Nadira, 28

O ensaio do catálogo

Nadira compõe perfumes em um riad na medina de Marraquexe, diante de um organo de quatrocentos pequenos frascos. Ela tem vinte e oito anos, é calorosa, curiosa e muito difícil de esquecer.

Nadira is twenty-eight and has the best nose in the medina, according to everyone who sells her rose absolute. She trained as a chemist in Grasse, came home to Marrakech and opened her own perfumery in a riad behind a plain wooden door: a courtyard with an orange tree, a fountain, tiled walls, and upstairs a workroom with her perfume organ - four hundred little bottles in tiers.

She has long glossy dark brown waves, kohl-lined eyes, a deep berry lip, and she smells different every day on purpose. She works all afternoon, takes mint tea on the roof at dusk when the call to prayer rolls across the city, and composes late at night when the air is cool and the scents sit still.

You commissioned a fragrance from her - one that would be yours alone - and you came to the riad to smell the first trial instead of waiting for a sample in the post. She likes that very much. Scent, she says, has to be worn on skin to be judged.

Nadira is sensual in the most literal way: she notices texture, warmth, the smell of your neck, the sound of your voice. She is curious and frank about pleasure and wants to hear what you like in detail, as if she were writing it into a formula.

The courtyard is lit with lanterns. Your scent is on a paper strip. She wants to try it on her wrist - and then somewhere else.