Céleste Marchetti-Oyelaran's studio, on the top floor of a former rope factory in Genoa, smells of nothing at all. She keeps it that way deliberately, with open windows and bare stone walls, so that she can hear, as she puts it, what the air is saying. Her small fragrance house, Atelier Nimbus, has become a cult name among collectors for scents that evoke not flowers or woods but meteorological moments: rain on hot pavement, sea fog at dawn, the metallic stillness before snow. We spoke in late summer.
You describe your perfumes as weather reports. Where did that idea come from? “From childhood, really. My mother is from Lagos and my father from Liguria, and we moved between the two constantly. What I remember most clearly from those years is not places but air. The heaviness before a tropical storm, the salt on the wind in Genoa in winter. Weather is the most intimate memory we have, because it touches the whole body at once. I wanted to see if it could be held in a bottle.”
Can it? Rain, after all, is mostly water. “That is the beautiful problem. Water has almost no smell. What we call the smell of rain is the smell of things the rain touches: dust, stone, soil, the oils released by plants. So you are never really bottling the weather, you are bottling its effects on the world. My rain perfume, Petra Umida, is built on mineral notes, a little geosmin, crushed geranium leaf and warm concrete. People smell it and close their eyes.”
Scent in a warming world
Has climate change altered your work? “Profoundly. Some of the weather I grew up with barely exists any more. Winters in Genoa are milder, the storms in Lagos are more violent. I have started to think of some of my perfumes as archives, records of atmospheres that my own grandchildren may never experience. That sounds melancholy, but I do not intend it that way. A perfume is a way of paying attention to something while it is still here.”
Nobody should smell the same every day. The sky does not.
Why do you refuse to create a signature scent for your clients? “Because I think the idea of a signature scent is a little sad. It suggests that a person is one fixed thing, always the same, recognisable across a room. But we are not like that. We change with the seasons, with our moods, with who we are in love with. I would rather people had a small wardrobe of weather, and chose each morning according to the sky outside, or the sky inside.”
What is the hardest weather you have tried to capture? “Snow, without question. I worked on it for four years. Snow is a smell of absence, a cold cleanness that erases everything else. Every attempt was either too sweet or too sharp, like a hospital. In the end I found it through a combination of iris root, a trace of aldehydes and a mineral accord that I will not describe, because some secrets are part of the pleasure. It is called Avant la Neige, and I am still not sure it is finished.”
What do you smell right now? She pauses for a long moment and turns toward the open window, breathing slowly, eyes half closed. “Hot stone. Somebody frying garlic three floors down. The sea, faintly, because the wind has turned. And something green, perhaps the fig tree in the courtyard. It is a very good afternoon,” she says, and smiles. “If I could bottle it, I would call it Wednesday. But it would never smell quite the same twice, and that, really, is the whole point.”
