ELLENA LEFT PARIS and flew home to Grasse, where he took a call from Gautier. She told him that they had definitely accepted AG2 as the general theme. “Ça sent bon,” she stated. It smelled good. “C’est ce tableau là qu’on veut.” This is the picture we want.
And now, she said efficiently, changes. She ran down the list, which he found at once a lot and not much. They wanted him to keep the freshness and the fusant aspect (the word is related to un fusil, a rocket), the sparkling quality, but Dubrule found it a bit too tranchant (to her it was a love/hate scent). Gautier thought it was a bit too harsh grapefruit. They both felt there was a problem with the persistance, which is the amount of time the fragrance lasts on skin and a common technical problem perfumers deal with; the juice was not as tenacious as it should be. And they wanted the fond, the base, to be more present.
He hung up encouraged, basically happy. “I have no anguish once I’ve got to the ‘ça sent bon.’” He paused. “Well, for a few minutes I have no anguish.”
Ellena, by his own account, works within two alternating psychological systems, extreme doubt and absolute certainty. His wife, Susannah, knows both quite well. “I have,” he says, “terrible, terrible periods of doubt and fear where I feel like hiding under the table, and other periods where I say, ‘There—that is exactly where we need to go.’
At the meeting in Paris he hadn’t admitted it to them, but they’d surprised him. He’d thought they’d choose AG3, the magnolia-inflected green mango, for which he had a certain faible, a weakness, and not AG2, the lotus. In fact when he’d said to Gautier, “I know which one you don’t like,” he’d thought it would be AG2. When he realized he was wrong, he didn’t say anything. “I know her well,” he said of Gautier, “but I don’t know everything about her.” He made a mental note.
He’d thought they’d choose AG3 “because it was the strongest character.” Sitting in his lab, he made a little moue, looked pensive for an instant, then dismissed it. “Bon, c’est pas bien grave.” Well, it wasn’t a big deal. AG3 was, he admitted, quite pronounced. “It’s difficult to accept that AG3 is so pronounced,” he said. “But … still …”
If you are the creative—if you are Sarah Jessica Parker and have a scent in your mind that you want the perfumer to find for you—and you fail to communicate your vision, you’re building a disaster. If you are the perfumer, every clue the creative gives you, every casual comment they make about every single smell, is to be ignored at your peril. Ellena reassembled the Egyptian comments in his mind.
When they’d been in the Nile village, just discovering the mango trees, he remembered Dubrule pressing her nose into the branches, inhaling the marvel of natural olfactory technology. She had remarked, surprised, on the carrot angle. “A fruit that smells of a vegetable?” she’d asked. Yes, Ellena had replied, what you’re smelling are molecules grown in both carrots and mangoes.
Now in the lab he said, “Naturally I put in carrot to get my mango. But that’s a special trick of mine. There are very few perfumers who can do that. Other perfumers say, ‘Merde, il a trouvé cette astuce-là; je n’aurais jamais pensé à ça!’”Shit, he found that trick; I’d never have thought of that! Dubrule had also gotten a hint of apricot and grapefruit, and Ellena knew why. “I can tell you exactly which molecules that thing contains,” he said. “I can analyze things faster, and I can put things together faster.”
In Egypt he had watched Gautier frown under the green mangoes, and … they smelled like … nail polish remover? Yes, Ellena said, green mango contains the molecule acetone, aka nail polish remover. “You will above all not put nail polish remover in the perfume!” Dubrule had said to him. “Above all!” Gautier stated, looking at him. Of course I won’t, Ellena had said to them in Egypt. He knew full well that he would, “but,” he explained now in his lab, “in such a manner that you don’t feel it.” Perfumers often put acetone into their formulae to give a sort of shimmering/lightening effect; there were things you did that you didn’t necessarily tell the creatives about. “I put incense in Nil to get the mango resin smell, but what actually interests me is not the incense itself but what it does to the rest of the perfume: If you don’t put it in, the perfume is very cold.” The politics of the process bothered him not at all. He just had to be a little diplomatic. “There’s always a décodage,” a decoding, “between what they say, the scent in their minds, and what I am actually constructing.”
Philosophically, Ellena is a devout minimalist in terms of materials and a maximalist, in the classic French intellectual manner, in terms of thought. He practices (currently, not originally; he has evolved into it) a sort of Bauhaus school of perfumery: clean lines, deceptively neat structures, simple formulae, luminescence, clarity. His style took the entire history of Western perfumery and distilled it to its highly thought-through essentials, then carefully mutated each one of those forward until it reached a modernized format. One could say the approach simplified without necessarily purifying.
Ellena thought about things like: What fragrances does the human species react to and why. He said things like: “Ce n’est pas l’argent qui m’intéresse. Je suis un homme d’idées.” Money doesn’t interest me. I’m a man of ideas. “Je défends les idées et les principes.” I defend ideas and principles. “Ça pourrait apparaître stupide à certaines gens.” That might appear stupid to some people. He shrugged. He’d begun, a young, freshly minted perfumer in the Grasse office of Symrise, by making—his very first scent as a professional perfumer—Eau de Campagne for Sisley, which launched it in 1974. It was one of many perfumes that year, and, as usually happens, no one noticed. (It can take five, ten perfumes before having even a half-decent success. Or never.) Ellena’s second perfume he made for the jewelers Van Cleef & Arpels. He did it in the ultraclassic, traditionalist French style with all the heavy gilt rococo flourishes, the olfactory equivalent of plush scarlet brocade. They named it First and launched it in 1976. It was a huge hit. This can be disconcerting, a success so young.
In 1982 he created the artistic perfume La Haie Fleurie du Hameau for the niche Parisian house l’Artisan Parfumeur, which he did, by contrast, in a rough sketch impressionist style like a painting of a Provence farm by Monet: delicate, sentimental, a bit wistful, a bit comfortable. All in all, by this time he’d won around twenty briefs. In 1984 he did Bulgari’s Pour Femme (the original version; it was changed later with a relaunch); in 1990 for Rochas he’d gone back to the French traditionalist school for Globe; in 1995 he’d changed stylistic gears and done a commercial scent, L’Eau by Laura Ashley; then for Yves Saint Laurent he switch-hit with the gorgeous commercial electrical neon In Love Again (1998), which was like smelling a three-story-tall gas plasma screen over the Champs Elysées showing a bowl of the ripest tropical fruit. In 2003, collaborating with the Symrise perfumer Lucas Sieuzac, Ellena had produced a typical Armani commercial pastiche for Emporio Armani, Night for Her.
His biggest hit was his most unlikely. In fact the story of Ellena’s Eau de Bulgari is one of the stranger episodes in perfumery.
When he’d done First, this classic rich French perfume, he’d packed in some 160 materials. But by the mid-1980s he felt strongly that it was time, as he put it, “for me to show that I have something to say in perfumery, not just what you ask me for.” Jean-Claude and Susannah are serious lovers of tea and began frequenting the tea seller Mariage Frères, which at that point hadn’t become as famous as it is now. He went often and loved the smells—walking into a Mariage Frères store is categorically one of the most exhilarating olfactory experiences it is possible to have—and after making his purchases he would go back to his lab and, all but compelled, write short formulae sketching the scents in his head. He kept the sketches in a drawer.
One day he went and asked them if he could smell their teas—Moon Palace, Lung Ching Impérial, Earl Grey, French Blue. They agreed, and he spent a whole morning smelling all hundred of the large metal canisters. He was developing an idea, refining it to a point. His astuce, his trick, was to mate a synthetic called ionone, which had as far as Ellena knew been used only to make the scent of violets, to a molecule called Hedione, a synthetic derivative of methyl jasmonate, the natural—and key—odorant that you smell when you smell jasmine. Hedione is a gorgeous molecule, a man-made beauty with an ethereally unidentifiable scent, like olfactory halogen light in a liquid form. From these two molecules he made a scent of tea, though not a particular kind of tea; it was, as Ellena would be careful to explain to you, actually the concept of tea.
Dior was then asking for submissions on a major new Dior masculine to be called Fahrenheit, and Ellena submitted his tea fragrance. Dior loved it and, after changes and questions and a lot of waiting, told Ellena that he had won the Fahrenheit brief. He went to Paris and drank champagne with the Dior bosses, and everyone celebrated. The next day, Dior called to say they’d changed their minds. The marketers were uncomfortable with the abstract, unknown quality of Ellena’s juice. They announced that the winners of the brief—one of the most important of the decade—were the perfumers Jean-Louis Sieuzac and Michel Almairac, and their submission became Fahrenheit, which turned into a huge hit. Ellena was astounded, then crushed.
He tried to rally. He took his scent elsewhere, and word got back to him of the mocking comments of his colleagues. “Have you heard about Ellena, taking his little tea scent around Paris? Yes—tea.” According to Ellena, the decision makers at Yves Saint Laurent passed on the juice, saying, No, it’s not for us, it’s too creative. He tried other houses, urging them, “I think it’s really something new, it will work.” But none of them wanted his scent.
At that moment, knowing nothing of this, some executives from the Italian jeweler Bulgari approached him. They explained that they had been envisioning a nice fragrance that, perhaps, would be sold in some quiet corner of their store, an eau de cologne maybe. Oh, and make it 100 percent natural. The scent’s primary role would be to perfume the boutiques, give them a pleasant smell, though yes, certainly, it would also be worn by the few clients who might buy some now and then. They did not at all think of the fragrance as a product that would bring in money; this was simply about another part of the identity of Bulgari. Ellena took a deep breath and, first, said that yes, well, an eau de cologne might be nice, but you don’t want a 100 percent natural because all that will give you will be a standard eau de cologne exactly as it was in the eighteenth century, no lasting power on skin, no originality, the same as a thousand others. Second, I have an idea, and he brought them his draft of the tea scent.
Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert de Bulgari, which became the name of the perfume he ultimately did for Bulgari, is a smell as deep and strong and clear as Turkish seawater. The scent has power, a technical feat. Aesthetically it conjures a small amount of the smoothness of Darjeeling but gives in much greater proportion a rough, potent black tea from China; Bulgari’s marketers called it a green tea, but it has only the freshness of green tea, not in any way the scent. There is a vaporous trace of old wood smoke from the fire used to boil this pure water, and at the same time the scent is shot through with this freshness, which is why, as Ellena intended, it smells like tea and, simultaneously, it doesn’t. His idea was—explicitly—not to copy reality. His idea was to transform reality. Shortly after the scent launched, the manager at Bulgari Parfums called Ellena to report, in a strange tone of voice, that, odd, but at the Bulgari store in New York they were selling ten bottles a day. At $350 per bottle. Once the Bulgari executives realized what they had, they sent it into the market, and it made buckets of money. This was a perfume never meant to be distributed.
“When I did Eau de Bulgari,” Ellena told me, “everyone said, ‘Oh, another cologne.’ And in two years everyone had copied it—it gave birth directly to cK One. They didn’t give me a brief by the way. They’d told me they wanted something discret, léger, et qualité” discreet, light, and of quality “and what I brought them was completely mine.”
“I have two periods in my life,” Ellena said, “from First to Eau de Bulgari, from 1976 to 1992, then after. I was young when I created First, and I put everything others had taught me into it. With Eau I had my own story.”
At the time Hermès began courting him, Ellena was just completing a perfume called L’Eau d’Hiver, the third (and, given his entry into Hermès, obligatorily the last) of a trilogy of perfumes he’d made for an exquisite, in fact all-but-revolutionary niche collection, Editions de Parfums, run by the scent impresario Frédéric Malle. Ellena’s approach to the construction of L’Eau d’Hiver reveals the technical and intellectual approach he had evolved by this point in his career.
He began his perfume by intellectually reconceptualizing the great Guerlain classic Après l’Ondée. “The problem,” he started and then immediately checked himself. “Well, you can’t say there’s a problem with Après l’Ondée, but … bon, voilà: They were too opulent, these Guerlains in the baroque, supercharged tradition of voluptuousness. ‘J’en mets, j’en mets, j’en mets.’ “I put in, I put in, I put in. “At the same time, there’s the Guerlain sillage.” Sillage is the scent wake the perfume’s wearer leaves behind in a space, an olfactory infrared arc of their trajectory. It’s a technical aspect of a scent that the perfumer must skillfully engineer. I believe it was the perfumer Calice Becker who once defined sillage to me, somewhat metaphysically, as the sense of the person being present in the room after he or she has left. “It’s marvelous,” said Ellena, “this gauzy veil that envelops you. So I wanted to find this sillage, but in enlightened form. My style is perfumes that are at once light and very present.
“So for L’Eau d’Hiver I took my inspiration from Après l’Ondée’s theme. Cloud. Soft, comfortable, light, and very present, but without all this”—he gestured—”grosse étoffe that you have with the Guerlains, all this stuff. It took me forever to do it. The idea of the diaphanous.” He conceptualized sleeping in hay in the summer. Heat. Sun. A powder that envelops without weight. He began the perfume’s construction with a gorgeous absolute of hay, one of the most sublime of all perfume materials. Hay is, as literally as possible, the smell of liquid summer sunlight. He wanted to create with it the scent of a cloud filled with sun. People expected L’Eau d’Hiver to be a cold water (the name means “winter water”). In fact, he was building the opposite, a hot water for a cold winter. He then took an old synthetic, Aubepine (an anisic aldehyde), which smells like a mix of the finger paint you used at age five and the cleaning wax applied to formica floors. Aubepine costs almost nothing, around three euros per kilo. He bolted those two to methyl ionone (a synthetic that gives the idea of iris), the milky-musky molecule MC-5, and a natural absolute of honey. It took him two years to fine-tune this engine, Malle giving him creative feedback, the two of them going back and forth, and in the end, his formula, according to Ellena, totaled twenty ingredients, relatively minimalist for a perfume. L’Eau d’Hiver smells of ultrafine ground white pepper and extremely fresh, cold crab taken that instant from the ocean. It is a brilliant, marvelous, utterly strange perfume, unique—it references nothing—and among the greatest ever created.
Véronique Gautier appreciated this maximalist minimalism. As a creative director (the role she played at Hermès), Gautier was ahead of the game in several ways. She understood, as some did not, that one could stuff a perfume like a sausage with the most expensive ingredients in the world and wind up with carefully macerated shit that cost a fortune. What mattered was the way the thing was built.
Gautier was after great art, and great art is great artifice and great manipulation that forces its experience on the viewer, tells him its story, and thus changes him. Ellena was an artist. That’s why she wanted him. And Gautier would also tell you instantly that Ellena wasn’t there to re-create nature. As an artist, he was principally an illusionist, a description he agreed with emphatically. “Picasso,” Ellena liked to say, “said, ‘Art is a lie that tells the truth.’ That’s perfume for me. I lie. I create an illusion that is actually stronger than reality. Some people are surprised when I say this, but: sketch a tree, and it’s completely false, yet everyone understands it, and actually if you do a very, very basic sketch, abstractly, people will understand it better than if you do every single leaf. Give them too much, and people will start to say, ‘OK, it’s a tree, but is it an oak or a maple?’”He thus practices a perfumery of very few ingredients. And, he would tell you, the greater a perfumer’s power over his art, the greater his mastery of such illusion.
Ellena will dip a touche into a molecule called isobutyl phenylacetate, which smells sweetish/chamomile blossom and vaguely chemical, and another into a synthetic molecule whose common chemical name is ethyl vanillin. (Its IUPAC name is 3-ethoxy-4-hydroxybenzaldehyde, and this rich gourmandy vanilla molecule is the heart of Shalimar.) He puts the touches together and hands them to you. Chocolate appears in the air. “My métier is to find shortcuts to express as strongly as possible a smell. For chocolate, nature uses eight hundred molecules, minimum. I use two.” He hands you four touches, ethyl vanillin plus natural essences of cinnamon, orange, and lime—each of these has the full olfactory range of the original material—and you smell an utterly realistic Coca-Cola. “With me,” says Ellena, “one plus one equals three. When I add two things, you get much more than two things.”
He will hand you a touche that he has sprayed with a molecule called nonenol cis-6, which by itself smells of honeydew melon or fresh water from a stream. He’ll then hand you a second touche with a natural lemon on it, direct you to hold them together now, and suddenly before you appears an olfactory hologram of an absolutely mesmerizing lemon sorbet.
The explicit point was not to create a thing but an illusion of that thing, an olfactory alchemy. The point of Nil was not to create a green mango but the illusion of a green mango.
He was in his lab. It was June 11. Ellena began the work of changing AG2.
As do virtually all perfumers, Ellena works in his office at his desk, running molecules through his brain as he stares out the window, jotting down the ideas, ten milliliters of this, twenty of that. He sends these down the hall to his lab technician, who assembles them, brings them back, and sets them before him. He smells this, the assemblage he imagined, and frowns irritably or laughs with delight and surprise or narrows his eyes in fury or frustration. And then he adds X milliliters of other materials to another formula on his computer screen and with the push of a button sends those off to the lab.
Like young French chefs dutifully imbibing the culinary canon—with the basic mise en place (flour + butter + cream + stock) you master the basic white sauce—all young perfumers can recite in their sleep the recipes for the classic categories. Ellena had learned them at a tender age.
How do you make a basic chypre? (“Chypre” is one of the classic perfume categories.) Answer: patchouli plus labdanum (a species of shrub; its scent is bizarrely animalic, like the fur coat of an unwashed muskrat) plus mousse de chêne (oak moss); bergamot as well, if you want.
How do you make an amber? Labdanum + vanillin + Ambroxide.
Junior perfumers discover that Vetiver Huile Essentielle from Haiti smells like a Third World dirt floor and Vetiver Bourbon from Isle de la Réunion smells like a Third World dirt floor with cigar butts. (They hope to do something wonderful with the cigar butts.) They learn, as Ellena knew from decades of work, how to create the illusion of the scent of freesia with two simple molecules, both synthetics: ß-ionone + linalool. And orange blossom: linalool + methyl anthranilate, which by itself smells like blossom + aspirin. The classic Guerlain perfumes often used a resinoid material called styrax, which smells of olive oil pooled on a table in a chemical factory. Add 2-phenylethyl alcohol, one of the main molecules in rose, and you get lilac. Add the smell of corpse (indole), you get a much richer lilac. And you can give your lilac, freesia, and orange blossom a variety of metallic edges: Add allyl amyl glycolate, you get a cold metal freesia. Add amyl salicylate, and you get a freesia with the smell of a metal kitchen sink dusted with Ajax powder. Lauric aldehyde C-12 adds an iron with a bit of starch still on it.
A small but increasing number of perfumery raw materials are controlled substances—you see “USDEA” (United States Drug Enforcement Administration) and a warning on the label—because they are the precursors for drugs such as methamphetamine. Security measures are taken, in particular at the larger companies because by definition they have larger amounts of the stuff sitting on shelves and, as one lab tech put it to me, perfume labs are potential crystal meth labs.
By Ellena’s rough estimation, the changes Gautier and Dubrule had asked for involved inflecting between 5 and 25 percent of the formula. The estimate hardly mattered; it would depend on a thousand things, and anyway he wouldn’t know for sure till they’d reached the final perfume. Ellena assembled the extant AG2 on a fresh standard formula sheet, briskly listing each material, its product code, its precise amount in milliliters and its price per thousand milliliters. Together the materials totaled 100 percent of the formula.
He spent some time eliminating the tranchant bitter acidic ingredients, then corrected the proportions. Then he sat at his desk and stared at the formula.
He started with Hedione, which has a jasmine scent. Hedione (its more formal name is methyl dihydrojasmonate) is a molecule that was found in 1961 by searching molecularly through jasmine, and it is a material Ellena loves. He then put in methyl anthranilate extra 10 percent DPG, Iso E Super (a synthetic with a light woody scent used prominently in Beautiful by Estée Lauder and Calvin Klein’s Eternity), and a natural essence of neroli. As a solvent, ethanol, the alcohol in vodka and gin, is used for perfumes, but here Ellena used dipropylene glycol because, due to archaic European regulations, the concentrées of perfumes can’t be transported from place to place if they have alcohol in them.
He tried three different iterations, smelled them, and didn’t like them at all, so he tried four new directions, which Monique, his lab tech, mixed and lined up neatly on his desk in tiny vials. He labeled the touches with a pencil, AJ1, AJ2, AJ3, AJ4, dipped each, and held the four spread like a hand of cards in poker.
He leaned over in his chair, closed his eyes, and smelled each systematically. He grimaced thoughtfully. He bent each of the touches, resmelled each systematically, precisely two seconds per touche, then reversed back down the line. Murmured, “C’est pas vrai …”
AJ2 was the freshest, AJ3 the most mango, sweet. He lowered the grapefruit synthetic in all of them and then added to all except AJ3, in different proportions, trans-2-hexenal, a synthetic that smells half of golden apple, half elementary school glue paste, because he wanted a greener fruit. He inflected AJ2 with 5 out of 10,000 parts of Ambroxide, an extremely expensive synthetic derived from clary sage that had been molecularly futzed with. The Ambroxide was for Gautier’s fond, in theory, although personally Ellena thinks the olfactory pyramid, the cliché glossy diagrams of top, middle, and bottom notes salespeople mechanically deploy at Macy’s perfume counters, is “complete bullshit. I’m sorry, you add something to the bottom and you influence the top notes, and when you first smell a perfume you smell everything, top to bottom, instantly.”
(As an intellectual exercise in what one must not do, he added the peachy gamma-undecalactone to get AJ5. As he suspected, AJ5 was now a rich peach that in its lusciousness completely drowned the green freshness.)
His cell phone exploded on the desk, and he jumped, grabbed it, and glared at the number. Brightened instantly. “Ah, c’est Gautier!” Answered with a grin and an insouciant solicitude: “Oui, madame la présidente.” They chatted. He clicked off, put the phone down, and stared out the window.
Monique brought the new iterations, and he dipped and smelled. Smelled them again. Tossed the touches on his desk and sat back. “Ambroxide helps the tenacity,” he murmured to the window and scowled. He picked up one of the touches again and smelled it and moved his torso back and forth very, very slowly, forward, back. Tossed the touche on the desk and looked at the ceiling and smiled a small dark smile. Unconvinced, perhaps. Or perhaps waiting for a material to fall from the sky. Monique brought an envelope. An invitation from a very expensive luxury goods maker. Black tie. He looked at it, chanted out loud, “Monsieur this-and-that, Madame this-and-that would be ravished to have the company of Monsieur Ellena …” He tossed it aside. “I rarely go to those things. I’m not a sophisticate.” (
Un homme mondain.) “I go, I feel like a penguin.”
He smelled his iterations again. “At the moment,” he said, “I like AJ3. It’s the freshest.”
That afternoon, Ellena got in his car and drove over to Laboratoires Monique Rémy, a small company in Grasse that is perhaps the most rarified supplier of natural perfume ingredients in the world. Ellena had heard that LMR had a new quality of narcissus called absolue narcisse de distillation moléculaire—molecular distillation narcissus absolute. To build Nil, Ellena was wondering if a very raw green scent might work well. He was here to smell it.
LMR’s tuberose is legendary; its price, like many LMR products, is breathtaking, though the company sells quite reasonably priced products as well. Price is simply a function of scarcity of the raw material multiplied by the difficulty of making the essence or absolute. LMR supplies Chanel with materials it reserves exclusively for Chanel, and no other house can get its hands on them at any price; one of these is Iris Naturelle 15 percent 4095C, which costs $8,500 per kilogram.
Ellena drove up the LMR factory’s steep parking lot and parked his new Citroën precisely. On returning from Paris the previous day, he’d picked the car up and found its battery dead. He’d left the headlights on. “This car can do everything,” he said, “wash your hair, make you a cappuccino, except turn off its goddamn headlights when the battery starts to die. The one practical thing it might be capable of.” He looked skyward. “It’s a French car.” He walked to the door in the bright sunshine, pressed the button, and stood back, looking up at the factory. He looked intensely interested. “This is the first time I come here as Hermès,” he said. He squinted at the building. “We’ll see how they treat me.”
Frédérique Rémy, Monique’s daughter and then commercial director of the company, greeted him. Rémy was an attractive, direct woman with dark hair, a palpable intelligence, and a quick, interested manner. “Félicitations!” she said—congratulations—and they both grinned. She and Ellena are both grassois. She all but grew up with him, and she had already made him several wonderful things with particular properties he’d asked for.
Several years earlier Ellena had asked Monique Rémy to develop a special bigarade, a special grade of bitter orange, for him to use in a perfume he wanted to make for Frédéric Malle. Ellena loves bitter smells, but bigarade oil has two problems—it is naturally highly red, an unstable color that deteriorates over time, and it renders human skin light-sensitive—which have kept it from being used in large quantities. Rémy made him a colorless bigarade that does not photosensitize, and with it he created a Malle fragrance absolutely stuffed with the material and called, simply, Bigarade, an astonishing work of sorcery, an elixir of bitter orange, citrus, white smoke, and the scent of the stratosphere.
LMR had for years supplied Hermès with several of the ingredients for 24 Faubourg: absolute of orange blossom, an LMR jasmine sambac, an LMR orris butter, and a rose called rose de mai (it blooms in the south of France in May). Both Ellena and Rémy were perfectly aware that he would now directly influence LMR’s fortunes as he would decide whose vetivers and jasmines were to be specified in Hermès’s perfumes. He had choices. Robertet S.A., just up the hill, made excellent things, as did Mane nearby, and the Biolande products had premier reputations. To the degree to which his perfumes were successful, they would demand more materials. Supplying a top-ten bestselling fragrance could mean selling tons of Rémy’s Basilic Grand Vert Absolue at €790 per kilo.
To its credit, LMR is spoken of in the industry in the slightly cloaked tones with which Oppenheimers discuss their diamond mines. LMR’s factory in the center of France produced, from its own proprietary fields of flowers, a narcissus absolu. Only LMR had it. It retailed at around €6,500 per kilo. In Vietnam Rémy had contracted with a French botanist to find unknown plants to develop into new perfume materials. One of the first products that resulted from LMR’s new Vietnamese fields was a rare basil with a strange, complex, fresh angle. An Estée Lauder might, for a new Michael Kors (Lauder owns Kors’s license), buy up 100 percent of the supply of an LMR material, simply take it off the world market, in order to make Kors’s perfume unique. The basil cost €250 per kilo.
LMR is also coveted for its quality control. The materials producers are notorious for trying to pass off cheap Indian or Brazilian distillations as Grasse flower absolutes. “I have to be very careful,” Sylvie Chantecaille, head of her eponymous niche house, told me. “There is one house”—she named it—”that is not always good. Their Grasse jasmine is eighteen thousand dollars per kilo, the most expensive in the world, and they recently sent me a complete joke. It was clearly from Morocco.” She rolled her eyes. “This happens all the time. I find the two most honest companies are Biolande and LMR. Monique has some amazing stuff. Just incredible. Out of this world. There’s another company”—she named that one—”that has a rose water concentrate that’s two thousand dollars per pound, but don’t identify it; I want to keep this secret because I use a lot of it, and I don’t want people to know where I’m getting it. In all Chantecaille skin creams, we use rose water, and you have to heat the product, ah, but if you heat it you kill the rose, so you have to … stop taking notes and I’ll tell you.”
Rémy called up to Bernard Toulemonde, the company’s CEO. Toulemonde brought down several pairs of industrial protective glasses, and the three chatted animatedly as they did a casual tour of the facilities. They walked past impressive metal-and-glass machines that looked like dinosaurs with tubes and cables sprouting from them. Rémy hated the oversized glasses, which were required by both company policy and French law. She kept taking them off, and Toulemonde kept patiently giving her his lecture on the corrosive chemicals, the solvents, the high pressures, and the extreme heat sources from the machines that surrounded them—which she knew perfectly well. “We can’t ask the employees to wear them if we don’t,” he said. She glared at the ugly plexiglass and demanded of Ellena, “Jean-Claude, can’t you get Hermès Eyewear to do something in these?” He promised he’d have Jean Paul Gaultier get on it.
Rémy and Ellena walked around the huge machines, many twenty feet tall. Some had giant metal blades to hash grains and roots. LMR’s machines make two classes of perfumery raw materials, and the classes are determined quite simply by the way in which the materials (sage, ylang-ylang flowers, tree moss) are treated: steam or solvent. Essences are what one calls scent material extracted using steam at 120 degrees Celsius (almost 300 degrees Fahrenheit). This is “hot” extraction. Absolus are materials extracted with solvent (the most common is hexane, which is a little like dry cleaning fluid) at 30 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit). “Cold” extraction. (Actually, solvents will first extract from the ylang-ylang a greasy, gorgeously stinking waxy goo Rémy and Toulemonde would call a “concrete.” The concrete is given a lavage à l’alcool, an alcohol wash, to dissolve it, and that is a liquid absolute.)
If you hot-distill roses with steam to get an essence, or cold-extract them using solvent to get an absolute (perfumers are extremely picky about matching these verbs and nouns), even if it’s the same rose from the same field, your rose essence and rose absolute will smell quite different. This is because the two methods take different groups of molecules out of the flower. Distill, say, a species of rose called Centifolia (it’s one of the only two rose species used in perfumes; Centifolia means “one hundred petals”) with hot extraction, and you’ll get the rose material’s lightest molecules, the top notes. Wash another batch of the same Centifolia in solvents, and you’ll get all soluble molecules including (notably for your smell) the heaviest molecules that give you bottom notes. (Solvents also remove colorants.) And a perfumer has to be able to manipulate the two. Ellena began his career among these machines as a teenage marmiteur (slang; a marmite is a large metal pot), extracting jasmine, and he can, he says, tell you the country of origin of a jasmine essence. He can also tell you what kind of machine distilled it: inox (stainless steel), aluminum, or steel.
LMR extraction is widely regarded as superior, and its prices reflect this. A sample of the Laboratoires Monique Rémy price list reads, in prices per kilo, like this:
Basilic Essence |
€47 |
Styrax Resinoide |
56 |
Vetiver Java Essence |
100 |
Mousse Arbre Absolue DM 85% IPM IFRA |
129 |
Vetiver Haiti Essence |
142 |
Basilic Grand Vert Absolue |
790 |
Camomille Romaine Essence |
857 |
Rose Bulgare Absolue |
1,639 |
Cassie Absolue Egypte |
2,093 |
Tubereuse Absolue Inde |
4,546 |
Ambrette Absolue |
6,792 |
Rose Turque Essence |
6,868 |
Iris Naturelle 15% 4095C |
7,340 |
Rose de Mai Absolue |
8,381 |
Ellena was not unconscious of price, but he was quite insistent that “you must never forget price is not axiomatically quality. That means …” He hesitated, looked a bit foxlike and a bit wary. He glanced sideways. “It’s delicate to talk about such things. How would nonexperts understand this?” He thought about it. “Take a jasmine from India,” he proposed. “That comes in at around €1,510 per kilo. These are very expensive products, and there is Indian jasmine in several of the Hermès perfumes. Then take a jasmine from Grasse. That’s around €30,000. When you smell them next to each other, the Grasse jasmine is a bit better. Twice as good. But not twenty times. At that price, you’ve simply lost touch with reality. It’s extremely bothersome for the people who work here”—he looked back at the factory that produces such stratospheric materials—”but at a certain moment, economic reality …” He shrugged. “Look, personally I instantly recognize the difference, but virtually no one who wears the perfume ever will.”
He frowned. “It’s very important to understand that the price of perfumes is not the price of their materials. You pay for the creativity.” He lifted his shoulders, made a rather Greek gesture: He meant himself, the guy right in front of you. “You don’t pay for a painting the value of the paint the guy’s thrown on the canvas. You pay the years of experience. Tu me paies, quoi!” You pay me! “That has value as well, a value that I put into the perfume. This Marxist idea that the price of a thing is the price of its materials is false.”
The last room, lined with refrigerators, was the stockroom. Rémy brought out the absolue narcisse distillation moléculaire and set it before him. He leaned over and inhaled. She watched him carefully. It was a beautiful scent, an ethereal yet muscular flower with a raw green angle, and it was, he realized, wrong for Nil. Too raw, not sufficiently tender. He thought, Shit, it doesn’t work.
He got in his car, went back to his lab, and thought, Now what am I going to do?
The degree to which the perfume industry runs on lies, strange outmoded and anachronistic business practices, vapid publicity, gross hypocrisy, and a general miscomprehension by marketers of what perfume actually is is jaw-dropping. But it is not entirely illogical. Ellena is as fluent in the industry’s strange black holes and bizarre features as he is ambivalent about discussing them on the record. The central problem is the formula. The formula is a beautiful thing for those who understand it and terrifying to those who don’t.
Creating perfume is exceedingly complicated. It is an art form that is, for example, infinitely more complex than, say, making clothing. Cutting silk crepe into a dress means a piece of silk crepe cut and stitched—expertly, we can stipulate—into the form of a dress. Add the neurosis necessary to get people to spend three thousand dollars for the thing, and you’re done. Perfume, by contrast, is, fundamentally, mastering organic chemistry, and it involves cutting and sewing together pieces of the periodic table of the elements, trying to choreograph electrons that often react to each other in surprising ways, and cajoling molecules into a single mesh that has structure, durability, and stability—not to mention beauty, originality, and commercial appeal. It takes all of this to create a formula.
But the thing about formulae that creates real panic in the perfume industry—and this is where Ellena’s ambivalence in talking to the public is noticeable—is the synthetic molecules. The industry as a general rule is blindly and adamantly convinced that the public will only buy perfumes it believes to be “natural.” Since on average perfumes contain 80 percent synthetics, the industry lives every day terrified that the client won’t like reality, which thus needs to be suppressed at all cost.
I was at breakfast in Paris at one of the stupidly expensive Alain Ducasse places with the creative director of a prominent French house. I told her about a piece I was writing about synthetics for The Times, explaining the role that synthetics had in perfume and that most perfumes are made of synthetics today. She looked at me with honest horror. She said, “Mais Chandler, tu casses le rêve!” But, Chandler, you’re destroying the dream! The dream being some information-free version of perfume where the stuff presumably flows purely out of a tiny magic spigot attached to a rosebush or something and is bottled by fairies with LVMH employment contracts.
I like this woman. She’s serious and smart, but she shares this viewpoint with the overwhelming majority of French perfume industry people (and basically the same number of their New York counterparts), and I couldn’t disagree with them more. When I repeated the comment to Frédéric Malle, he rolled his eyes and said, “They’re killing themselves with this rêve, which in my opinion is more of a cauchemar.” A nightmare. For example: not only are synthetics fascinating; they’re basically completely misunderstood by everyone. Including some of the pros, by the way.
Ellena and Gautier basically agreed with Malle about the vapidness of almost all perfume marketing, although cautiously. It’s true that they could more easily afford to since, unlike the woman at Ducasse, they had no licensor to serve, no corporate executives to answer to, and an in-house perfumer who was part of Hermès itself. And he was a perfumer singularly capable of talking about perfume (a talent few of them have), which meant he could talk in a way that didn’t freak out the consumer when he (if he) brought up the dreaded synthetics. So they were risking less. But given those caveats, they were still notably enlightened.
Gautier, for example, was truly and blessedly free of the misconception that “natural” materials equaled “good,” an archaic piece of dogma ardently subscribed to by those who know nothing about perfume. A modern perfume’s being made entirely of naturals is as appropriate as a skyscraper’s being built of wood and thatch; modern buildings use steel, glass, and spun silicates because they are the best materials for the job. The first perfume synthetics were created in the 1800s. I once met a pompous Frenchwoman who said, “Myself, I only buy Chanel scents because they’re one hundred percent natural.” A stupid comment; Chanel No. 5 is probably the best single example of the use of synthetics in the world. Its key is a molecule called an aldehyde, first synthesized in a laboratory in France in the late nineteenth century, and it’s this synthetic that gives No. 5 its volume and glittering abstract brilliance. Aldehydes are marvelous, pure powdery scents that smell metaphorically like the brilliant light from a magnesium camera flash. In fact, not only do all Chanel perfumes contain synthetic molecules; every single great scent from every perfume house is built with them.
The synthetic molecules Karanal, ethyl maltol, and a third known commercially as Calone (its chemical name is 7-methyl-2.H-1,5-benzodioxepin-3(4H)-one) alone have allowed a huge amount of innovative, surprising, daring scent creations. Gautier would tell you straightforwardly that Hermès’s cash cow Eau d’Orange Verte is 70 percent natural, and she would immediately add that, first, 70 percent is abnormally high, extraordinarily high actually; almost all perfumes on the market, including, she would stipulate, almost all Hermès perfumes, are around 20 percent natural. And second: So what. Who cares. Opposing synthetics in perfume is like opposing antibiotics in medicine. It is simply complete retrogression.
Ellena, for his part, had no more time for the antisynthetics religion than she did. But he was careful. Ellena has in fact created, for a major fashion house, a perfume that is a huge commercial success, 100 percent synthetic, and a gorgeous piece of work on every level, but he would not allow me to give its name simply because, he said with a sigh, “the public can’t handle the truth.” This was an argument he used often when we discussed the behind-the-scenes questions. My view was that the public wanted the truth. “In the long run,” Ellena would reply, and I would agree—but his problem was getting from now to the long run. Risky.
And still he yearned for the long run, when the public could handle perfume as it actually is. He found it all ridiculous and attempted, whenever he was interviewed by Le Figaro or L’Express, to enlighten. Synthetics didn’t merely start modern perfumery. They are modern perfumery. In 1882 Houbigant launched Fougère Royale, the first perfume containing a synthetic molecule—coumarin, a deliciously sweet, chewy scent like marzipan—to become popular. From the 1500s until 1882, perfumers had just re-created nature: “Here is a rose.” From 1882, synthetics freed them to begin creating art. In 1889 Guerlain launched Jicky using vanillin, a synthetic. When asked why he used synthetics, the great Aimé Guerlain said simply, “Because they gave me an effect I couldn’t get from naturals.”
To Ellena, it’s a given that creating a perfume without synthetics is like painting a picture without blues or reds. You could, but why. Synthetics give you range, from the amazing milky lactones making Gucci’s Rush the ingenious piece of abstract art that it is (if Versace’s The Dreamer is the smell of silk, Rush is the smell of the most excellent rayon) to the gorgeous synthetic iris the perfumer Olivier Polge created when he made Dior Homme. Fresh’s Mukki and Issey Miyake’s Le Feu are both utterly, brilliantly strange because each has a drive train that runs on hydroxy butyl thiazol, an ingenious, disorienting synthetic that smells like milk and can give a perfume a beautiful creamy scent. Like Toyota, Mercedes, and Ford, the Big Boys wage fierce, constant warfare to put out the most commercially successful new models. Françoise Donche, Givenchy’s creative director, once declaimed to me, “Firmenich, c’est la haute couture de la molécule!” (Firmenich is the haute couture of synthetic materials), though naturally this is hotly contested. Sure, said a Givaudan chemist, Firmenich had introduced Helvetolide, Romandolide, and Coranol, and they were serious machines, but Symrise had come out with some very strong trendsetters like Ambrocenide, Globanone, and Globalide, IFF put Trisamber, Two-Eyed-Musk, and Florol Super on the market, and Givaudan had launched Javanol, Azurone, and Safraleine. (“At the last World Perfumery Conference,” another chemist said to me, “I think the best introductions were definitely IFF’s—Florol Super and Trisamber. Awesome.”) So they’re all in fierce competition over the molecular market.
The secret of Dior’s Eau Sauvage by perfumer Edmond Roudnitska is Firmenich’s methyl dihydrojasmonate, a molecule that smells beautifully of clean, pure light. The heart of Houbigant’s 1912 cult favorite Quelques Fleurs is a synthetic called hydroxycitronellal. Angel’s secret is the molecule ethyl maltol (which was isolated in 1969 and is the succulent sweet molecule you smell when you smell cotton candy). There were, of course, synthetics Ellena hated, but he hated them because they were boring, or clichéd, or inferior in performance—rational reasons.
Marketers have, logically, seized on the prejudice of the “all-naturals” movement as a marketing device and promoted the idea that natural materials are always good when, of course, a low-quality natural narcissus will smell like garbage while a good synthetic heliotropin is an olfactory marvel, a powdery floral scent, both delicious and abstract, somehow crossed with a cloud. Then there is the universally known fact that synthetics are more likely to cause an allergic reaction. Exactly wrong. Naturals are more likely to cause allergic reactions, and for a very simple reason. To get a sandalwood smell in a perfume, Ellena could use Sandalore, a synthetic molecule that smells like sandalwood. It’s exactly one molecule, C14H26O, which gave him exactly one possibility of an allergic reaction. Or he could use a natural sandalwood, which contains hundreds of molecules. Here is an extremely abbreviated GC/MS analysis of East Indian sandalwood (Santalum album L. from the family Santalaceae).
(l)-alpha-Santalol |
50.00 |
(Z)-beta-Santalol |
20.90 |
epi-beta-Santalol |
4.10 |
(Z)-trans-alpha-Bergamotol |
3.90 |
alpha-Santalal |
2.90 |
cis-Lanceol |
1.70 |
1.50 |
|
beta-Santalene |
1.40 |
Spirosantalol |
1.20 |
(Z)-Nuciferol |
1.10 |
epi-beta-Santalene |
0.97 |
alpha-Santalene |
0.82 |
beta-Bisabolol |
0.64 |
(E)-alpha-Santalol |
0.56 |
beta-Santalal |
0.56 |
dihydro-alpha-Santalol |
0.38 |
ar-Curcumene |
0.26 |
alpha-Bisabolol |
0.26 |
beta-Curcumene |
0.13 |
trans-alpha-Bergamotene |
0.12 |
(Z)-trans-alpha-Bergamotal |
0.10 |
complex rest |
6.50 |
total |
100 |
The natural creates a much greater allergy potential. If a natural has, say, one hundred molecules, the house must contend with roughly a hundred possible allergic reactions. The synthetic, just one.
Ellena would also point out that naturals pose a sourcing challenge, which creates a threat to the perfume’s memory switch. For memory to trigger, a perfume has to smell the same, and everyone in the industry can remember how perfumers had been specifying natural vetiver from the Caribbean island of Montserrat when the island turned into one big volcano, blew up, and caught on fire. The entire island was evacuated, and the supply of vetiver stopped dead. Everyone had had to hurriedly switch to other sources of vetiver—Haiti, Réunion, China—(and then rush the quality controls and worry about the purity and the toxicity, and as fast as possible rebalance formulae; it had marked them all), which is why naturals also pose a much greater quality control challenge. What the all-naturals people don’t realize is that synthetics are better ecologically. The sandalwood forests of India are being destroyed at a terrible rate, literally disappearing, and the price of natural sandalwood is skyrocketing (it was, not long ago, $300 a pound, then $500, then as even more Indian trees were sawed down it shot past $800 and up). Most perfumers I know refuse now to use natural sandalwood in perfumes, and their bosses support them, and it’s a purely eco question. (Smugglers and the black market keep prohibited sandalwood flowing.) They don’t necessarily tell Dolce & Gabbana; they just quietly put them in—lovely mixes of synthetics like Santaliff (from IFF) and single molecules like Javanol (made by Givaudan), a strong, nicely diffusive creamy/rosy sandalwood scent which saves the natural environment.
The idea that synthetics are “modern” and “American” and naturals are “classic” and “French” is completely wrong. There’s no Frencher house than Guerlain, no more classic collection of perfumes, and not only were Guerlain perfumers at the forefront of the synthetics revolution with the 1889 Jicky, Guerlain’s classic L’Heure Bleue (1912) derives its beauty from methyl anthranilate, its elegant Mitsouko (1919) uses the very elegant synthetic aldehyde C-14 (which smells deliciously of delicate, ripe peach), and the immortal Shalimar (1925) has quinolines. The sleek and, in my view, vastly underrated Samsara has the synthetic sandalwood molecule Sandalore, and just a few years ago the perfumer Maurice Roucel put a really cool molecule—cis-3—hexenyl salicylate (it smells, by itself, of solar-drenched suntanned air over freshly cut green grass)—into his modern classic L’Instant de Guerlain. Synthetics bring order, said Ellena, like a calm teacher before an unruly class, in whose presence the students relax, find a focus.
The naturals movement would like to believe synthetics are “cheap,” which is the usual ideological slander. IFF, for example, has some excellent, very pricey synthetics. All scent materials have an internal and an external price; the internal is what, say, IFF will charge Vera Wang if Wang has her perfume made by IFF; the external is the price IFF will charge Givaudan for the synthetics it makes, and if Wang goes to Givaudan and the Givaudan perfumer uses an IFF molecule in Wang’s juice (maybe because Wang is in love with the idea of an abstract sweet, and IFF has on the market the achingly perfect molecule for making abstract sweets), to make money Givaudan has to put its own margin on top of IFF’s external price. This is why you want your research chemists working away in their labs to smelt the hottest new molecules: They’re tiny cash cows, microscopic ATM machines spitting out money. For example, here are four excellent IFF synthetics:
I got these prices from a former IFF evaluator who had had it with people calling his beautiful synthetics “cheap.”
Some synthetics become so expensive that IFF’s business managers will take them off the available palette; the price is just too high.
The final irony is that the naturals-only people don’t know what the word natural means. There’s a molecule called linalool (the trade name of the terpene alcohol C10H18O). You can chop down scarce Brazilian rosewood trees (Aydendron rosaeodora) from the rain forests, steam-distill the wood chippings, and then isolate linalool by fractional distillation from the essential oil. But for years we’ve known that you can also create this exact same molecule, much faster and less expensively, by adding acetylene to 6-methylhept-5-ene-2-one, then doing a Lindlar hydrogenation. The same molecule. Linalool is what’s called a nature identical (there are thousands of them), the same molecule whether it comes from destroying the srain forests to get rosewood or from the lab. Exactly the same. Well, there’s one difference between naturally derived and synthesized linalool: the synthesized molecule is pure, the natural is impure.
The “naturals-only” movement is, of course, simply a panicked reaction to a world becoming too complex and too out-of-control. But fundamentalism is always a disaster. “It seems not to occur to these people,” a South American flavorist commented to me, “that a lot of naturals are actually forbidden because they are toxic. Natural coumarin from tonka beans is poisonous. Wormwood oil has high levels of thujone and is banned, as is natural nutmeg, which is loaded with myristicine. Or so many other examples. This notion that ‘being natural’ equals ‘being healthy’ …” He paused, looked at the ceiling. “Arsenic is natural, and it kills you.”
The fear of talking about synthetics to the public is not entirely unreasonable. It is, as an absolute policy, merely irrational—a certain degree of reality injected into the conversation with the consumer would be an exceedingly healthy thing—and has been taken to an extreme that is now a religion. Combine this specific fear with the fundamental paranoia of the luxury goods industry, where nothing more than image, quixotic and perishable, accounts for the sales of one-thousand-dollar handbags, and the result is that you have this art form, perfume, an art in which polysyllabic intimidating-sounding molecules form an intricate, mercurial, perplexing clay molded by molecular sculptors called perfumers, and these artists must function inside a business of pure illusion run by executives worried about shareholders and uncomfortable with art. No wonder the perfume industry is like a sanitarium. It’s the same as Hollywood.
This was why Gautier was cautious. People can understand making-of documentaries that show movie stars behind the scenes on sets working with directors. Shots of fashion designers cutting silk taffeta has an instant logic to the consumer. It’s understandable. Hydroxy butyl thiazol is not. This is why when you say “perfume formula” to marketers, they wig out. Say these words to PR people, and they act like they forgot their rabies shots. Say them to perfumers, and they are usually (but not always) slightly nervous. In fact, they are often rather wistful about their formulae, these wonderful novels they write that the marketers then assiduously hide from everyone in the world. “I wish I could talk about my formula on the record,” a perfumer once said to me regretfully. She had just, finally, finished a perfume for a major American designer—we were going over it on paper—and she was extremely proud of it, but she dutifully stipulated that it was off the record. I’ve spent wonderful sessions with perfumers like Pierre Wargnye and Dominique Ropion and Pierre-Constantin Guéros going over formulae, the columns of molecules that represent so many hours of agonizing, careful ratios and precisely calibrated percentages. They discuss them intelligently and with passion, and it’s beautiful to be walked through a molecular creation with its creator, a personal tour of the inside of the machine by the artist who built it. Say the word “formula” to a few of the more paranoid ones, and they react like chickens on speed. They believe the formulae need to be kept absolutely secret.
But with the fundamental irony that the fervor with which the houses keep their formulae secret is actually inversely proportionate to the importance of doing so, which is either zero or near zero. It’s tough to say exactly. The unspoken fact is that all formulae are public now, at least to everyone who owns the right $50,000 worth of molecular analytical machinery (which is all the Big Boys and any number of independent laboratories), but the industry is terrified to admit it for a rather simple, if not particularly intelligent, reason.
For historical reasons having to do with how medieval perfumers made their money, Dior does not own the formula to a single Dior perfume. Lancôme has never seen the formula for Magie, Ralph Lauren and Estée Lauder could not tell the formula of Romance from that of Pleasures because they’ve never seen them. J’adore was created by the perfumer Calice Becker at Quest, and Quest, not Dior, owns the formula for J’adore. When Givaudan bought Quest, Givaudan—not Dior—then owned the formula. Symrise owns the blueprint to Givenchy’s Amarige, IFF owns the plans to Donna Karan’s Cashmere Mist, and Firmenich owns the wiring blueprint to Armani’s Acqua di Giò Pour Homme. Giorgio Armani has never seen his own formula.
When Ellena made Un Jardin en Méditerranée for Hermès, he was an employee of Symrise, so Symrise owns the formula to that Hermès perfume. In fact neither Véronique Gautier nor any president of Parfums Hermès before her (nor, incidentally, Jean-Louis Dumas) had ever seen an Hermès formula, not for Calèche (which was owned by Mane, which held it close in its paranoid grip), not for Equipage, created and guarded by the perfumers Guy Robert and Jean-Louis Sieuzac.
Ellena’s Nil was thus a revolution for the house: It would be the first Hermès formula that Hermès would own.
The convention surrounding formulae is due simply to the fact that medieval perfumers guaranteed the faithfulness of their clients by keeping their formulae secret. Only your perfumer could recreate your perfume. So Givaudan and Firmenich and IFF, the descendants of these medieval businessmen, do the same.
The problem was that in 1952 A. T. James and J. P. Martin developed a machine called the gas chromatograph. This was an ingenious device that separates individual molecules on an invisible conveyor belt of gas and IDs each of them as they float by. It tells you what molecules are in the material before you, unlocks the juice, and hands you a printout like a grocery store cash register spitting out a paper listing of the items sitting inside your plastic bags at the checkout. (A little more complicated, but still.) And from that instant, secrecy began a slide to uselessness. The gas chromatograph and its brother, the mass spectrometer, with which it is used in tandem, do molecular analysis and, with a really good molecule jockey reading the results, and with enough time to interpret what the machines spit out, give you basically 100 percent of any formula. Everyone in the industry knows that the first twenty bottles of IFF’s perfumes are bought by IFF’s competitors, who take them back to labs where the techs “shoot” the juice (that’s the verb they use; “We just shot the new Gucci masculine, totally blew me away how much Isobutavan they put in there!”), the machines crunch it, the techs eyeball the molecules, fill in the gaps with a little wizardry, do a polish, and send the formula directly to the hard drives of the executives. (Perfumer François Demachy, by contrast, told me that in his extremely conservative view, you could only piece together about 90 percent of a formula with the machines. Perhaps, but this is contradicted by every perfume lab technician I’ve ever talked to.) The IFF execs read the Givaudan formulae, the Givaudan execs read the Firmenich formulae, and everyone gets together at industry functions for cocktails and cheerfully doesn’t talk about it.
It’s not hard. The truth has never been a particularly significant ingredient in the industry in so many ways. I got bumped up to a rare business class seat on an American flight from Paris to New York and met in the seat next to me one of the industry’s legendary figures. She spent the flight telling me stories. One was about a meeting she had attended in the vast Manhattan conference room of one of the biggest French luxury brands. A French perfumer was presenting the brand’s executives their new scent, which she’d made for them. They were launching it next month, millions of dollars, media, a major deal. With great flair they brought in the touches sprayed with the scent, the suits sent the thing around the room on its little paper carriers, and everyone smelled deeply, pronouncing it great, genius, exclaiming about “the notes” of this and that. This went on. After a while one young guy screwed up his courage and said, “Uh, I just don’t smell anything.” Everyone froze. Dead silence. A few people cleared their throats, then started backtracking. The perfumer looked rapidly from one to the other, grabbed a scent strip, smelled it. Her face went opaque and she rushed offstage and grabbed the bottle. Her assistant had screwed up; the bottle she’d sprayed from was a factice, one of the mock-ups they make for photography. It had been filled with colored tap water.
IFF is still pretending that if it keeps the formula secret, Estée Lauder can’t take Beautiful away and have Givaudan manufacture it for less. (This would quite simply involve a Givaudan perfumer quietly taking out, say, an expensive natural Sicilian bergamot and substituting in some cheaper Brazilian stuff, then rebalancing the formula, which now costs two euros less per kilo, instantly kicking up Lauder’s profit margin. Lauder would hope no one would notice, and in many cases—particularly if the perfumer has talent—they wouldn’t. Note that I’m using IFF, Lauder, and Givaudan here purely as theoretic proxies.) What this means is that these are twenty-first-century companies operating under medieval business practices, the emperor has no clothes, everyone knows it, and no one will admit it.
Ellena was very much of two minds about this. He was punctilious about the rigorous secrecy of his formulae, a firm believer in and emotional adherent to this tenet of the perfume industry creed. This despite the fact that if you asked him, most of the time he would also tell you quite directly that he recognized the secrecy to be bluff. If you asked him at still other times, you could get a different answer. It depended on how he chose to see it at that moment. It was a small cognitive dissonance, but he argued some of it away and some of it he just shrugged his shoulders and accepted.
He did have one intellectual counter: His argument was that you could keep formulae secret because the gas chromatograph could be fought and, he would tell you, he had figured out how to fight it. He argued—others made this claim as well—that he and a few of the truly talented perfumers had become adept cryptographers, loading red herrings into their formulae, secret codes to screw up the analytical machines.
Essentially the secret codes were naturals, and the naturals were used as codes because they were so complicated. Put a synthetic in your formula, and you’d have added exactly one molecule. Shoot the juice, and on the readout the lab tech would see, for example:
dihydrojasmonate. (Very simple.)
But naturals are phenomenally complex. Rose absolutes can contain a thousand molecules. Put in a bit of rose, and on the lab tech’s readout he’ll see:
neryl acetate, a-terpineol, n-heptadecane, geranyl acetate, citronellol, nerol, n-octadecane, geraniol, benzyl alcohol, nonadecane + 1-nonadecene, phenylethyl alcohol, methyl eugenol, eugenol, farnesol … (And this is just the tiniest proportion of the immense list.)
Add naturals, and you multiplied the complexity logarithmically: The molecules would go on for pages. How did Ellena use this simple fact to encode his formulae, his trick to confuse the machines? Simple: Slip subperceptible doses of naturals into the perfumes. He could add a tiny amount of ylang-ylang essence from the Comoros, and he didn’t change the smell of the perfume at all—for the consumer, it might as well not be there—but the mass spec picked it up, and the machine saw hundreds upon hundreds of molecules flooding through, all of which it faithfully reported. Do that a few times, a tiny bit of jasmine, a tiny bit of violet leaf, molecules piled on top of molecules spilling onto molecules, and the mess would be spectacular. It was the same principle of packing into a single missile ten fake nuclear warheads along with one real one: Midflight the missile spat the warheads into the air, and the radar registering the rapidly incoming blips had no idea which of the ten was actually armed.
But the counter to his counter, which a technical perfumer gave me when I asked him about coding, was: “That’s fine. He can encode his formulae by adding red herrings, but the problem is, first—and Jean-Claude may or may not acknowledge this, but that’s his choice—that the machines are getting smarter and smarter. Second, if you put in a complex rose at a subolfactory dose only to confuse the machine, by definition the amounts are tiny. You can follow those minuscule percentages. It slows me down a little, that’s all. Trace amounts of things that I can pretty much tell they’re only in there as decoys?” He shrugged. “It’s fine in theory, but is Jean-Claude such a wizard that he can figure out how to permanently throw both me and the mass spec off the trail? Perhaps. He’s smart. But I doubt it. People like to say, ‘Oh, I can fool the machines,’ but I haven’t seen it much. IFF can code a Dior fragrance with trace naturals, but Dior can hire me, and I can eyeball the readouts, figure out which part is coded junk, adjust for the background noise, and simply wipe it out.”
If it is essentially impossible to keep them secret anymore, there is a second, complementary reason for the fear of revealing formulae. It’s another bizarre legal anachronism of the business: No one has contracts. One of the Big Boys’ marketing guys once said to me flatly, “We own one of Givenchy’s juices; we’ve made it for several years. But because our operational practices are so anachronistic we actually have no legal contract with Givenchy—or, more precisely, with LVMH, which owns Givenchy—that protects our exclusive legal right to manufacture this formula. Instead we just keep it secret. Except that we and they and everyone know that everyone has shot our juice and that everyone else has the formula for this perfume, or at least that they’ve got 99 percent of it.
“If we really wanted to protect ourselves, we’d have a contractual relationship saying only we can legally produce this formula, and Givenchy can only buy it through us, but no one on our side has the balls to ask Givenchy and Lauder and L’Oréal for that. We just pretend everything actually makes sense and hope they will too.” He turned his hands palms up and shook them, once. “We got nothing. Fucked-up business.”
The problem is actually worse than he described it. Even if L’Oréal gave Firmenich (say) such a contract for an Armani scent, were L’Oréal ever to decide to have the juice made cheaper by Takasago, it could have a Takasago perfumer just change .I percent of the formula, and were Firmenich to sue—which it never in a million years would—L’Oréal would simply say to the judge, “Hey, the formulae are different.” The change would be done in such a way that the consumer couldn’t smell the difference, the judge would back L’Oréal, and L’Oréal would sell the cheaper Takasago-made formula and make more money. As one of them said to me, “Moral of the story: Intellectual ownership doesn’t protect squat.” This is one reason they walk on eggshells.
They shoot the new ones pretty quickly these days, more or less the moment they hit the market. One day I was in a perfumer’s office discussing the use of a particular synthetic I like. The funny thing about it is that this molecule manages to have a different effect in different perfumes, and the perfumer and I were looking at five formulae that contained it, comparing percentages in each. He mentioned that another perfume, just launched, also contained a pretty healthy dose of the stuff, “but they haven’t shot it yet,” he said. He frowned. “Wait.” Hit a few keys, peered at the screen. “Yeah,” he said, “it just launched on Friday; they’ll probably shoot it Wednesday; I’ll let you know.”
The perfumers each choose how they will behave with me. I was looking at formulae with one, and she took a piece of paper and carefully covered her screen to hide the internal price column. But then I spent an afternoon with another perfumer at the same company, and he just shoved the screen in my direction and we started working. He said, “Obviously you’re not going to screw me or my company.” And obviously I’m not. I’m neither stupid nor malicious. There is no point to that.
Because of all of this, when I started this beat for The Times and began to report on formulae and the synthetics in them, though I didn’t realize it immediately, the industry viewed me as a threat. One incident illustrated it for me. I was establishing with a Big Boy what we were calling “guidelines,” i.e., good playground behavior, what would be on and off the record, etc. They definitely wanted me to write about their perfumes, and their work (after all, their job is creating the formulae and making the scents, and they’re justifiably proud of them; the brands just think up cool names, stick on pretty labels, and market the stuff). And yet at the same time the whole thing made them profoundly uneasy because if Armani freaked because I wrote that the latest perfume they’d made for Armani had this or that molecule in it, and if one of their employees had told me about the molecule, Armani could punish them by not sending them its next brief proposal for the next Armani perfume. So I was busy reassuring them and we were going back and forth discussing fact-checking practices and defining journalistic parameters, and their corporate immunological system was busy trying to figure out how to react to me: Was I self or nonself?
They were sending e-mails about this to five different people in various departments. The communications person in New York was negotiating with me, and suddenly I got an e-mail that came from one of the execs in Paris, addressed to her with everyone else cc’ed: “Good job, Carla, keep up, Chandler is difficult to control … let’s all be very careful with him.”
I’ve inadvertently sent e-mails to the wrong person as well. I said so in my reply, and I also said that I was glad to have gotten his e-mail because now we could speak frankly. (A few weeks earlier, I’d gotten a late e-mail from an industry chemist. “Sorry for the delay here,” he’d written, “I’m trying to figure out how dangerous you are.”) Why, I asked, did they need to be so careful? His response came two days later. “Dear Chandler, Nothing personal, be assured, just the usual issue of respecting our customers’ communication. We have had issues in the past, believe me, with customers reacting negatively at what we have been saying to journalists … I remember a lot of ‘dramas’… Therefore we avoid to speak about our customers’ products, by experience.”
I had to learn that were I to write a piece with a Big Boy’s participation about, say, a Ralph Lauren perfume, and if the slightest detail appeared that the Ralph Lauren PR department hadn’t itself vetted, such as, say, that allyl amyl glycolate played a significant role in the new Lauren launch, then Ralph Lauren would go ballistic. This despite the fact that the innovative use of this molecule is (oh yeah) both true and what is interesting and substantive about the perfume. But the perfume industry shuns substance like the plague, and they are saddled with a lie of their own creation that undergirds perfume’s most fundamental marketing platform. The Ralph Lauren PR people want you to write that Ralph “created” his perfume. You, however, know the truth, that perfumers created it, that Lauren’s creatives managed the process, and he himself smelled a few iterations, maybe, in some meeting at the very end of the process and said “Yeah fine,” and that was it. So—forget even the synthetics and formulae for a moment—just the fact that I wrote about the perfumers freaked them out. It freaked out the perfumers too, a little, which seemed crazy: The perfumers were the story, as far as I was concerned.
I first met one of SJP’s perfumers, Laurent Le Guernec, at a large business dinner a few nights after my piece on Parker came out in The Times. Some of his friends had told him, “Hey, Laurent, you’re in The New York Times!” He hadn’t believed it (“Allez! My name?”), he’d gone and looked and been amazed to see it, and he came up and shook my hand and said he appreciated it. I was amazed he was amazed. It made me angry, not at Le Guernec but at the industry. Here’s this guy, he’s the creator. And they keep him in a cage, in the back, in the dark.
In the “dream” version of perfume, marketers tell the public that perfumes have “notes of caramel and blueberry,” which simply means, since there are no natural caramel or blueberry perfumery raw materials (it’s neither technically possible nor financially viable to distill them), that the perfumers have just created these scents (perfumers call them accords, not notes, which is a term for public consumption). You can create the scent of caramel with 3-hydroxy-4,5-dimethyl-2(5H)-furanone. If you take that molecule and add a small amount of ethyl butyrate, ethyl valerate, and phenethyl acetate, you get a nice fresh garden berry that would work great in an Escada launch. God forbid the public knew it.
Explaining a jet engine or the wing of a 787 doesn’t destroy the awesome beauty of flight. It doesn’t break the dream. It does the opposite. The more you understand of science, the more you marvel at the magic of reality, and creating the dream is not the same as perpetuating ignorance. It is the opposite: taking people inside, letting them see behind the scenes, showing them how it all works. To the degree to which its public discourse aligns with the truth about the construction of its perfumes, Estée Lauder is always on surer, safer, more solid ground. This is, pretty much, the fundamental political observation of the twentieth century; it is one of the more obvious economic lessons drawn from ideological, antimarket socialist economies where both economic forces and the public relations surrounding them were divorced from the reality of consumer instincts. Lauder’s old public relations policy, in which the perfumer was never to be mentioned and Mrs. Lauder was presented in some vague, inchoate way as sitting in her kitchen pouring raspberry ketone into dihydrojasmonate, is from a different era. The paradigm is antiquated.
I would suggest that it is also commercially ineffective. In fact, probably counterproductive. Perfume sales have been flat for years; the perfume industry has ferociously resisted allowing consumers behind the curtain. I have seen their formulae. Lauder formulae, Hilfiger formulae. The point is not formulae. The point is that decades ago every other industry started taking their consumers behind the curtain, and we’re fascinated by everything from how Warner Brothers makes superheroes fly on screens to how Toyota makes its cars, Frank Gehry his buildings, presidential election machines their candidates. The perfume industry alone remains walled off like a gulag.
Millions are fascinated by the process by which designers like Todd Oldham cut, sew, design, and agonize their fall collections into existence, but the great creative minds at Yves Saint Laurent and Jean Paul Gaultier and Dior, with the collective brilliance of a single mollusk at low tide, have intuited that with perfume—No. Here is an industry suffocating itself on the most immense pile of public relations shit human civilization has ever produced, a literal mountain of verbiage about “the noble materials, symbol of eternal feminine beauty, addictive notes of Cocoa Puffs, she can’t wait to taste him like a Hershey’s kiss, Cleopatra wore this, it has notes of distilled wild all-natural Martian fungus harvested by French virgins on the third moon of Pluto.” The lies pile up on other lies, they generate a poisoned river of vapid crap the marketers try to pass off as “information,” and the brands have no clue that their public relations approach is about fifty years out of date. Reading anything they put out on their perfumes is like reading a combination of Kafka, only less creative, and Pravda circa 1985. Zero interest. There is almost no recognition that the enforced lack of knowledge—this gaping void of nothingness about what their products actually are, who makes them, and what’s in the things—is creating boredom and disinterest. The perfume industry is choking itself to death on its vacuum.
Look at the sales figures.
The taboos are the problem. One of these is against publishing perfume formulae. So here is a perfume formula.
My friends send me formulae; I keep them carefully in a subfolder on my hard drive. I have the formulae for Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue, Hermès’s Ambre Narguilé, Ralph Lauren’s Romance, Estée Lauder’s Beyond Paradise, and so on. I have the formula for Cartier’s Déclaration because an industry friend heard I was writing about Ellena—it’s his juice—and sent it to me “afin que tu puisses connaître sa patte,” so you can get to know his style. Some I don’t have anymore because they were sent to me on the condition that I look at them for my personal interest and delete them. One of these was for Un Jardin sur le Nil. A friend sent it to me just after the launch but asked me not to keep it, so I read through it—a few surprises, but most of it I knew from what Ellena himself had told me—and deleted it.
So this formula. It is for a hugely successful commercial luxury perfume. It’s a feminine, it’s from a house named for an iconic French designer, and it is in my view one of the most beautiful perfumes ever made. I got it from a friend who shot the perfume in a lab, so it is not the original, but it is probably 98 percent+ of the original on a molecule-to-molecule comparison, and I’d bet 100 percent of the original in terms of smell perception. Technically it is expertly done, with excellent diffusion and excellent persistence on skin, seamlessly built. As for the aesthetics, it is a wonderfully ripe, fruity, full scent with great volume, smooth and strong as a swimmer’s naked back and as self-assured and direct as the gaze of an African woman.
The thirty-three materials—more or less the average number—are listed alphabetically, and volume is indicated in parts per formula totaling 100.
allyl amyl glycolate 10% |
0.40 |
Ambrettolide |
1.10 |
bergamot Italie |
3.00 |
cardamome Guatemala |
0.30 |
carvone Laevo 10% |
0.10 |
cassis base 345B |
9.10 |
cis 3 hexenol 10% |
1.30 |
cis—3—hexenyl acetate 10% |
0.40 |
damascone beta 10% |
0.50 |
dimethyl benzyl carbinyl butyrate |
0.30 |
18.5 |
|
ethyl aceto acetate |
0.90 |
ethylene brassylate |
30.4 |
fleur d’oranger F175SAB |
0.20 |
geraniol |
0.50 |
geranium bourbon |
0.40 |
geranyl acetone 10% |
0.40 |
grapefruit |
0.50 |
Hedione high cis |
8.90 |
helional |
0.90 |
ß-ionone |
1.00 |
lemon Italian |
0.90 |
linalool |
1.30 |
linalyl acetate |
1.20 |
magnolan |
3.30 |
methyl pamplemousse |
0.50 |
mousse synthétique 10% |
0.20 |
nerolidol |
5.60 |
phenoxy ethyl iso butyrate |
0.30 |
phenyl ethyl alcohol |
2.00 |
reseda body 10% |
0.10 |
Sandiff |
5.30 |
tuberose base |
0.20 |
|
100.00 |