Perfumes de Maurizio Cerizza

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

His training mentor was René Ricord, a professor at the first prestigious Roure Perfume School. Ricord was the assistant of Jean Carles, the great perfumer who founded the Roure school in 1946 and created a teaching method based on memorizing fragrances and classifying them into 15 olfactive families. This method was never patented and, therefore, is 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 oils.

The perfumer is essentially “an artist who has to use raw materials the way a painter uses colors and a musician uses notes—imagining combinations first and creating them afterward.” For this reason, Maurizio Cerizza considers it essential to continuously create mental associations between essential oils and what their smell evokes, also in a completely personal way. Thus, for him sandalwood has a nuance reminiscent of milk, Artemisia Davana of fig, sesame of hazelnut, Ambretta absolute of pear skin, and Rhum absolute of burned woods. In this way, it is easier to compose by mentally recalling the particularities of each essential oil’s catalog and recognizing the potential in bold combinations. Maurizio Cerizza is a member of the SFP – Société Française des Parfumeurs and of international juries for evaluating fragrant roses from Nantes and Monza; both are important opportunities to meet other “noses” and exchange opinions, comments, and experiences.

While visiting an exhibition, Maurizio was very impressed by reading a quote from Kandinsky, a leading figure in theories about colors: “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 mainly based on 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 but following instinct. One can have intuitions at any time. “I created new olfactive concepts by thinking of unprecedented chords in the most outlandish moments and places. While a perfumer composes, he lets himself be carried away by rationality, by respect for the ‘canonical’ composition rules, and therefore by using raw materials in familiar combinations and dosages; but creating 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 result in the unexpected outcome we are always looking for: balance and harmony.”

When a perfume has to be created, it is necessary to establish a relationship between the customer and the perfumer based on a common language that makes it easier to understand each other. But it is possible to go even further. In 1986, Maurizio Cerizza signed his first success with the female fragrance of the ROCCOBAROCCO fashion house. Over 30 years of career, he has authored more than 100 fragrances.