Artemisia Davana recalls fig, sesame recalls hazelnut, the absolute of Ambretta recalls the skin of a pear, and the absolute of Rhum recalls burnt woods. In this way, it becomes easier to compose by mentally remembering the particularities of each essential oil’s catalogue and recognising the potential in daring combinations. Maurizio Cerizza is a member of the SFP – Société Française des Parfumeurs and of international juries for the evaluation of fragrant roses from Nantes and Monza; both are important opportunities to meet other “noses” and exchange opinions, comments and experiences.

Maurizio, when visiting an exhibition, was very impressed by reading a quote by Kandinsky, a major proponent of theories about colours: “Personally I do a lot of theory, but I don’t think about it when I paint”. Even for him, the art of composition is based mainly on the emotion and imagination that manifest freely without conditions. No doubt these are guided by experience, method, planning and theory, but at the creative moment the artist thinks of nothing else but following their instinct. Intuitions can happen at any time. “I have created new olfactive concepts by thinking of unprecedented accords at the most unlikely moments and in the most disparate places. While a perfumer is composing, they let themselves be carried away by rationality, by respect for the ‘canonical’ composition rules and, therefore, by using raw materials in habitual combinations and dosages; but to create sometimes, though not always, means doing without the paths already laid out and trying to broaden one’s horizons by using some components in an original and unusual way. What may seem risky, exaggerated, or unthinkable can produce the unexpected result that we always look for: balance and harmony”.

When it is time to create a perfume, it is necessary to establish a relationship between the client and the perfumer based on a shared language that allows them to understand one another better. But it is possible to go even further. Maurizio Cerizza signs his first success in 1986 with the women’s fragrance for the fashion house ROCCOBAROCCO. In 30 years of his career, he has been the author of more than 100 fragrances.