Dominique Ropion

The destiny of Dominique Ropion

Dominique Ropion was in contact with scents from a very early age. Indeed, his mother and his grandfather both worked at Roure. It was there that he spent part of his summer vacations doing weighing in place of the company's lab technicians. This also allowed him to meet great perfumers such as Jacques Polge and Jean-Louis Sieuzac when he was barely 15 years old. He then went on to study physics before joining the fine fragrance sector in Argenteuil. Building on his past relationships, he teamed up, from 1989 to 1998, with Jean-Louis Sieuzac. Then, he decided to join IFF in 2001. There, he signed numerous best-sellers such as the floral and chypre scent of Ysatis, the oriental power of Jungle Elephant, the gourmand quality of Very Irresistible, the sensuality of Amor Amor and the mystery of Alien, to name but a few. For him, perfumery is a minor art. He describes it as a concrete, manual, laborious art. A craftsman's work at times, he says. Like painters, one puts one's hands in the material and, like architects, one makes real constructions, foundations. Just as sculptors do, we have to carve into scents, file them, break them. A formula gets worked over in every direction. Accords emerge. There are surprises. Poets do the same thing with words.

The perfect mastery of Dominique Ropion

Dominique Ropion is a perfumer who has taken the time to study each of the natural raw materials and who today has almost encyclopedic knowledge of perfumery. Thus, even though he gives free rein to his inventiveness, it is always perfectly mastered. Dominique Ropion has an extraordinary technique and is considered one of the most perfectionist perfumers of his time. He builds fragrances under the microscope and manages to isolate each scented accord so as to know precisely which scent to pair it with and in what quantity. Thus, each of his fragrances displays a perfect balance. Moreover, while perfumers of the early twentieth century lacked certain necessary tools and were therefore condemned to approximations, Dominique Ropion, by contrast, seems to use every technique available to him to create with the greatest possible precision.

If Descartes said, nature teaches me, Dominique Ropion, for his part, aims to draw from nature the maximum amount of information in order to convey to us the best of perfumery. In doing so, he makes of his craft a field that is half scientific, half artistic, and offers us fragrances with a naturalistic approach capable of captivating the entire planet.