“I was making an appearance on Clodine Desrochers’ show on Radio-Canada and Clodine said, ‘You know, that passion for fragrances, it’s been sticking to you since you were little.’ And she was right: when I was a little girl, I would collect scented erasers, I had the whole range of Charlotte scented dolls,” recounts Clarisse Monereau, founder of the first-in-Quebec perfume-making school that bears her name. “Later, I would collect perfume samples and even the displays the perfume counters would discard.”
Armed with her international masters in aesthetics and perfume-making, Clarisse spent the first part of her career working for Sephora, in France and then in Quebec. She opened the Carrefour Saint-Bruno and Fairview Pointe-Claire stores and was headhunted by Murale. "Eventually I got laid off from Murale, but I had always been toying with the idea of opening a perfume-making school. So the next day, after my tears had dried, I put my nose to the grindstone and called all the large brands with which I had worked in France to pitch my idea. Cartier supported me, then Guerlain, Givenchy, L'Oréal and Elizabeth Arden,” says Clarisse. École en parfumerie Clarisse Monereau welcomed its first students in 2010.
