LIBRIDO – A torrid affair with the printed word

Books and stories are incredibly important to Pia. If she's not reading, she's listening to an audiobook. Her living room is basically a library - bookshelves line the walls, filled with tomes of every genre. Classical literature, science fiction, fantasy, reference books, mythology, graphic novels, science and politics, Moomin books and copies of Aku Ankka (the Finnish name for Donald Duck) comic strips. Whenever I need to buy her a gift, a book is usually my first thought.

So it should come as no surprise that as a perfumer, she has always been fascinated by the smell of books and wanted to capture the scent of them in all their forms. She's referenced ideas of 'paper' and 'leatherbound books' in her work before.

LIBRIDO started life as an accord that Pia named 'fetish' - following an insight she had smelling copahu, realising it could be the key to nailing the paper accord that she had been ruminating on for years. Once Pia has an idea for an accord, she'll find herself wandering down a garden path until she's satisfied her curiosity with it.

Once she perfected her paper accord (after hundreds of experiments and trials with different ratios), Pia decided to work it up to a fragrance and codenamed it LIBRIDO - a fun play on libido and liber - latin for book.

She told me she wanted to use the paper accord, incorporate the smell of fresh ink from magazine pages, the solvent character of bookbindings, and marry it all with Sandalwood from New Caledonia, as its papery facet lends itself beautifully to the accord. She also wanted to bring in the idea of a librarian or a bookseller. We spoke about Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and how he was both our favourites in the show. As a nod to him, she built a fougere structure to provide more intrigue to the fragrance.

When we thought we were finished, we realised it didn't quite perform as much as we wanted, so she added more freshness to the top to help give all the body some lift. Because it was such a personal fragrance for Pia, I simply acted as a sounding board and sense checker. 

My favourite aspect of LIBRIDO is how much it reminds me of the weekly 'library lessons' we had in senior school - where we just got to sit in the library and read. Normally I'd pick up a Discworld book, or a 'choose your own adventure' story where my character would inevitably end up drowned or jettisoned from the airlock of the space station, or some such devastating fate. I never managed to survive one of those books.