How Perfumery Turned a Fruit into a Landscape

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a recipe: pinsa – that airy, crisp Italian relative of pizza – topped with figs, Gorgonzola and walnuts. Autumn was announcing its arrival, and I’m a fan of Gorgonzola. So I downloaded the recipe and invited my best friend over. Surprisingly, you could even find the pinsa base at Aldi. Contrary to what I had expected, fresh figs turned out to be the real challenge. In several supermarkets, my question was met with puzzled looks, or I was directed to the dried-fruit section. I was simply a little too early: here, fresh figs are at their peak from late summer into autumn. A little later, I finally found them. Blue-violet and velvety-dark, they lay individually wrapped like little treasures in the fruit aisle.

Why am I telling you all this? The most remarkable thing about my search was not that I initially couldn’t find any figs, but how unfamiliar the fruit apparently still is in this country. It is by no means rare. Yet fresh figs are delicate, highly perishable and have to be harvested when ripe, as they do not ripen after picking. Hardly ideal conditions, then, for a consistently profitable product in retail. No wonder that many people in Northern Europe primarily know figs as dried fruit: very sweet, chewy and more reminiscent of Christmas fruit bread than of a summer in the Mediterranean.

Historically speaking, this is almost curious. Figs are among the oldest cultivated plants known to humankind. At a Neolithic site in the Jordan Valley, archaeobotanists discovered figs more than 11,000 years old, which are considered very early evidence of deliberate plant cultivation. As a fragrance note, however, the fig is surprisingly familiar to us. Fig fragrances have been a staple of perfumery for decades. In other words: for many of us, a fig in the perfume aisle is much more familiar than one in the fruit section. There is a catch, though: a fig accord rarely smells like the fruit itself. Fresh figs have a rather restrained scent and taste mild and sweet. The typical fig accord, by contrast, often tells the story of the entire tree: green leaves, milky sap, pale wood and a soft, creamy interpretation of the fruit.

As with most fruits, no essential oil can be extracted from the fig. In perfumery, natural fruit oils mainly come from the peels of citrus fruits. Apple, pear, peach and fig, on the other hand, are created as accords made up of different fragrance notes. In the case of fig, these are usually green-smelling materials that create the impression of leaves and plant sap, while lactones provide a milky, sometimes coconut-like creaminess. Depending on the interpretation, fruity notes and usually pale woods are added as well. Yet that alone does not explain why, with peach or pear, we usually think of the fruit itself, while with fig we often imagine the entire tree – and not infrequently the entire landscape. Why do fig fragrances so often smell of leaves, milky sap and wood – and only rarely like the fruit?

The answer to this question has a fairly precise date, at least in modern perfumery. Until the early 1990s, fig was hardly present as an independent fragrance theme. That changed with two fragrances by the French perfumer Olivia Giacobetti: Premier Figuier for L’Artisan Parfumeur appeared in 1994, followed two years later by Philosykos for Diptyque. Neither treated fig like a classic fruity note: no fruit bowl, no sweetness to lean into, but rather a tree in the breeze, with leaves, wood and plant sap.

Premier Figuier is considered the starting point of the modern fig trend; Philosykos became its best-known point of reference and remains in the collection to this day – thirty years later. What Giacobetti created was, strictly speaking, not merely a new fragrance profile, but a new olfactory narrative: the fruit as landscape. To this day, many fig fragrances are based on this olfactory framework of leaf, milk and wood.

It could, therefore, have turned out quite differently. If the first influential fig fragrance had been a sweet, dark, juicy fruit composition, we might understand something quite different today when we hear the term fig fragrance. Instead, since the 1990s, the fig has appeared to us as a transparent, green landscape. This interpretation was so successful that it became a convention. It was not the fruit that shaped our idea of what a fig smells like – the fig fragrance shaped our idea of the fruit.

The fact that such an abstract note became a classic is not a contradiction, by the way, but rather the point. Fig works because it refuses to fit into any single category: sweet, but rarely candy-like; green, but not sporty-fresh; creamy, but not gourmand; sensual, but never overtly so. The fig successfully refused to be read as distinctly feminine or masculine. In the 1990s, it fit just as naturally into the minimalist counter-movement as it does today into the green trend and the world of milky gourmand compositions. And in thirty years, it has never seemed as overused as cherry or, more recently, pistachio.

Unlike other fruity notes, when we smell fig notes we have fewer concrete associations and memories and more of a collectively shared visual world: the white stone wall, the tree in the shade, the light of the Mediterranean. Images we have seen so often that they almost feel like our own memories. A fig fragrance, then, does not necessarily smell like something we have experienced ourselves, but rather like something we already believe we know. A memory that is not recalled, but composed – and filled into small, beautiful flacons.

For most of us, fig trees are not childhood memories, but part of our idea of the South. So perhaps we do not actually love the real fig at all, but rather the image that perfumers have created for us. Maybe that is precisely the particular appeal of fig fragrances: they are green and subtle, they feel polished and are usually coded as gender-neutral. They smell of summer without smelling of sunscreen. They have creamy notes with a subtly gourmand character, yet they do not smell edible. Instead, fig fragrances are a vacation for our brains.

And really, what more could you ask of a perfume?