Mathilde Laurent. The in-house nose.

From Guerlain to Cartier

Mathilde Laurent began to be noticed in the late 1990s. Straight out of school, she joined Guerlain and made a debut the trade took note of. She stayed with that house for more than ten years.

In 2005 she became the perfume creator of Cartier. Cartier is a jeweller. The things that made its name are rings, bracelets, watches: objects weighed, measured and cut to fractions of a millimetre.

In that house the panther has been an emblem since Jeanne Toussaint, creative director from 1933 to 1970, herself nicknamed the panther. La Panthère is also the name of one of the first perfumes Laurent signed at Cartier. She has said that tackling that emblem while still so young in the house made her dizzy.

An emblem made of gold and stone, now to be rewritten in something that cannot be held.

A rare position: the in-house perfumer

Most perfumers work for companies that make materials and scents. They take briefs from many brands, produce many options, and often do not know which will be chosen until the end. An in-house perfumer is different: they work for one house only.

In a 2020 conversation with Nez magazine, Laurent described the difference plainly. She does not have to develop many ideas for others to choose from, only one. The perfume is made for one question, not for a contest.

She also described the inside of the work: close to marketing, to senior management, to her assistant, in a spirit of thinking together rather than of rank. When a perfume is nearly done, the group smells it together before it goes to the executive committee. She still works with a large scent company for resources and to stay in touch with what is new in the trade.

The position gives her something many in the trade lack: time spent long with one house, and the chance for many perfumes to speak to one another across the years.

Smell beside metal and stone

In a jewellery house, value is tied to endurance. Stones are loved because they do not change. Gold is loved because it does not tarnish. People hand them down through generations.

Smell does the opposite. It changes by the minute on skin, then is gone. No one inherits a scent worn yesterday. Putting smell in the same house as stone sets two ways of existing side by side: one stays, one leaves.

In 2025, at Paris Perfume Week, Laurent sat on a round table organised by Nez about how jewellery houses translate their worlds into smell. The question has perhaps followed her through twenty years at Cartier: can a smell carry the spirit of a hard object without pretending to be one?

Penta does not know her exact answer. But the question is clear, and worth keeping.

Speaking of smell as an art

Laurent does not only make perfume. She speaks and writes about it. In 2022 Nez published her book Sentir le sens. For Cartier she hosts a podcast called Inspire, inviting artists, historians and scientists to smell a perfume together and talk around it. The first episode, Une panthère, brought together a pianist, an actor, a historian and a veterinarian from the Jardin des Plantes menagerie.

Talking to Nez about the podcast, she said she continues a path opened before her by Edmond Roudnitska: treating the art of perfume as an art in its own right. She also said that for many who love scent, meeting a perfumer is like meeting an artist or a writer.

The idea has been tested elsewhere. The exhibition The Art of Scent hung perfumes the way one hangs works, with no bottles and no brands. Laurent does something similar from inside a house: she keeps a voice of its own for smell, even beside gold and stone.