WHEN ELLENA’S DAUGHTER, Céline, was seventeen, one day in the car as he was driving her somewhere in Grasse, she said, “Voilà, Papa, I want to do this métier.” She wanted to be a perfumer.
Ellena was quiet for a moment and then said, “Think about it.” She would speak about it from time to time. When she brought it up again at nineteen, he knew she would not be convinced otherwise.
Céline’s decision left her father decidedly ambivalent, principally because of the psychological difficulties of the life. For every brief he won, there were dozens lost, and each of those was a creative work that died. It was often agonizing. Céline herself would recount later the impact it had on her as a girl seeing her father and grandfather returning home battered after having lost a project. JeanClaude would struggle months with juices to sit in meetings and be told, “What the hell did you think you were doing?” And “What is this crap?” And, concisely, as a dismissal from the room under many pairs of eyes, “This thing you made—” (a curt, derisive motion) “it’ll never sell.” They gave the briefs to other perfumers. His daughter watched the fallout. All the brilliant, labored-over ideas he had, the precious works of art that were killed, all the scents he’d borne, then lost, gathering dust unpublished in his notebooks. For a period of time, she knew, he took pills to help him sleep.
“In this profession,” says Céline, “people don’t talk about it. No one talks about it. But I’ve seen it. In your head you think: ‘What will I say if they don’t like it? What will I reply? Because I have to win this brief. I have to. What must I do to win?’ You submit your scent, this scent you’ve worked so hard on, slaved over. People put the touche under their nose. And they can be terrible. Terrible. They throw your juice on the ground; they sneer; they take your perfume and throw it across the room.”
A few days later Ellena said to her, “You want to be a perfumer. OK, you will be a laborantine, a lab tech, at Givaudan over the summer.” (He was chef parfumeur there.) She worked for him and for other perfumers, weighing their formulae. “I cried,” she says. She bursts out laughing at the memory. “The very first project, which a woman perfumer gave me, was to weigh a very old formula. There were almost three hundred materials. An experienced laborantine would have spent an entire morning on it. It took me three days. I made mistakes everywhere, too many milliliters of something, or I put in the wrong material. I finally went to see the perfumer, and I told her I’d ruined it, and she scolded me very severely, and I went into the bathroom and cried. I found it so unjust, so difficult.”
She adds, “I never told Jean-Claude. He must know. But we never talked about it. I just gritted my teeth and worked. I was too proud.” She stops, smiles, says, “I am too proud.”
She saw perfumers forgotten, pushed aside all the time. “There are terrible periods where you have nothing to give, no inspiration; you sell nothing; everything you do is rejected. I’ve seen many perfumers debut and then so many disappear. The profession eats you, grinds you down.”
If he was somewhat wary of her having chosen this life, his advent at Hermès gave him an opportunity to help her through it. Ellena had, with a designer friend, created a tiny niche perfume house called The Different Company, for which he had created all the juices—four of them—and when he accepted Gautier’s offer, he and the designer had had a brief discussion, then announced that the new in-house perfumer would be his daughter, Céline Ellena. Along with a perfume house, Céline inherited three things from her father: her looks—though Ellena and his wife, Susannah, have donated an exact fifty-fifty split there; her face broadcasts with amazing fidelity her father’s slightly closed, slightly dark Mediterranean handsomeness and her mother’s open, clear Celtic features—her talent, and a capacity rare among perfumers for talking about perfume. Like his, her words are deliberately but not laboriously chosen, the sentences fluid and given a subtle polish.
When Céline was announced for the position, there was the usual less-than-charitable speculation among perfumers about the ratio of her talent to her name. Then in 2004 she produced for the collection Jasmin de Nuit, Night Jasmine, which is a deeply solid example of the best of its category (floral), and, two years later, Sel de Vetiver, Vetiver Salt, which is, arguably, the very best of its (unclassifiable). It is an extraordinary perfume.
I called Céline one afternoon when she was at home in Paris to talk about the creation of Sel, and the following is not far from a word-for-word transcript of what she said. “Jasmin de Nuit was a wink to my father, who loves jasmine. I used the scent of the jasmine we have at our house in Grasse. Sel de Vetiver, on the other hand, was born from a dinner I had in Paris and a carafe of water I drank there. A Frenchwoman of Algerian origin named Ferouz Alhali, she loves Africa, has traveled there quite a bit, and I was at dinner at her house, and she served cool Paris tap water in a carafe. But she’d put an herb stalk in it to macerate, a piece of vetiver root. She had seen them use these roots in water like this in Africa, and she’d brought a few back. She actually didn’t know what it was. She said, ‘I brought it back from Africa, and everyone drinks it and enjoys it.’ I drank and ate, I went home, and days later I found the taste of this water anchored in my memory. This was four or five years ago. I had finished Jasmin de Nuit, and we were thinking about new ideas. I decided I wanted to do a perfume that spoke about salt. There are many sweet perfumes. None salt. I didn’t want marine notes. I had in mind simply crystals of salt, sel de Guérrande, from a region in Bretagne, one of the best salts in the world. I understood that this water I’d drunk at Ferouz’s apartment, which I now was making at my own house with the Paris tap water—the salt was the thing that created the link between the tap water and the vetiver.
“Paris water comes from natural springs beneath the city, and the taste of the water changes depending on which arrondissement you live in.” (Paris is divided into twenty sections called arrondissements.) “The water in Montmartre, the ninth arrondissement, is particularly good. In the first, tenth, fourteenth, and fifth, slightly less, although still good. It’s not particularly salty, although when it’s very hot I find the water becomes saltier, and in winter I find it more mineral, which is a better taste. The trick was going to be finding the scent of salt, which is very abstract because salt is a taste, not a smell, although when volatilized we can smell it. I asked JeanClaude, ‘What is the odor of salt for you?’ I asked other people. And every time, depending on the people, I got different answers. People confused the odor of the sea and the taste of salt. I didn’t want sea. Or ozone. For me, salt is the taste of skin. When you’ve perspired, or when you swim in the sea and the water evaporates and you have the salt still on your skin, that is the smell. La saumure, when you put olives or anchovies in salt to conserve them. And cabbage, they used to conserve cabbage on ships with salt. I wanted to find some natural materials that were a little bit forgotten, used by perfumers in the generation of my grandfather, Pierre Ellena, who was also a perfumer, grassois. He was born in Italy of a family who were probably Greek; they immigrated to France in the 1920s as manual labor in the flower harvests. He often used an essential oil of la livèche. He started as a worker in a Grasse distilling factory, and he climbed the ranks bit by bit to become a perfumer.
“I’m a perfumer at Charabot, a perfumery materials maker. It’s still a family-owned company after two hundred years, and Charabot specializes in natural materials. I have a studio with a small team in Paris, but the main factory and the headquarters are in Grasse. I went there and looked on the shelves of the factory, and there were all sorts of materials that were literally gathering dust. I smelled mousse de chêne, oak moss, which has an algaelike smell, but it wasn’t right, and besides it’s well known. There was a material that smells of nuts, and I wrote it down in my little notebook that I always keep with me, but it wasn’t right either. I saw the livèche, and I didn’t know what it was. I smelled it, and I thought, That’s it … Livèche smells very spicy, of curry, and pickles. And above all it smells of la saumure: salt, water, and food. It smells of skin that has taken salt. To make my salt scent, I took the livèche and I added synthetic salicylates: benzyl-, methyl-, amyl-, hexyl-, cis—3—hexenyl salicylates. I also used prenyl salicylate, ethyl salicylate, and phenethyl salicylate, which smell very fat and very mineral. It’s those that give the perfume’s rhythm. If you use only naturals, a perfume is very heavy and inert. Synthetics give the rhythm to a perfume, le creux et le plein, the empty and the full coherently together, the rounded whole. The synthetic does”—she sings a single tone and holds it for a moment, looking straight ahead. “Naturals bring light and infidelity. Naturals have several personalities, they tell you different stories, sharp, low, fruit, shade, bright, and they change with time and their mood. The natural does”—in a clear, sure voice she sings several notes, “Dah … dah …,” some higher, some lower. “When you use naturals, you put in a little bit of synthetic, because with only naturals, the perfume is très bavard, talkative, full of little stories it tells. Like when you open your window and you have Second Avenue, all that noise.” (She’d asked where I lived, and I’d told her that my apartment was on Second Avenue and that I was closing my window because the June traffic was too loud.) “When you put in synthetics, it becomes an ordered series of sounds; they come together in a key, with rational tones.
“And then a few other materials to trouble the perfume, because a perfume must not be perfect. It must have small imperfections that give it tension. Tiny lights that glint. Which is why I put in a touch of ylang-ylang, which puts in fat, geranium for its lovely metallic and its tiny taste of water. I do very short formulae. Then a natural orris resinoid, what is left over from the highest-quality iris root butter, which has an excellent odor of salted caramel. And you’re going to laugh, but it smells a bit of popcorn, but no vanilla, no sugar. I used it for the gentleness. It’s a patina, like an old well-polished wood. It’s heat, actually.”
A child cried in the background over the phone, and I heard Céline gently shut a door. “There are synthetics that give the scent of big, gray clouds and of rain.” She thought about this for a moment.
Recently, her son Enguerrand asked his mother for the smell of strawberry with mint. “Like many French children, he loves the scent of strawberry. It’s the reference gustatif of childhood in France.” Then he asked her for popcorn, and when she gave it to him he found she’d done it poorly. Then he asked for the scent of spring. “He doesn’t know,” she says, “that I used to ask these scent stories of my father.”
She turned back to the perfume. “I used two essences of vetiver, both from Haiti. Both are very expensive. One is traditional; the other is une fraction, which means it is a piece of an essential oil that one has isolated from the original whole with a machine that slices apart the molecules. It’s a molecular distillation. I mixed the two until I obtained exactly the odor of vetiver I wanted. Usually vetiver is quite harsh, it smells of toile de jute—the jute sacks you put potatoes in—plus fresh, raw peanuts.”
I told her that I don’t like vetiver. I’ve tried and tried. But I find Sel de Vetiver essentially perfection. “The vetiver is a pretext,” she said simply. “The vetiver here simply helps me to speak of salt. I wanted to talk about salt. Ce n’est pas la peine de parler d’une histoire que beaucoup avant toi avec du talent ont déjà racontée.” It’s not worthwhile to tell a story that many with talent before you have already told.
From her grandfather, Céline had learned to smell. He would hold her hand and take her into the garden, and they would lean into the flowers. From Jean-Claude, she learned the notion of time. “I am by temperament very impatient, and he taught me about putting time into my perfume. And something else. One day I gave him one of my formulae. He studied it for a moment. He handed it back to me and said, “Ne pas faire plaisir à son ego et faire plaisir à la formule.” Don’t please your ego; please the formula. He handed the formula back to her. He hadn’t mentioned a single material.
She wrote it down, and she still has the piece of paper.
On June 14, Ellena went back to Paris for meetings with Gautier and Dubrule. He’d brought up the four new essais, AJ1, AJ2, AJ3, AJ4, the next iterations of the perfume, which he’d done in Grasse. At the moment he was hanging out near Dubrule’s office in Pantin, smelling them from time to time “to live them” and plotting his strategy.
He hadn’t actually decided if he was going to show them to Véronique Gautier, whose schedule no one could quite figure out, and to Hélène Dubrule, who was (possibly) leaving for New York the next morning. “You have to know how to wait,” he said, thinking it over, and added, “That’s my psychology of the bazaar.”
The two executives had been sending him signals. Ellena found that the signals were helpful—and he found that they weren’t. This was par for the course in the dynamics of the creative director-marketer-perfumer relationship. Gautier had recently called him in Grasse—she’d been smelling AG2, thinking about it in Paris—and told him to “raise the volume a bit.” He had a few methods for doing this that he was mulling over as he sat in the corridor. He could go a bit more into woods by using a powerful synthetic called Karanal. The problem in his view was that wearing Karanal was like slicing your arm open with a knife, olfactorily speaking. Or he could go to the fruits and get a neon fruit, but he really didn’t want to do that. “They stink. Or they can.” Oily, greasy, sticky. So, what then.
There were flowers he could try, lay down a floral track on top of the green/fresh, mix in a bass line in narcissus or hyacinth, but … well, they’d have to be neutral flowers adapted to the perfume rather than forcing it to adapt to them. Jasmine? No, he’d be, as he put it, “telling a different story.” So “floral abstract, maybe?” he said, looking morose. He brightened for a moment. Maybe an angle starting with lilial, a synthetic watery floral. Maybe a floral-wood accord. He seemed hesitant and pensive. “But I’m not worried. For the moment I’m floating, I’m smelling. Maybe the answer is already in the perfume. Often you just need to turn up something already in there.”
But Ellena was dealing with something else. He was well aware that beneath these four vials lay a vast, difficult question they would have to answer, relatively soon: What was this thing called an Hermès perfume? If you are Stella McCartney, you do not worry about history and tradition. You launch Stella, which is a solid-enough piece of fashion perfumery, a smooth, delectable darkish rose that is slightly powdery, and you are blissfully unburdened by a century or so of a house’s history, that history’s aesthetic, and how to put that aesthetic in that fragrance. If you are the Olsen twins, you meet your agent at the licensee’s corporate offices, sign the contract, and walk out of the room, and your licensee eventually launches two scents that smell like car exhaust on Tenth Avenue, scents with no persistance, no sillage, no beauty, and no reference to anything except its creative team’s attempting to ride some vapid pop cultural pulse. They do the marketing for you, and you cash the checks.
If you are Hermès, these solutions are anathema. It is, said Ellena in his corridor, a privilege and a burden to be Hermès. Regarding the burden, Gautier knew all the criticisms, and Ellena knew what people said: That Hermès’s perfume collection had no unified signature, that nothing linked these scents to this house. That Hermès had never really put the same effort into its fragrances as it did into its other products. That Hermès had flirted with fragrances but had never fully committed.
To this, of course, Gautier had a reply, and the reply was Ellena. He was the commitment. But he was conscious that this almost two-century history was now sitting on his shoulders, and it was he, not Gautier nor anyone else, who ultimately had to find the solution to the question of what made a perfume an Hermès perfume.
Arguably the strongest signature of any collection currently on the market is owned by Armani. L’Oréal, which owns Armani’s fragrance license, has done a positively German job of precision engineering every single launch under the brand—from 1995’s massive bestselling feminine Acqua di Giò (created by the two legendary perfumers Edouard Fléchier and Françoise Caron) to the huge 2002 hit Armani Mania Pour Homme (by the young wizard Francis Kurkdjian) to the slightly robotic Black Code. Each time at bat, L’Oréal has ensured that the perfumer weaves in the same filaments. Brand unity. You smell the links subtly but distinctively, not as materials but as style, the juice olfactorily finished in that instantly recognizable matte, sleek, silver-gray Armani polish. An aluminum carapace, one part light to two parts dark, and the perfumers manage to convey it in smell. Even the brightest Armani scents you view as if through sunglasses.
I don’t like the Armani aesthetic particularly, and I never have. (For some reason I believe in Armani-ness in the clothes, where the sleekness translates into elegance, but not in the perfume, where it strikes me as freezing-cold modernism.) But I admire it intellectually, and I respect how Armani’s creative director, Karine Lebret, has hired and ridden herd on the perfumers, extracting from them the technical mastery necessary to embed into each juice a strand of Armani’s DNA, this scent signature, as invisible and powerful as a silicon locater chip. From a marketing perspective, it’s genius. Other brands have, as brands, less coherence. Yves Saint Laurent’s Paris is one of the most gorgeous and elegant perfumes it is possible to buy, arguably the paradigmatic rose, glorious and luxurious and of excellent quality, and Yves Saint Laurent’s Baby Doll is also brilliant, arguably the paradigmatic scent of helium-induced laughter and ketamine pinkness, territory the Fiorucci scents pioneered in commando boots and tutus, but what does Paris have to do with Baby Doll? And—strictly speaking—what does Baby Doll have to do with Yves Saint Laurent? Individual scent by scent, I would in almost all cases prefer an Yves Saint Laurent perfume over an Armani, but when it comes to the unified aesthetic, the brand signature, Armani is spotless.
When the signatures work, it is, generally, because they have been carefully engineered. The Escadas have a well-developed, palpable signature because their licensee, P&G, does an excellent job of having the perfumer place the same olfactory thumbprint onto each Escada scent, a sort of neon-and-disco-ball party-crazed Barcelona-Eurotrash-girls-gone-wild aesthetic. It works beautifully in Ibiza Hippie, a scent that incarnates the smell of the taut tanned neck of the girl at the beach that everyone wants to dance with—sea air, sweet beach foods, cotton candy, plus the traces of suntan lotion in her sweat. And less beautifully in the hideous Escada Magnetism for Men, a mixture of Papaya Kool-Aid and Brut by Fabergé. Estée Lauder (which owns the license) has kept a similar firm hand on the controls at Tommy Hilfiger, whose signature is a quintessentially American openness that feels both comfortingly familiar and (reasonably) avant-garde.
Coty—and Kenneth Cole, per his licensing contract with the company—makes millions off the Cole signature, mostly in the Midwest where the Cole scents are wildly popular with middle-and lower-class straight guys who think they are buying the olfactory equivalent of a pair of Kenneth Cole shoes but wind up smelling like fluorocarbons. I smell Kenneth Cole, I think of the hole in the ozone layer. A Coty executive once said to me, “You can’t argue with money.” Yes and no: Kenneth Cole scents smell like air-conditioning vents.
The deepest pit of hell, however, is reserved for the suits slaving over the Hugo Boss brand in the dark corners of Procter & Gamble, which owns the house’s perfume license and creates its scents. In the St. Petersburg airport, where I once spent an hour waiting for a flight to Amsterdam, they had every Hugo Boss. P&G has created for Boss a fluorescent-lit polyurethane signature that is as clear as it is repellent. The fact that P&G sells more Hugo Boss—scented products to men on the planet than almost any other brand contradicts the economic theory of the Invisible Hand (which is supposed to create a certain logic) and confirms Veblen at his most bitterly cynical. I know someone who believes that Hugo Boss scents constitute proof that God does not exist. I would disagree—atheism is a rational response to the chaos of life, while the rational response to any perfume by Hugo Boss is to run, screaming, into someone’s parking lot—but the scents certainly do make you think of Agent Orange. Here are a few of them.
Soul. This smells like the very good, very interesting John Varvatos except that everything good and interesting and creative has been leached with chlorine from its desiccated corpse. Given that it has none, calling this smell Soul is like calling Sean John’s hackneyed, derivative masculine cliché Innovative: It is an Orwellian use of the English language. This is the chemical reek of deep-space travelers frozen in goo in suspended animation.
Hugo Boss. Huh?
Edition. Grout cleanser.
Intense. Nice, sort of, if you don’t really want to smell of anything at all, until it fades into complete obscurity in about four minutes and disappears into some dimly lit service corridor below an anonymous sewage treatment plant.
Natural Spray. This scent makes us ask what alien species does the marketing for Boss. The brand has a phenomenally irritating tradition of not naming any of its scents coherently, or of intentionally obscuring the name because apparently on this species’ home planet “obscure” is what passes for “cool.” (Hey, what’s this? Who knows.) (Also, most of the juices look like frozen green goo.) As far as I can figure out after a close perusal of the packaging, Natural Spray is this thing’s name. It could be sold in the local drugstore next to the disposable diapers. Some experts think aluminum induces Alzheimer’s. This stuff smells like aluminum—experience it by holding under your nose a cheap metal spoon with traces of dishwasher detergent chemicals. After you smell it, you may desperately order an eight-course all-aluminum tasting menu with an aluminum chaser in an attempt to induce a case of Alzheimer’s sufficient to forget the smell. At the same time, to describe this perfume is to render it more important than it should be. It is nothing.
Elements. A cologne most appropriately worn by electrical appliances. It should be called Eau de Refrigerator Condenser Coil.
Number One. Fascinating. If a cat had morning breath, then ate kibble, then licked its anus, then licked your hand, and if you then smelled your hand, it would smell like this. (Number One what, incidentally? The number one nuclear meltdown in a paint plant? Or maybe the one that’s not number two. If the name of this perfume is not Vile and Toasty, it is only due to the lack of the appropriate application of genius in the Hugo Boss marketing department.)
Woman. This is a scent for a woman who has no taste and absolutely no interest in having any. This is for a woman who loves a man who wears Vile and Toasty. She lives in an apartment without light or furnishings or running water or, perhaps, oxygen, and sleeps inside an aluminum container in a frozen green goo.
In a sense, you have to admire P&G’s Teutonic monochromaticist steamroller. It’s able to stand up to anything. That thickness of armor plating demands respect. And perfume-as-amphibious-assault-vehicle is an interesting aesthetic (Natural Spray is more of a flame-thrower), but it’s about as pleasant and as subtle as Kevlar. The fact that Boss and P&G have managed to wring such utterly wretched products from such considerable talents as Olivier Polge, Alberto Morillas, and Dave Apel merely speaks to the iron-clad strength of the Boss signature. The creativity of these estimable perfumers is simply ground out of them under the steel fist of some executive with the soul of a creature from a Bosch painting, who is himself just driven by the market even as he drives the market toward the core of a nuclear reactor. The brand’s signature destroys everything before it like the clouds of nerve gas that drifted silently and murderously across the trenches of World War I, poisoning every living thing they touched.
By contrast, the central aspect of Jo Malone’s scent aesthetic is, in my opinion, the quality of light. When I mentioned this to her over breakfast at a Manhattan restaurant, she said, “Hm!” Then she paused, considering my remark. “I’ve never thought about it as such.”
Really? I said, surprised.
“Well, no …” And then, half laughing, half in irritation, “Well for godssake, Chandler, don’t look at me as if I was an idiot!”
Sorry.
“I mean,” she said a bit uncertainly, “it’s very interesting …”
And I was thinking, But isn’t it totally clear? Malone’s work is criticized as “aromatherapy” and praised as “contemporary.” Her genius in either case is the fingerprint she leaves on each scent, a marvelous quality that is not weightlessness—it’s something much more startling: Weight that floats, hovers in the air. Solidity shot through with light. The classic Hermèses are thick palpable fabrics, perfume as rich, opaque silk weighty on your body; Malone’s are like the revolutionary new-technology translucent concrete that architects have just begun using, a recipe of glass gravel mixed with optic fibers. When poured, this concrete forms slabs of luminescence, and the outlines of people inside the walls of buildings using it are visible to those outside at night against the glow of the light inside.
Think about Malone’s Amber & Lavender Cologne, the Grapefruit Cologne, the French Lime Blossom. I mentioned to Malone the “glass roof sensation” I feel when I smell her work, and she frowned.
“In my perfumes?”
Yes, yes, all the light, I said, and hesitated; we seemed, suddenly, to have missed each other. I asked her, When you say light, do you mean light, the antonym of heavy, or light as photon radiation?
“Oh,” she said immediately, “the antonym of heavy.”
Ah. I’d been thinking of luminescence, she, of heft. She cocked her head for an instant, pulled a small bottle from underneath the starched white linen tablecloth. “I’m not going to tell you its name,” she said. “It’s our next launch. But you tell me whether you find your glass roof.” She sprayed it on my arm, sat back.
You bring the arm to your nose, and you think, Wait …
What is light to you? This perfume is the scent of the darkness that inhabits the corners of the paintings by the Dutch Masters. You know Rubens’s Sef-Portrait? The rich, rich, purple, luscious dark that surrounds that illuminated head watching you, that bright white collar floating in the warm blackness. Rubens’s dark is not the cold heaviness of the void. It is the deep warmth of all that is there but, simply, unseen. That is this scent. It’s entirely possible: Think of photons, particles with energy and momentum, yet, quixotically, no mass at all. They’re all around us. What is amazing about this fragrance is that it is at once utterly different from Malone’s bright work and, yet (“Oh! the antonym of heavy”), characteristically massless. Jo Malone, queen of light, has created the weightless scent of a photon.
Ellena was thinking about all this. He had to resolve the problem of the Hermès signature by July. He was aware of the views out there.
Over a salad in a sixth arrondissement café, a rather severe Parisian woman long in the industry described Hermès perfumes to me as compact. Handsome. Forbidding. Maîtrisé, masculine, the opposite of fantasy, never, she stated firmly, a Fracas by Piguet, this gloriously over-the-top tuberose, never the mad gourmandise of Mugler’s Angel. They were not easy, these Hermès fragrances, she said, stabbing a fork deep into the flesh of a Bibb lettuce. Not accessible. Not feminine in any common sense. She took a sip of wine, put the glass down decisively, and made two surgical observations: “They”—she meant Hermès—”like animals more than people.” And: “La fragilité n’est pas leur truc.” Fragility is not their thing. Hermès perfumes were almost barricaded; look at 24 Faubourg, she said. “Verouillé à tous les étages.” Every floor locked tight.
If perfumers defended the house—”The Hermès signature is quality,” said one “elegance, good taste, quality, you smell all the expensive ingredients, you see every dollar on the screen”—mere “quality” as an aesthetic left something to be desired. Bacon’s paintings are “quality,” and so are Caillebotte’s, but the signature problem turned on the fact that the eye would never mistake Caillebotte’s gorgeous bourgeois Parisian genius for Bacon’s slide shows of blood-spattered hell, nor either of those for David’s neoclassical clockwork beauty. If Hermès’s and Chanel’s scents were both quality, in a perfect world an Hermès perfume would never be taken for a Chanel, and while consumers expect quality, they hunger for style. And style is, substantially, signature.
There were obvious paths Ellena could follow, but they were not necessarily workable. Hermès was leather. The house began as leather workers making saddles. So perhaps a subtle leather note in every perfume that said, “I am Hermès,” that lent coherence. But if the leather scent in Bel Ami was indeed quintessentially Hermès, did they just renounce the citrus in Orange Verte? And how did you make leather friendly to the twenty-first century without falling into S&M? Ellena had mentioned the leather idea once or twice in passing, but for the moment he was simply eliding the signature question. He, Gautier, and Dubrule had decided that, for the time being, the Hermès signature was to be luxury. A fluid concept, but one would be supposed to know it when one saw it.
Dumas had hired Ellena to implement the signature. Ellena was conscious (the Mona Lisa smile again) of coming aboard the house just behind bad-boy/iconoclast/sexual provocateur Jean Paul Gaultier, whom Dumas had in the fall of 2004 picked as designer of Hermès’s women’s collections. For staid, conservative, very Right Bank Hermès, the Gaultier move was much discussed. “I admired Hermès till they hired Jean Paul Gaultier,” sniffed one doyenne of Paris’s luxury industry. “I was astonished that they took him.” Others saw a savvy and necessary makeover, a move toward le commercial, aka products that actually moved. A young New York fashion editor gushed to me that “Hermès is doing, like, a total Burberry!” (the fading British house had revived spectacularly), but it was a risk, and many in the fashion world were not certain that Hermès should in fact be doing a total Burberry. Here was a house whose products spoke, metaphorically, to Proust’s Madame de Guermantes. Gaultier was more likely to be found chatting with Paris Hilton, who, incidentally, had just come out with her own fragrance—”Your chance to share the magic that is Paris Hilton,” said the press release—the juice built for her by the perfumers James Krivda and Steve DeMercado. That perfume was a perfectly well made, super-commercial neo-luxe scent, but it did not bring to mind words like taste, quality, and artisanal craftsmanship, and Macy’s sold out of it twice before it was even officially launched. To Ellena and Véronique Gautier, this served as a bracing splash of the reality of the harsh new perfume environment in which they were operating. Gautier wanted Ellena to create art, but she wanted the stuff to sell too.
Ellena is actually a bit of a diva about le commercial. “I’m certain that AJ2 will be the most commercial,” he said, then added very quickly, “but I never take a position on the market. I give my opinion on the aesthetic. When they start asking me for a commercial opinion, I start braking with both feet.” Ellena said he only smelled new launches once because he didn’t want “to be influenced by the market.” He might look around for things he could pirate, “but, you know” (this somewhat primly), “there’s not a hell of a lot on the market worth pirating.”
So here he was, sitting in a corridor in Hermès’s offices, smelling his essais. “I’m pretty happy with the sillage in the latest versions,” he remarked. “The problem is the persistance.” He stopped. “But I’ll find the answer.” Stopped. “I hope I’ll find the answer.” Stopped. “I must find the answer.” He smelled. His face went agonized.
He said thoughtfully, “You know, perfumes have a certain threshold in terms of the number of bottles sold, above which no perfume will ever go. Because when it reaches a certain concentration, people start turning against it. It’s not like Coca-Cola. Which billions of people can drink.”
Dubrule and Gautier were, for the moment, still nowhere to be seen. He remained undecided. He looked at the vials. “I still don’t know if I’m going to present them or not.” He considered.
He felt blocked, at moments. Sometimes, he remarked, he would sit at his desk and … nothing. And nothing. He screwed up his face morosely, then broke into a huge smile. “They asked Picasso, ‘What do you do when you’re inspired?’ Picasso said, ‘I work.’ They asked, ‘What do you do when you find yourself blocked creatively?’ Picasso said, ‘I work.’”
He smelled the vials again. “Black skin is the best for perfumes. It retains fragrance much better.”
He smelled them one more time. “Now I like AJ3. The mango. It’s fuller. It fills out better.” He peered at a vial, made a pensive moue. “The problem with AG2 is that it’s too citrus.” He looked subtly stricken.
The next day, on June 15 at 10:00 A.M. in Paris, less than four weeks from the July 10 deadline for finalizing the perfume, Ellena arrived for a meeting at Hermès’s luxurious headquarters at 24, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Hermès’s flagship store sits on the street level, under the headquarters, and down from Chanel, Dior, Missoni, and the Hôtel Costes. It is also a block from the Hôtel Crillon on the place de la Concorde and the relentlessly, aggressively hip Buddha Bar, a restaurant that finds itself, perhaps to its surprise, increasingly barricaded behind the elaborate security measures implemented by the American Embassy directly on the other side of the rue Boissy d’Anglas.
There are usually uniformed military personnel with machine guns in the street here. Due also to the presence of the British Embassy four hundred meters to the right of the store and le Matignon, the French president’s home, a few hundred meters farther from that, this block of the rue du Faubourg may be the most highly militarized superluxury spot on the planet.
The beautiful summer mornings were stretching themselves into a surprisingly major series, and Ellena and Anne-Lise Clément, the project head for perfumes, walked up the narrow sidewalk past Lanvin under blue skies and warm yellow sun, police discreetly everywhere.
It was Ellena’s first meeting in this august place. They arrived at the elegant 23, rue Boissy d’Anglas business entrance, a spacious arch of stone built for eighteenth-century horse-drawn calèches. At Hermès, even the business entrance was relentlessly exquisite. The bright sun made the space inside the stone arch pleasantly dark and cool. The Hermès guard handed them a visitor’s card to fill out. Ellena peered at it. “We need to complete this?”
It wasn’t his words but his manner that made the guard suddenly frown, already shifting gears. “Ah!” asked the guard, a shade more deferentially, “mais vous êtes avec la maison?” But you are with the house? Ellena, just perceptibly, straightened up. He nodded. This was the first connection, and from now on the guard would remember his face. There was, instantly, a complete attitude change, the standard officious French attitude now an attitude of officiousness that included Ellena. “Mais vous montez tout de suite!” said the guard. But you go up immediately!
The sterile fluorescent-lit service corridors inside are identical to those backstage at Saks and Bloomingdale’s, the harsh lighting, the clean, elderly, comforting formica department store floors. A young woman arrived to collect Ellena and Clément, led them inward. They passed for an instant by the store’s back door, glass covered with a black lacquered iron grille (so different from this utilitarian taupe), a view into the lush, rich interior of Hermès filled with the vibrant, bright colors of the towels and plates, the shine of the silver objects, rich leathers. They walked, bumped up a few steps, down a few steps, and were lost in twisting, turning wormholes that disappeared here and there.
Ellena grinned. “This is why things are slow at Hermès. You have to find the right office. You could get lost forever here, you starve inside these tunnels, and they find your body in the spring.” It was a rabbit warren, stairways that communicated in narrow halls. Their guide expertly herded them into an elevator, which sighed upward and stopped, and suddenly, blinking, they emerged into the real backworld of Hermès. Under Paris’s rooftops are breathtakingly lovely ateliers. Old French windows, large panes of glass surrounded by wrought iron, let the blue and yellow light into cool corridors. There was a feeling that everything was silk and beautiful and pure. As they passed one of the ateliers, a lovely young blond woman in an exquisite pale-pink top, a secretary perhaps, was delighting in a small leather-and-cloth bag an Hermès artisan had just turned out. He stood behind his bench, a large, thick, meaty Frenchman torn between gruff restraint and open pride, and basked in her delight as she opened the small gold-colored clasp, felt the inside, closed it again. She swung it around and laughed. Her laughter was like music. He nodded gravely at the bag he’d made.
Ellena and Clément were here for a réunion artistique, a creative meeting to discuss the small illustrated book about their trip to Aswan that would come inside the special prestige box set of Un Jardin sur le Nil. Ellena would write the text, photos by Quentin Bertoux, and Dubrule had decided the box set would include sticks of incense perfumed with Ellena’s Nil scent, so they’d be discussing how to manufacture those as well. Ellena and Clément walked into the meeting room and greeted Fred Rawyler, the tall, thin, serious, fifty-something Swiss German who oversaw the house’s design. Rawyler, elegant and intense, wore glasses and a late nineteenth-century haircut, longish and Beethovenesque. For twenty years he had worked with Hermès. Everyone did double-kiss bises all around. Bertoux, the photographer, walked in, and they complimented him on the current Hermès magazine cover photo. It was an exquisite little girl in the paradigmatic sailor’s dress of childhood, arms extended behind, chin up, and leaning blissfully into a jeté. She was Bertoux’s daughter.
Stéphane Wargnier, head of communications worldwide, arrived last, blew into the room with a big curly mane of hair and a big curly personality. Bises all around again. Everyone sat down at a round table. The offices were pale, pale celadon.
Rawyler lay out the galleys of the book, photos and the text, which Ellena had drafted and they’d then translated—English, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, the alphabets of the various languages like different spices. They talked about the layout, contemplating every millimeter, every detail.
Wargnier: “Remember that Jean-Claude’s text is independent from the photos.”
Ellena, smoothly: “Exactly. It’s its own story.”
Wargnier was wearing his usual unusual clothes, an amalgamation of styles and bright fabrics and layers.
Bertoux: “Jean-Claude sent me some flacons (perfume bottles). We could use images of them to initiate each section.” Icons, basically.
Wargnier (to Ellena): “You sent him the perfume and not us?” Wargnier was in fact joking; he assumed Ellena wouldn’t have.
Ellena looked at him, realizing: “You haven’t smelled the scent?”
There was an instant intake of breath around the room. Ellena’s hand moved toward Clément’s, hesitated, and Wargnier realized and said, “Non!”—almost leaping over the table. He made an impatient gesture: gimme!
Ellena to Clément: “You have it?”
She got out the current draft, AG2.
The room watched in silence as Wargnier sprayed it on. He closed his eyes, waved the arm leisurely under his nose. Someone honked outside on rue du Faubourg, a car passing the British Embassy. He opened his eyes and smiled intently.
Wargnier: “It’s not the opposite of Jardin en Méditerranée.”
Ellena: “It’s the next.”
Wargnier: “It’s truly the second chapter.”
Ellena (smiling): “That’s what I wanted.”
Clément: “Very different, but you recognize the Jardins collection.”
Ellena: “And there’ll be a third chapter, and a fourth.” He said wryly, “The second volume is written by Victor Hugo.”
They were passing the bottle around, everyone spraying. Ellena watched them closely, wearing his Mona Lisa smile. Wargnier was frowning at his wrist, breathing in, out, in from his nose: “And it’s funny,” he said intensely, “because the odor is actually so much more colored than the garden in Aswan. It’s a Rousseau painting. Colors all over.”
Ellena: “Very colored.”
Wargnier: “Jean-Claude, you watch the volume!”
Ellena: “I’m working on it! …”
Wrist still to his nose, Wargnier moved a critical eye over the layouts and photos spread across the table. “Hm. Smelling it, it occurs to me that the packaging design is a bit too demure for the perfume …” He jots down a possible title for the book: Impression du Nil.
Ellena: “How about Nez Fertiti” (Nez means “nose”).
Rawyler: “Quentin, you could do us a great photo there!”
Bertoux: “Introduce me to Fertiti.”
They went over the printout of what Jean-Claude had written. Possible titles for sections: “Les Mangues Vertes.” The Green Mangoes. “Les Saisons.” The Seasons. What was too short, what contradicted what.
Wargnier: “It’s the same format?” He meant the specs on page size and paper.
Clément: “Yes in all dimensions except we can go a bit thicker if we want.”
Rawyler showed them a font he was proposing. Wargnier squinted at it: “That’s going to float a bit.”
They talked about pavés, blocks of text, and the matte versus brilliant textures of paper. Wargnier, smelling his wrist while he listened, said forcefully, “Well, if we go by the perfume, we need brilliant.” (Ellena found this a nice visual way of describing the fragrance, but it directly contradicted Gautier’s latest critique, which he found slightly worrisome.)
Ellena sneezed three times. Wargnier looked at him. “I can turn off the air-conditioning.”
Ellena: “No, no!” Getting out some tissues. “The room is nice and cold.”
They discussed how they should refer to the book. Wargnier suggested bréviaire, then immediately, “But no one knows what a bréviaire is anymore!” (A bréviaire is a small book monks read containing a thought for each day.)
Bertoux: “It’s a story that was in Jean-Claude’s head during the trip.”
Ellena: “No, the story in my head during the trip was, Where are the crocodiles?”
Wargnier looked at Rawyler. “Is the cover a photo of the Nile?”
Bertoux: “The cover!” He paused, then: “Une photo du Nil, non?”
Rawyler, warning them: “You put a photo, you’ve got a tourist guide.”
Wargnier: “A big close-up of Jean-Claude’s nose.” Ellena: “Ah, excellent!”
Rawyler, decisively: “I just see green. Period. And what do we put here?” He meant Ellena’s name on the cover, how to identify him. Wargnier shrugged and said, “Ah, bah, ‘Jean-Claude Ellena, l’Académie Goncourt.’”
Ellena cracked up. The Académie Goncourt is one of France’s most illustrious literary societies.
Wargnier sighed. Leave it for the moment. “It’s starting to take form,” he said. “Not bad!” He went back to his wrist. “It’s a big garden. It’s not some little housewife’s vegetable plot.” Wargnier looked with pride at Ellena, then remembered something. “La mère Gautier, she owes us a dinner to celebrate the arrival of Jean-Claude.” And then he shrugged. “Bah! He’s already here now.”
The packaging of a perfume can be as much an obsession as the juice. “The design of the packaging is an absolutely huge investment,” a French executive said to me. “There’s stock packaging, and if you go that way, you can save some significant costs, it’s actually a good business decision, but people are very sniffy about it. The box for Miracle cost Lancôme maybe $15,000. BPI’s Gaultier boxes are much more expensive.”
Naturally there’s a certain cynicism, and a certain guilt, when more attention is paid to the box than the juice, and Dubrule and Gautier had no intention of committing that sin. Ellena’s elixir was primary. Still, Dubrule would doubtless be producing the most exquisite package possible to surround it. It was her responsibility, and she would be judged on the success of the look she produced.
They’d been searching for the visual signature a scent needs to establish its identity and represent the house. Dubrule had noticed, about five years earlier, that Hermès Tableware had created a collection of porcelain called, coincidentally, Nil Hermès. The motif was lotus leaves in a delicate red-accented, yellow-tinted green. The artist was a woman named Véronique de Mareuil, so Dubrule had asked her to submit a design proposal for both the Nil perfume box in its various sizes and the coffret (the box set that would include the book of Ellena’s text and Bertoux’s photos). They’d demanded certain elements, primarily a white background since that was the way the lotus leaves were presented on the Hermès plates and since, more important, it was strategically important given that the Jardins were now a collection: With white, they’d be able to do individual future designs on the same basic étui.
De Mareuil had done up a proposal, based on her gouaches— opaque watercolors—for the porcelain. After they’d found it a bit large, she had reduced it, but they still weren’t totally satisfied. Perhaps a white lotus flower on the box’s left edge? Maybe she could move the leaves around a bit. Then she did a full mock-up (by hand, which had surprised them), which they had presented to Dumas, and the elegant old gentleman had loved it.
So at 4:15 P.M. on June 8, Dubrule and Clément had had a packaging meeting on the box for Un Jardin sur le Nil. The meeting had taken place in Dubrule’s office, where de Mareuil was presenting the scanned and cleaned-up version, though she had again brought hand-done individual leaves. She was dressed entirely in black, just back from her vacation in Greece (“What a tan!” said Dubrule enviously, “me, I’m white as a sheet”), chic cat-eye glasses, and sandals. She spread her painstakingly painted leaves across the tabletop in Dubrule’s spacious office, then stood back and looked at them, confused. “I didn’t realize this flower was cut.” She frowned. “Was this the same size?”
Clément: “No, we grew that one.”
Hélène Dubrule was wearing a simple summery cotton top and skirt. She was surrounded by the graphics she’d thumbtacked all over her wall: photos of Hermès scarves and the scarf shirts that Jean Paul Gaultier had recently done for the collection. Sketches of purses. Clément was in linen and sandals, sunglasses holding back her shoulder-length, thick dark-blond hair.
De Mareuil: “Now this is great, the side, these three leaves above the Hermès.” She pointed at the word, which had been professionally imprinted on the coffret; it looked, for all intents and purposes, perfect, ready to ship, but all three women saw problems with it.
The sides and back were disproportionate. “Maybe we should keep the proportions here,” suggested Clément, pointing to the back of the coffret, but Dubrule shook her head: “Then we have to cut it off. This stem”—she motioned. De Mareuil followed the motion and noticed something that Autajon Coffrets, the manufacturers, had done with her design: “Ah! See, here? The stem ends inside the box. I love that.”
Dubrule, who hadn’t actually been pointing at that detail: “Let me see? Ah!”
De Mareuil tried to lift one of her leaves, tearing it in half. She glowered at it.
Dubrule: “You have to buy repositionable glue!”
De Mareuil: “Oui, oui, je sais.” Yeah, yeah, I know. She used a ruler to find the center, distributed leaves, moved them lower, marked almost invisible parameters in sharp pencil. They worked efficiently, rapidly, speaking in quiet, focused voices.
De Mareuil found herself struggling to manipulate tiny bits of paper stem, and they burst out laughing. She put a circular lotus leaf with a triangle cut out of it on the box. Laughing: “Mon pauvre dessin!” My poor design.
Clément left the room, came back with a paper mock-up “twilly,” a long thin silk scarf that is a signature Hermès product. Hermès would be making twillies as launch presents for reporters and for the saleswomen to wear when they were selling Nil.
Dubrule raised an eyebrow at de Mareuil: “Twelve cadres.” She meant the number of passes the silk dyers would have to make to produce de Mareuil’s design. She cast an almost involuntary guilty glance at Hermès’s atelier across the street, where many of its products—silk scarves and ties, bags, leather goods—are made. De Mareuil acknowledged (in the breezy, matter-of-fact French manner that never admits fault, particularly where beauty is involved) that this was her fault. Yes. The cost of art.
Dubrule: “And you’re going to bend this lotus leaf up so we see the bottoms.”
De Mareuil: “Like these.”
Dubrule: “Yes.”
De Mareuil: “Yes.”
They stood back.
De Mareuil: “Oui.”
They discussed the problems of getting the same colors in the photogravure, making the master impressions. Clément ran down the technical details. They talked about whether the twilly’s background should be white or a bit ecru. Dubrule looked confused: “We were talking about a green background.”
De Mareuil gave a look of starched horror like Jeanne Moreau playing a schoolteacher: “Ah, non! Le vert, non!”
Dubrule acquiesced. She surveyed the revamped design, checked a mental calendar. “How much time do you need?”
De Mareuil: “When do you want it?”
Clément: “The fifteenth of July we want to have the documents at the printers.”
De Mareuil: “I’ll give it to you around the twenty-third of June.”
Clément (reminding her): “And we need the text for the back of the coffret.”
De Mareuil: “Jean-Claude is writing that?”
Clément: “No, no, someone else. Jean-Claude is writing the book.”
Dubrule: “It’s for the presentation for the produit.”
Clément: “It can be late July.” She put her lips together and said tightly, “We’re very late.”
Dubrule (grimly): “They’re giving you impossible deadlines.”
Clément (shrugging): “We have to do it.”
De Mareuil: “When does the perfume launch?”
“February, March,” said Clément, and she looked at her watch. Then to Dubrule: “We need all the documents to the printers by July to get everything back from them by October.”
Dubrule said nothing, breathed in, thinly thinking about the dates. Breathed out.
They stood back and gazed at the green glued paper lotus leaves and the unfinished designs.
Ellena was in Grasse, sitting in his lab office one afternoon, thinking about the approaching deadline, and wondering where he was going with Un Jardin sur le Nil.
“Classical perfumery,” he said, “is too perfumey for today’s sensibility. It’s like reading Stendhal. Very nineteenth century.” He looked at one of his latest iterations of Nil, the small bottle that he held in his hand. “This is a new way to write perfume. This is a new way to write formula. Short, concise. In First I put four different jasmines, three roses, two lilacs. Redundant.” He dismissed it, then added, “Big bouquets, very complex, very obvious.” Dismissed it again.
He looked around for an analogy. “Classical painting is beautiful,” he said, starting again, “but it takes so much time to read all the symbols—which saint is it, what does he represent, which biblical story—that it’s more about the process and less about the emotion.” He mentioned Giotto’s frescoes, loaded with elements. “Matisse,” he said by contrast, “you just feel it immediately. I couldn’t do First today. Today I look at that formula, and I think, Oh my God! I was not controlling the materials. And I was trying to understand the market. In Nil I know that I mean to put my paintbrush here. And here.” He lightly touched an imaginary brush to his desktop. “Not here. But here. I’m not trying to understand the market. I make the market.”
One’s taste in perfume develops and evolves sophistication like one’s taste in music. A person matured, Ellena noted, from, say, simple lilac to the thick, sophisticated, white-breasts-in-satin-gowns-at-the-Moscow-Opera of Calèche. It took some effort and some education. (Frankly, getting to lilac can take a little work too. Lilac smells of soiled underwear.) We all go through the experience of acquiring a taste for certain foods. You start with milk and white bread and eventually reach beer, Gruyère, the suffocating dirty rich weirdness of truffles, pinot grigio. Everything children refuse to eat they pay serious money for as adults, but they must evolve to those choices and those restaurant bills.
Ellena respected the classic French school, of which First is one of the later-era examples. (It had less animal but all the gilt and brocade of that style.) He respected, perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, the classic American school (Lauder’s Youth-Dew and Aromatics Elixir by Clinique and Charlie, which simply made a more commercial photocopy of the French and put on an American wrapping). But he had evolved. He was not interested in writing Stendhal. If he looked down on the contemporary American school (clean laundry scents like cK One), he loathed the internationalist school, the euphemism for the Asian consumer school (Versace’s Bright Crystal, a piece of chemical-sweet commercial emptiness that smells like a tablet of saccharin). Ellena was in the process of creating a new school.
Not consciously. Naming it would be difficult, if not impossible. The Flesh School? Not that it smelled like, or of, flesh. Its relationship to flesh was the approach. “A good fragrance becomes part of the wearer,” Frédéric Malle once said to me; you didn’t, for example, want one of those air-conditioning fragrances like Calvin Klein’s Crave, machines that Malle witheringly described as “those ozonic white-musk gadgets that just sit on your skin.”
And yet in a sense the classic French perfumes were exactly that, gorgeous objects made by artists, olfactory jewels set in olfactory fourteen-karat filigree that sat on the skin, separate from the wearer. These were hard, glittering things worn to decorate oneself, and the ego of the artist and the ego of the house came through at a thousand degrees. Black Orchid by Tom Ford is the paradigmatic example of this aesthetic re-created today, a perfume that is, intensely, about the perfume; “I am a work of art, see me.” By profound contrast, Ellena’s scent for Malle’s collection, L’Eau d’Hiver, melted into your skin and mixed with your bloodstream, and it seemed that you weren’t wearing a scent at all. The difference was that with the classic French school, people smiled and told you, “That’s a wonderful perfume,” as if you were wearing a beautiful new shirt, but with L’Eau d’Hiver, they’d get an intense, unfocused look and say, “You smell great,” and then stop talking, as if they’d been caught in an inadvertent intimacy concerning your body. It was as if the scent were coming through your pores.
Sake, created by Christelle Laprade for Fresh, is one of this modern school, incidentally, as is, unexpectedly, the crystalline, transcending Juicy Couture, one of the best perfumes on the market, by the expert commercial technician Harry Frémont. These perfumes are ideas of the smell of our bodies in heaven.
Ellena was an experimenter. Just as an intellectual exercise, he had taken Hermès’s old masculine, the stinking-animal Equipage, and redone it in two different lavender versions. One of them was extraordinary and wonderfully strange, the scent of the Thai dish larb: lemongrass, basil, mint, and hot red peppers mixed into cold ground pork. You smelled the organic burn and the animal fat. Ellena was uninterested in whacky abstract stuff. He liked perfumes that were bien balisés. Well marked. (Les balises are the lights on either side of the runway that guide the plane in.)
He was crafting a style, but not everyone understood. “Some people,” he said, “smell my latest and say, ‘Well, it’s Jean-Claude Ellena, we’ve seen it.’ And I say, ‘Yes, you’re right. I don’t copy other people. I do not copy from the market. Je fais du Jean-Claude Ellena.’ “I do Jean-Claude Ellena. “They put them into the mass spec, and when they discover that I did it with only twenty ingredients, they say ‘Mais putain! Tellement peu d’ingrédients!’”Holy shit! So few ingredients!
Then there were the ways in which he was just plain cynical. One thing Ellena viewed with a decidedly jaundiced eye was the American obsession with synthetic musk molecules. These had a rather strange olfactory backstory.
Musk—real musk—is a molecule: (3R)-methylcyclopentadecanone, but its popular name is muscone. (The chemical name/common name pairing is quite common; there is, for example, the molecule 2-acetoxybenzoic acid which also has a popular name: aspirin.) Muscone is found, at a concentration between 0.5 percent and 2 percent, in something called Tonquin musk, a richly stinking secretion mixing hundreds of molecules that comes from a gland inside the male musk deer. Extract the rich secretion, separate out the little bit of muscone from it, and by itself this one molecule has the warm, sensual, rich scent of clean warm skin. It’s only this molecule (not the full, richly stinking, animalic Tonquin musk secretion) that perfumers call the scent of musk.
The problem was that you had to kill the musk deer to get its gland. This made it harder to find (it also became increasingly illegal for ecological reasons). What to do. In 1888 a man named Albert Bauer was searching for new explosives and noticed that when you did a chemical reaction with TNT (trinitrotoluene) and tertbutyl halides, the two produced a new synthetic molecule that smelled almost exactly like (3R)-methylcyclopentadecanone—i.e., like musk. The molecule, found via this explosive that had nitros in it and itself containing a nitro group, was called a nitro-musk. Named Musk Bauer, it became the first synthetic musk used in perfumery, the replacement for the natural material.
Chemists then found other synthetic musks: Musk Ketone was created in 1894—a lot was put into Chanel No. 5, Brut, and many more perfumes—and Musk Xylol, Musk Tibetene, Musk Ambrette, and Moskene. The problem with the nitro-musks is that they had NO2 groups that were unstable and degraded into different colored products. (Also some turned out to be toxic and were banned.) So the industry set out to find replacements for the replacements, and they found the polycyclic musks. These—Galaxolide was a famous one—had no NO2 groups. But the polycyclics, it turned out, didn’t biodegrade, so they went back and looked around in the natural musks (called macrocyclics) and modified them to come up with new synthetic musks like Habanolide and Musk RI. And then the linear musks, like Helvetolide and Serenolide, which were cheaper and had all the advantages of macrocyclics, plus in some cases also slightly fruity twists.
The strange thing was, says Ellena, what Americans used them for. Essentially these molecules were used as perfumes for laundry detergents. “The first scented detergents arrived in France from the U.S.,” said Ellena, “where they existed since before the war.” He listed them: Colgate, Procter, Unilever. “They created these molecules in a lab and smelled them, and they smelled strong, and they were quite stable. They were also cheap to manufacture. They weren’t water soluble. And these molecules smelled good in quote marks, which is to say people like them, which is certainly one definition of good. So how to use them. They found out that when they put them in detergent they stuck very well to fabric during the wash—again, water insoluble—so they put lots of them in cleaning products and put these products on the market. What happened? People associated this smell in their detergent with the idea of ‘clean.’ The molecules rubbed off from their clothes to their skin, and then people become used to having these molecules on their skin, so they came to associate wearing these synthetic molecules with smelling of fresh laundry, and so today when people smell these synthetics they say, ‘Clean’ and they say, ‘Skin,’ and they say, ‘It smells of Me.’”He added with a smile, “All of this unconsciously, of course.”
(It keeps perfumers on their toes. You have, for example, a truly first-rate scent by l’Artisan Parfumeur, Mûre et Musc— Blackberries and Musk—one of the more wonderful perfumes around, expertly crafted, and it uses these synthetic musks, which means that if the perfumer doesn’t dose them right, it could smell a little bit like Tide because it smells like the musk 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8-hexahydro-4, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8-hexamethyl-cyclopenta-gamma-2-benzopyran, which is sold under the trade name Galaxolide, i.e., the smell of laundry detergent. So you need to be careful.)
Ellena evinces disdain for certain materials, but it is never a prejudice against a category and it is never for ideological reasons. It is always an aesthetic choice. “In the 1990s, I created Déclaration for Cartier,” he says, “and I used synthetic musks. Today I don’t use synthetic musks, not because I think they smell bad—I don’t—but because I think they’re easy. They’re a crutch. When you don’t know how to sweeten something, you put in sugar syrup. It’s very easy. But I use them when I want them.” He names Angéliques sous la pluie, a gorgeous floral perfume he did for Frédéric Malle’s collection. “Sugar is easy to use,” he says and makes a dismissive motion: “Sugar for sugar’s sake: no.” Ellena loathes dihydromyrcenol as much as I do. It’s a molecule that smells like sink cleanser spilled on an aluminum counter. (Actually I’ve met few perfumers who don’t dislike it—”I’m at war with this molecule!” one of them e-mailed me when I brought it up with him—though often not because of the way it smells but simply because aesthetically it has become a huge eye-roll of a cliché.) Ellena identifies it (not enthusiastically) as opening what he calls “perfume’s phase hygiénique.” (He simply noted, “Dihydromyrcenol was hugely used to scent laundry detergents,” and stopped there.) To Ellena, you could pinpoint the beginning of the hygienic trend as Paco Rabanne Pour Homme (1973), which was leading away from leathers and ferns and spices and straight into the fluorescent-lit drugstore detergent aisle, but the dihydromyrcenol revolution was formally launched in 1982 by Pierre Wargnye, who exploded it onto the scene by—ingeniously at the time—making it a jaw-dropping 10 percent of the formula of Drakkar Noir. There’d never been anything like it, and frankly it was kind of sexy to smell like your shirts just out of the dryer. It reached its ultimate apotheosis in 1988’s Cool Water, a dihydromyrcenol orgy made by Pierre Bourdon, who dumped in 20 percent. Six years later, perfumers Alberto Morillas and Harry Frémont cast it in a starring role at 6 percent in their cK One formula, and even then one could argue that the cK One innovation was both significant and authentically creative. Ellena’s view was that these were valid and even creative perfumes in their own time. Now that that molecule has been dumped into 8 million masculine scents, it’s a boring cliché, but personally I dislike natural lavender for the same reason: natural or synthetic, a cliché is a cliché, and today no one should ever touch the stuff.
Ellena also categorically refuses to use Galaxolide, this synthetic clean smell. He is, says his daughter, “tyrannical” about the laundry. He has asked Susannah to re-wash sheets to remove the synthetic clean molecules because he couldn’t sleep, and every new detergent that comes into the house he must smell and approve. In hotels, he covers the pillowcases with his shirt or a sweater to counteract the scent.
And still he did not, on principle, oppose any new molecules. Ellena agreed with Frédéric Malle, who observed that technology was playing its usual role in art. The new synthetics, for example, and the scents they allowed you to create that you never could have before. “They’re more performant,” said Malle, “and can be overlaid in a much cleaner way, without interfering with one another.”
The most daring perfumers were all groping for new modes of expression. Some were developing a kind of transubstantiation; they’d start with a raw material and create a final perfume out of it that rendered it into almost metaphysical form. The niche Italian house L’Eau d’Italie hired the perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour, a master of olfactory chiaroscuro, to produce the mesmerizing, shadowy Bois d’Ombrie, and putting it on was like slipping on an organza silk shirt. You saw the material—the silken, shadowy wood smell—it had immense, gorgeous form, and yet it was transparent, if not invisible, and you saw every bit of skin underneath. Bois d’Ombrie was an olfactory garment. It sat on you like the most gorgeous Givenchy haute couture piece, and yet it became part of you somehow. The ingenious 2 by Comme des Garçons was the smell of a person, heightened into the surreal.
Perfumers were pushing the limits of the art form. “Years ago, I would be working on things,” said Malle, “and [the great perfume executive] Jean Amic would smell them and say, ‘It’s a wonderful smell. But it’s not a perfume.’ It took me a long time to figure that out, but it’s the key to my own collection. Sometimes a thing is good in a room, but it won’t become part of you.” Malle observed, “The great aspect of Eau Sauvage is that while people think it’s an eau de cologne with a flowery green twist to it, what actually makes it work is a leather scent that links the freshness to human skin.”
In crafting Nil, Ellena was embracing technology—the new materials, the new techniques—but not (he would underline this forcefully) for their own sake. When he thought about what he was doing out loud, Ellena said abstractly intellectual things like, “Perfume is an adjunctive sense, and time is indissociable from its creation. Time is also a sensual element, a sort of action at a distance which inscribes itself in memory.” (Then he stopped, looked ironically amused, and said, “That was very French, wasn’t it.”) At other times he could say concrete things: “I like the simplicity of objects that reveals their true beauty. A watch that’s too complicated won’t work for me.” He wore a Mirus watch he’d come across years ago by chance at an antiques dealer during a walk in the town of Mâcon. It was simple, rectangular, pure. It had been on his wrist when he’d created Un Jardin en Méditerranée for Hermès. Since then, he’d been unfaithful to the Mirus. He’d changed to an Hermès Arceau Équestre. He liked its graphical simplicity and the large numbers, for his myopia.
Although he did not say it (it wouldn’t have been his style, that sort of self-revelation), like all of us Ellena was looking for his place in this new world. In one of his notebooks he had written down something from the poet René Char. “Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler, ne mérite ni égard ni patience.” What comes into the world to disturb nothing merits neither attention nor patience. “It’s violent, this sentence,” said Ellena. With each iteration of each perfume he made, including with Nil, he was altering his world, disturbing the order, and he was also being altered (and risking falling flat on his face), and there was a certain violence in this process of artistic creation. But he agreed with Char. If you couldn’t do it, or were afraid to, stay home.
In his search for Hermèsness, Ellena naturally observed JeanLouis Dumas. Dumas headed a large, specific tribe—the family—and they were organized in the at-once completely fluid chaos and absolutely ironclad order of the wealthy French familial social order. Dumas had a strong touch that age had made both more velvet and more assured, but whatever he ran he ran like clockwork. To journalists, he would say gnomic, deeply French things about Hermès perfumes like, “The Hermès perfume aesthetic is the idea and the simplicity. The idea is fundamental. It is like a drop of water on a leaf after the rain, a sentiment expressed in the eye of the other, a miniuniverse that carries the force of all it has created.” He would also say practical, less-French things like, “Roudnitska’s Eau D’Hermès is a school of realism. The smell of the leather saddle.” (Ellena thought about leather scents.) “We are saddlers. Even in our perfume, we have to make the leather saddle elegant and useful.”