Born in Morocco in the middle of family orange groves – his Azemour perfume recounts his childhood breathing wild grasses, sand dunes and citrus fields – Marc-Antoine Corticchiato also carries Corsica in his heart. In Cutuli è Curtichjatu, a village near Ajaccio, he spent his holidays in the house where his great-grandparents were born. His olfactory heritage is a patchwork of these two places and his passion for horse riding which he hesitated to make his profession. As a kid, it’s the smell of plants that fascinates him, much more than the perfume in the bottle: “I was trying to understand how a wild plant that doesn’t look like much could exhale a powerful and lingering scent. »
With his doctorate in analytical chemistry in his pocket, he works for research laboratories to dissect the smell of plants to discover their mechanism. On his journey as a chemist, he met Lucien Acquarone (deceased in 2008), a specialist in the distillation of perfume plants, with whom he traveled in all directions the Corsican maquis and the more distant lands of Vietnam, Reunion and Madagascar. “Lucien had the talent to extract the smell of plants without distorting the original scent”, remembers Marc-Antoine Corticchiato.
wild grass
A performance, as the extraction techniques, which use heat to capture the smell of the plant, destroy some of the odorous compounds, making the aroma of the final extract often more disappointing than that of the plant on the vine. This botanical enthusiast nevertheless chose to become a perfumer and studied at Isipca, the school of perfumery and perfumery in Versailles. With only one idea in mind: to found his own brand.
It will be Parfum d’Empire, an ode to the perfume plant, to its truth and its brutality. He does not hesitate to use plants such as inule (queen of his Mal-Aimé fragrance), a weed that grows in car parks and along roadsides, which perfumery has always shunned as it is devoid of nobility. “I never resolved to pull it out of my garden in Corsica”, he laughs. Nice way to close the loop, the distillation of this “weed” was carried out with the two sons of Lucien Acquarone. Vétiver Bourbon, Marc-Antoine Corticchiato’s latest creation, demonstrates once again that his perfumery displays rigor and sensuality.
The Parfum d’empire website, its Instagram account.