Harutyun Tonyan is 16 years old and for the past four years he has been on a path that will hopefully bring him closer to his beloved profession. His dream is to one day go to the perfume capital of the world, the French city of Grasse, to study. But when might that be? He still can’t tell but until then, he is learning the scents that surround him now, infusing and mixing the herbs and fruit around him, trying to understand their true essence himself.
Through scents, I can learn a lot about people, even secrets. I dream of a profession that is unique for Armenia, I want to become a real perfumer.
I’ve known what I was going to dedicate my life to since I was 12, the scents.
The 44-Day War had just finished when my brother and I started selling perfume in Stepanakert. I started to become intrigued with the subtleties of the perfumes. Before the blockade, we would receive deliveries every two days. Our last order had already reached Goris when the Azerbaijanis blocked the road. We sold whatever stock we had online and it was during the blockade, when it occurred to me that perfumes could also be made locally.
I started experimenting, infusing different things. I even learned to make the alcohol myself since it was no longer available at pharmacies.
The situation was worsening by the day and I ended up as one of the students that the Russian Peacekeepers were going to escort to Armenia. At the time, I could not take anything with me that was symbolic of Artsakh, and all of my flasks had “Artsakh” written on them.
We set out in the bus with bare belongings. The Azerbaijanis stopped me at the checkpoint, told me to follow them. They violently dragged away one of the boys. I could feel how I was losing my ability to think. I had no hope that they would release me… but two hours later they told me I could go. They took me back to the checkpoint from where there was a bus that took me to Goris. From Goris, I came to Etchmiadzin.
I was living with my brother and sister, I had started to study and had a job when the large-scale attack against Artsakh on September 19 happened. My parents were in Stepanakert. We had no news of them for the whole day, it was only in the evening that we heard from them. They were saying they were well, that they were in a shelter, they were giving us hope.
They also brought nothing with them, the main thing was to get here alive… nothing related to my work made it out of Artsakh. I remember, we were all in a very heavy psychological state when my brother suggested that I start working with scents again. That’s when everything started anew here. I have some homemade equipment now.
I’m a student now in Etchmiadzin, in a class for students who plan to pursue medicine but I do not intend to become a doctor, I’m there to learn chemistry. I don’t like the idea that when I go to study abroad, I might realize that I lack even the most rudimentary knowledge. And everyone knows that it’s impossible to study to become a perfumer in Armenia.
I receive orders through social media, I even design individualized scents for clients based on their preferences and personal traits. My friends help me with the deliveries.
Every city has its scent. The smells of Stepanakert are the dearest to me, it is that of a sweet memory, full of different scents. I remember the smell of plum trees and counting the days before the blossoms would turn into fruit.
In Armenia, I really like the scent of the evergreens, I also like how they look. I have not extracted any oil yet from the evergreens here, but I have done it many times in Artsakh. I would go into the forests and freely gather their branches in Artsakh but here, there are cameras everywhere, you can’t just cut branches from the trees. Either way, I feel restricted. Sometimes I feel like a hunter of scents.
When I start working on a new scent, first I pick the components. Then, I start manipulating them, maybe I want the rose to smell a little differently, or make the apple smell a little like orange. Once I have the bouquet of components, it is then time to dilute it with alcohol and bottle the product.
The more you process cold strawberries the more they will smell like sulfur, and sometimes cucumbers smell like fish. Everything is about how you work with the component, what you do with them. That is chemistry.
For me to be able to start working on a scent, I need to first imagine it before I can start making it. This is a creative process and I like it. And the more I immerse myself in this process the more acute my senses become, the more refined and deeper my sensitivity to be cognizant of the things around me, including people.
My dream is to one day find my signature and when I’m no longer around, for people to still be able to smell a scent and recognize it as one of my perfumes.
