Cigarette and whiskey: Perfumer creates unusual scents for movie characters

When Helena Bonham Carter walked onto the set of the 2012 film Dark Shadows, she smelled like bourbon whiskey and Gauloises cigarettes.

Her character was a chain-smoking, alcoholic psychiatrist, but Bonham Carter had not adopted the “method”; she simply sprayed herself with a custom fragrance created specifically for her by fragrance designer Azzi Glasser.

Having met by chance at the gates of their children's London school, the two have collaborated on countless projects over the years, starting with the 2009 period drama “Enid,” for which Glasser invented a perfume that evoked “powder.” white and old that immediately won me over. A return to the 1950s”, recalled Bonham Carter, who played author Enid Blyton.

Glasser also created a dark blend of foxglove, poison hemlock and nightshade plants for Bellatrix Lestrange in the “Harry Potter” films, a chocolate and pepper-scented fragrance for the character of the Red Queen in “Alice in Wonderland”, and what Glasser describes as a mix of “old, cracked soap with an 'angry' note” for the role of Miss Havisham in 2012's “Great Expectations.”

“Helena couldn't wait to start rehearsals,” said Glasser, who is famous for having one of the best noses in the business and prides herself on elevating a celebrity's presence through her visceral scent blends.

Born in the United Kingdom, Glasser spent her early formative years in India before returning to London. She worked for British fragrance house CPL Aromas for 20 years before creating the iconic Agent Provocateur fragrance in 2000 and, in 2016, founded her own brand, The Perfumer's Story by Azzi.

Now, a custom Glasser fragrance can cost up to £15,000 ($19,000 at current exchange rates), although it also offers a collection of lower-priced fragrances to allow people to discover their own fragrance DNA.

Her list of celebrity clients includes actors Alicia Vikander, Noomi Rapace, Damian Lewis, Orlando Bloom and Stephen Fry, as well as musicians Kylie Minogue and Adam Lambert. But it was Bonham Carter who introduced his “secret perfumer” to the curious Johnny Depp on the set of “Dark Shadows.”

Depp promptly instructed Glasser to create a bespoke perfume for his own character, a vampire named Barnabas, and they continued to work together. “Azzi possesses a certain sorcery, as he is able to capture the perfect essence of a character in perfume,” said the actor about Glasser's work.

The perfumer believes that fragrance helps to truly understand the essence of a character. “We will meet to talk about the role, the style, who the director is, who the other actors are, the space, the environment, where they might be filming, whether it will be hot or cold… There are many elements in the game. I will then start testing and adjusting [o perfume] until it is absolutely perfect. No one has ever said, 'No, that's not right,'” said Glasser, who can spend anywhere from a week to three months to create a custom scent.

The result isn't always positively fragrant, as with Jude Law's portrayal of an aging and ulcerated Henry VIII in the upcoming film Firebrand.

“I worked with Jude on “The Young Pope.” He came to the studio and told me, 'I want to smell exactly like Henry.' I told him, “you know it’s going to smell repulsive, right?”

The result was a heady mix of smells that evoked gout, bad breath and excrement.

“It was interesting because the other actors were affected by his presence, this manipulative power and stench, just like in real life. While Henry could simply (mask his own scent) smell a handkerchief that smelled like rose.

Brad Pitt is on her wish list of collaborators, alongside Julia Roberts and Leonardo DiCaprio, although she has made progress with the latter, she revealed.

“I met him [em um restaurante em Londres] recently and he gave me his number,” says Glasser, who will soon work with Austin Butler following his visit to her North London studio alongside his girlfriend, model Kaia Gerber.

But whether she's mixing a custom fragrance for an exclusive venue, like London's Chiltern Firehouse, or for a wealthy individual — as she did for Cindy Crawford (a 50th birthday gift from her husband Rande Gerber) and David Linley, son by Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones – Glasser approaches each scent as an entirely new landscape.

“David called it a fun therapy session,” she laughs. “But it's learning about the person, or the story, the character, the style and so on,” said Glasser, who called the fragrance “the love of my life.”

But it's Hollywood celebrities who seem to benefit most from a unique scent.

“As actors know, fragrance can transform you and take you on a journey. It opens passages and doors in the brain, working through the olfactory system to bring out emotions,” noted Glasser. “It can make you feel more confident, powerful, desirable and assertive and affect how others react to you. Essentially, the scent tells a story.”