Early Life
Benaïm was born in 1944 into a family of Spanish ancestry in Tangier, northern Morocco. Benaïm’s father was a pharmacist and botanist. Memories of scents experienced in Morocco with Carlos’s father and grandfather influenced Carlos’s perfume creation in later years. In particular, the smell of the tobacco (in Japanese) smoked by Carlos’s grandfather remained especially vivid because Carlos’s father combined tobacco scent with violet perfume and geranium aromas. These scent memories are a major reason Carlos uses tobacco notes in many perfumes. The smells encountered at Tangier’s markets with Carlos’s grandfather, including spices, oranges, peaches, melons and apricots, also remain strongly etched in memory.
At 17, Carlos went to Lautier Fils in Grasse (now Symrise (in Japanese)) for a chemical-engineering internship. But the chemists happened to be away on vacation, and no one knew what to do with Carlos, who was put in the room where the junior perfumers worked. There was a large perfumer’s organ (in Japanese), with ingredients in cloudy glass bottles. Carlos ended up spending four weeks there until the chemists returned, trying to smell and memorize every ingredient in the meantime. This was a turning point.
Concepts in the perfume industry are colored by science.
Carlos Benaïm
Meeting a Mentor and Becoming a Perfumer
After studying chemistry at a university in Toulouse, France, Carlos saw an IFF (in Japanese) advertisement in Le Monde at the age of 23, applied immediately and became one of six people selected from 400 applicants.
After being accepted, Carlos moved to Paris and Amsterdam and began learning about flavors and fragrances as an IFF trainee. Reportedly, the first week was spent creating a flavor for Britain’s bestselling potato chips.
Carlos then met Ernest Shiftan, who would become a mentor. Shiftan interviewed Carlos and administered a simple test: smell ingredients and identify them. Remarkably, Carlos could not name any of them. Instead, Carlos answered by explaining and defining what each ingredient brought to mind. As a result, Shiftan recognized Carlos’s talent for fine fragrance (in Japanese), invited Carlos to New York and made it possible to train as an IFF perfumer in 1967. Carlos has also said that a traditional perfumery school was not an appealing prospect.
Finding IFF was the most fortunate coincidence of my life.
Carlos Benaïm
At IFF, Carlos worked with and was deeply influenced by Ernest Shiftan, known as the “father of the perfume industry” (1903–1976, also the mentor of Sophia Grojsman (in Japanese) and later an IFF vice president); Bernard Chant (in Japanese) (d. 1987, creator of Aramis, Clinique’s Aromatics Elixir, Estée Lauder’s Beautiful and Grès’s Cabochard); Max Gavarry (perfumer behind Estée Lauder’s Beautiful and Halston Z14); and Dr. Braja Mookherjee, an IFF chemist.
Creating Polo and Becoming a Master Perfumer
In 1978, while working with Bernard Chant in New York, Carlos received a major project from Ralph Lauren. This was the beginning of Polo Ralph Lauren, which would become one of America’s legendary perfumes.
Ralph Lauren had never released a perfume, and two fragrances, one for men and one for women, were to be composed at the same time. Carlos took charge of the men’s fragrance and created a scent centered particularly on patchouli notes, with an old-fashioned, mossy, smoky aroma. It matched the image of polo players: leather, horses and so on. The key component was a grassy green note expressed through Aldehyde AA. It is said to have covered the patchouli (in Japanese) that was noticeable from the opening, creating a new identity and leading to the fragrance’s success.
The perfume used as a reference at the time was Eau Sauvage (Dior (in Japanese), Edmond Roudnitska (in Japanese)).
When Olivier Polge (in Japanese) (Chanel (in Japanese)’s in-house perfumer since 2013) joined IFF as a trainee in 1998, Carlos served as a mentor for nearly two years, teaching Polge the work. They subsequently created various perfumes together. Polge is also close to Dominique Ropion (in Japanese), and has described the three of them as good companions who understand one another immediately.
Scent is a treasure hunt through life.
Carlos Benaïm
In 2013, in recognition of 45 years of achievements at IFF, Carlos became the company’s first master perfumer (in Japanese).
Incidentally…
The four important things in making perfume are to understand “how every ingredient reacts with the other ingredients,” “how each affects the other parts of the formula you are creating,” “the properties of each ingredient,” and “diffusion and freshness on the skin to produce longevity and a distinct sillage.”
Carlos Benaïm
• Carlos currently lives in New York with Carlos’s wife and three sons, and is chairman of ISEF, an organization for the education of Israelis. (Carlos knows how intelligent Jewish people are.)
• Favorite scent → Patchouli. Carlos explains: “When I smelled it as a trainee, I did not understand what was so great about it. But as I used it, I came to understand its quality and power, meaning its longevity and diffusion, and came to appreciate its greatness.”
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