ABOUT THREE WEEKS before his deadline for finalizing Nil’s formula, I was eating with Ellena in a café in Grasse. His cell rang, and he had a brief conversation about the perfume museum he was helping establish in Grasse. It would contain great perfumes, old works of art now disappeared. And new things, perhaps like Nil. He hung up and, thinking about this, said, “One of the permanent worries I have is Am I still en phase with my era?’ The tastes and the moments of the moment. The spirit of the time.”
He took a bite, said, “I am of a certain age.” (He was fifty-seven.) “At some point I’ll have a vision passéiste of my time, not of now. J’ai toujours la trouille.” I’m always scared as hell about it. “Example,” he says. “In my time I’ve been a head perfumer. So I managed people, and when they showed me things I’d say, ‘This smells 1960s,’ and when I smelled the older era I was scared because I could become that.”
Perfume as a true art form has only existed since 1881 with Fougère Royale and its first use of a synthetic, but it is startling how fast the aesthetics change, the fashions blossom and die, the hot trends autoterminate in a concrete wall, surpassed by other trends. Ellena’s fear is one every perfumer—every movie director, every composer—lives with. A perfume can come out, hit the List, be ubiquitous, and in the blink of an eye become not just unwearable but unthinkable. Go smell Yves Saint Laurent’s Kouros. Kouros is a perfume that falls into the category animalic.
“Animalics” are animal smells. Castoreum, a perfumery material that comes from an abdominal gland of the beaver (le castor in French), smells of hot, worn leather, urine, smokey tar, and of anus—not (and this is very important) exactly feces but rather the smell of dirty, smelly, odorous, hot ripe flesh washed in fecal matter and sweat. It smells (in my opinion; perceptions vary) similar to labdanum, which comes from a bush and yet smells like the dirty testicles of a rutting beast. (That a bush can produce a substance that smells like an anus should not be surprising; as Ellena pointed out in Egypt, indoles, the smell of corpse, are loaded into jasmine, a flower that drips with the scent of rotting death.)
Civet, from an anal gland in the civet cat, is the fundamentalist’s animalic, rawly, violently dirty, dark as pitch, strong as a hammer, and even more fecal. Ellena told me once that in his view civet contains an angle of the smell of blood, though personally I don’t smell the blood. To me, the smell of blood = cold steel + cold dry cement.
But Tonquin musk is animalic in its most elevated form. It is a perfumery raw material that was extracted from a gland under the lower stomach and before the hind legs of the male of the species Moschus moschiferus L, the Tibetan musk deer. Not muscone, the molecule found at 2 percent inside this stinking cream; Tonquin musk is the real, natural, glandular product. It is one of the most astounding smells you will ever experience. It is, to put it most precisely, the rich, thick scent of the anus of a clean man combined with the smells of his warm skin, his armpits sometime around midday, the head of his ripely scented uncircumcised penis (a trace of ammonia), and the sweetish, nutty, acrid visceral smell of his breath. There’s simply no other way to describe it.
(Some use animalic to describe ambergris, which is rancid whale vomit and a classic perfume ingredient and gives a marvelous, mesmerizing oceanic/proteinacious/creamy/salty scent, but they are deluded.)
The smell of clean anus turns out to be extremely helpful in perfume. In trace amounts it deepens and enriches floral scents, fleshes out green scents. Jacques Guerlain—this is a man who was creating perfumes as recently as the 1950s—famously said that all his perfumes contained, somewhere inside them, the smell of the underside of his mistress. He was referring to all three holes. Ellena uses animalics. When he is working his olfactory magic in front of you, he will dose it perfectly, so that you don’t smell the animal per se but rather its effect on the whole. He’ll do his trick with the isobutyl phenylacetate (the sweet/chamomile/vaguely chemical) + the ethyl vanillin (the rich gourmandy vanilla molecule), where you hold them under your nose and chocolate appears in the air. And that’s when, with careful timing (he is a showman and enjoys making you gasp), he hands you a third touche of natural civet, and you will smell a mouthwatering unctuous chocolate ganache. The smell of shit is crucial to any high-quality chocolate scent.
But as a perfume? Miss Dior was created in 1947 and Caron’s Yatagan in 1976. Both were huge hits, and both are animalics—Miss Dior smells like the armpit of a woman who has not bathed in a week, and Yatagan is the odor of a European man removing his underwear in August—and they are now categorically unwearable except by the French. Today Kouros will get you expelled from a restaurant. It was launched in 1981. It is brutally not en phase.
But Ellena will call into question even the most accepted conventions. In his opinion, the musks used in detergents fundamentally divide perfumery into philosophical points of view. “There are two great poles of perfumery,” he says. “Latin and Anglo-Saxon. Seduction and hygiene. The Latin wants to seduce; he says, ‘See how sexy I am, I’m coming to you.’ The American says, ‘See how clean I am, you can come to me.’”His reaction also results from his impatience for anything too easy. “Today if I want to please Americans, I make it thirty percent clean notes just automatically. I know they’re going to say, ‘Oh, we love it!’”He rolls his eyes, proposes (after a brief pause, and very dryly), “cK One” and then a moment later, “Obsession,” and looks away into the middle distance.
(Incidentally, perfumers still do keep a few animalic synthetics in their palettes, though your chance of ever smelling one decreases every day with the rise of the Asian market, where the demand is for scents that smell of more or less nothing at all and where the police would be called at the first trace of civet. And yet the smells sit there on the perfumers’ shelves in their little glass vials. In 1915, Sack took natural civet and from this reeking cauldron of hundreds of stinking molecules, he chemically tweezed out a single ketone molecule that is manufactured and marketed under the name civetone. It is a musk that has a hugely strong stink of body odor and anus. More powerful than this, however, was Walbaum’s work in 1900 in Leipzig. He took civet, the cream from the anal gland of the civet cat, and from it excised another single molecule; it was given the rousingly poetic name skatol from the Greek word skato, excrement. In fact, in 1877 Brieger had taken the trouble and done the chemistry necessary to isolate the molecule in human feces. Skatol is a molecule that incarnates the adjective “animalic.”)
I asked Ellena: Do you have a good sense of the smells of various eras? “Oh,” he said raising a cup to drink, then, “of course, each time has its smell. Sixties fragrances are structured in a sixties manner. Eighties in an eighties manner, and people will understand the codes you’ve put in. And this has nothing to do with the materials. It has only to do with the way in which I use the materials.”
“Take men,” he said. “The 1960s began a romanticism—consider the culture at the time—with fresh, big colognes, citrus, the epitome being Eau Sauvage, 1966. You can smell how the 1970s scents followed logically. The epitomes of that era, Paco Rabanne Pour Homme and Azzaro Pour Homme, which were heavy on rosemary, lavender, thyme, the smell of the Mediterranean, but done in such a way that made the seventies really ‘parfums de camionneurs,’ truck driver scents, the guy who climbs down from some big cab. Brut de Fabergé. ‘Men dare perfume themselves!’ ‘Virile, not elitist!’”Ellena says all this straightforwardly, with no irony but at the same time with an academic detachment that renders ironic.
“1980s: Cool Water and Eternity, both 1988, and they were exactly the same thing, though you’re not supposed to say it. Clean, sterile, hygienic. That really shook up the perfumers because now we were using different codes and politics. You can never forget that perfume is completely political. This hygienic school was completely led by the Americans.”
He changed the subject. “Hermès has let me talk to you, about whatever I like; I’m on my own. No one has said to me, ‘You can’t tell Chandler this or that.’ I like Hermès for that.”
He didn’t, he said, referring to his new position, care about the envious and the jealous. Too bad for them. “What I find perhaps interesting is that by my deciding to go to Hermès, there is a small chance that maybe everyone will be able to do perfumery differently. I have an ego like everyone. But to say this in the most generous terms, I hope it will help all perfumers be more free.”
As we were paying the bill, Ellena said, because the thought came to him, “I don’t show them [Gautier and Dubrule] the formula because they wouldn’t understand it. In the new museum, I’m going to ask them to show a perfume formula. The public won’t understand, but at least they’ll see there are real people behind perfumes. They say cooking is an art and pastry is a science. Perfumery is a math, specifically an algebra. All these interactions.” He moved his hands and fingers to indicate variables flying about, crashing into one another.
The construction of a perfume bottle is a project far more complex than it appears. Years ago, Ellena had been directly involved in the creation of one of the more singular perfume bottles on the market. Its story illustrates the problem.
Around 1990, Ellena began talking with a cousin of his by marriage, an engineer named Thierry de Baschmakoff. Baschmakoff, descendant of a princely Russian family in exile that landed in France and born grassois, had like Ellena been raised more or less perforce in perfume. (Baschmakoff’s brother-in-law is also a perfumer.) He is relaxed and friendly with an appealing demeanor, like a Californian who got waylaid accidentally in Europe.
Baschmakoff saw Ellena at family gatherings and so on, but he wasn’t particularly interested in fragrance. What did interest him, in his smart-young-genial-guy way, were industrial design and technical problems, and some of the most interesting problems posed to industrial designers are those arising from the endlessly variegated creation of perfume bottles, where the stakes are high and the aesthetics intense. So he simply decided one day that he would leave his boring job—he was doing technical coordination of building projects on the Côte d’Azur—move to Paris, and start to design perfume bottles. (Most bottle designers sculpt their models in clay. He had never sculpted before and wasn’t certain he could do things that small, but that didn’t stop him.) He created an atelier, which he called Aesthete, asked Ellena for his contacts, and started looking for work.
There was none. Since the 1960s, four designers had entirely dominated the market. The two biggest were Pierre Dinand (who created the flacons for Opium, Eternity, and on and on) and Serge Mansau (bottles for Kenzo, Dior, Givenchy’s Organza), the latter a fat megalomaniacal cigar-smoking blowhard whose pomposity and arrogance were as legendary as his habit of talking about himself in the third person: “Mansau makes art, yes, it is true, but we must ask ourselves: what is this ‘art’ of his?” Baschmakoff realized he’d been a bit precipitate. For five years he worked very hard and got almost no commissions at all, and finally he met some people from the Italian jeweler Bulgari, and there was at last a connection, and he did his first bottle, Eau de Bulgari, in 1992. He designed a single, strong, graceful sea-green column of sanded glass, tapering up to smooth, clear shoulders, and everyone looked at him differently after he’d done it. And there he was. He went on to create all the bottles for Bulgari as well as bottles for Cartier, Versace, Dior, Fred, Anna Sui, Yohji Yamamoto, Nino Cerruti, and Nina Ricci, but the Eau de Bulgari bottle was seen everywhere in the media and launched him.
Ellena did the Bulgari juice. Their collaboration worked beautifully. Baschmakoff got an idea: He proposed to Ellena that the two of them create a perfume company.
It would be a somewhat different company in that Ellena would do all the fragrances, Baschmakoff would create all the bottles, their juices would be extremely expensive, and they would not be owned by Lauder or L’Oréal. They called it The Different Company, and it was Ellena’s position of in-house perfumer that he passed to his daughter, Céline, when he left it for Hermès.
Creating the house was high risk. Due to Ellena’s reputation, they got it funded, and it opened its doors in 2000, and Ellena created four juices: Osmanthus, Rose Poivrée, which is the perfume Satan’s wife would wear in hell (it is an exquisite scent, a combination of rose and smokey fire), Bois d’Iris, and Divine Bergamot, which recalls Jacques Guerlain’s quote about putting into his perfumes the smell of the underside of his mistress: Divine Bergamot smells like the mistress sitting on an exquisite bitter orange. The Different Company’s scents are sold in places like Estnation, the extraordinarily expensive, fashion-forward department store in Tokyo.
Baschmakoff wound up deciding to do a single bottle for all its perfumes. It is extraordinarily expensive.
The bottle is both a technical and aesthetic obsession for the perfume industry, in particular its marketers. (This is viewed a bit cynically by the perfumers, one of whom commented to me acidly, “Oh, of course, the bottles are visual objects, so the creative executives feel competent to control them. The invisible smell? They’re lost, terrified. The bottle reassures.”) The industry is conscious of the degree to which the bottle’s presentation of its juices determines the fate of those juices. On the other hand, it is conscious of how much those bottles cost. Shiseido’s mythic Nombre Noir was presented in such sumptuously luxurious packaging that though known as a spectacular perfume, it became equally well known for the amount of money it supposedly lost due to its wrapping.
The financial constraints imposed by the luxury brands on everything from the juice to the bottle are heartily lamented by the artists. The licensors “rarely ask you for beautiful products anymore,” said one bottle designer. “You’re always using the same materials. Think of the things we could do with a little more money!” Contrarily, in Baschmakoff’s view the bottle designers sometimes have more liberty than the perfumers to express the brand, though if you press him he’ll admit that exceptional things are rare because there’s always a limit on the price. “Our work,” he says grimly, “is very parametré” (parametered, constrained) “by the fashion houses.”
The negotiations over cost begin the instant the house shares its vision. They want a bottle like this, the wildest fantasy, insane beauty, et cetera. The designer replies that it is, in fact, not technically possible to create a bottle like this, but he could do that, and it will cost X. The house recoils, demands price Y; the designer concedes on a few points; the house is still shocked, then lays down price Z that its bottle must not exceed; the designer replies that he cannot do it for that price. They wind up compromising on a cap in metal, but they’ll drop the round edges because the consumer won’t see them. Truly round glass edges are expensive. Truly ninety-degree-angled glass edges are more expensive.
The Different Company has proven the exception that confirms the rule. Its artistic freedom came, rather ingeniously, from the simplest of strategies: The two partners decided that Ellena would quite simply create juices too expensive to be attempted by anyone else. The price would automatically be immense, which meant protection from competition at this level. It also meant creative liberation since, say, Calvin Klein could never dare to follow into this stratospheric territory. In Bois d’Iris, Ellena specified an immense amount of Florentine Iris Root Butter, which costs, depending on the quality, the source, and the day, from $25,000 to $80,000 per kilo. Though at the same time, his formulae were as always relatively streamlined “parce que,” Baschmakoff explained, “Jean-Claude n’aime pas les parfums compliqués.” Because Jean-Claude doesn’t like complicated perfumes. Baschmakoff applied to his bottles precisely the same principle. He would create his flacons using exactly the quality of materials he wanted and generate the price, whatever it was, forward from there. (As opposed to the habitual inverse.)
In the event, the Different Company bottle is a work of art so gorgeous, so substantive, that Ellena’s juices must do a bit of throat clearing to get the buyer’s attention. The real cost of the 90 ml bottle is €2.5; of the 250 ml, €6. Some of this is simply due to the fact that once all the variables are in place, the price of each bottle will fluctuate wildly depending on the number in your lot. If you are the Different Company, you order 5,000 bottles, giving you that per-unit price. If you are Bulgari, you order 200,000 bottles for Bulgari Blu and each one comes in at between €0.40 and €0.60. If you are Estée Lauder, you order a million bottles per year, and the price is risible, maybe €0.25.
At Hermès and every other house, when you start creating your bottle, you immediately begin making choices. Every choice is both aesthetic and economic. Every bottle first has to be modeled. That’s usually around €150,000, and there are no economies of scale; if you’ve got two sizes of perfume—a 50ml and a 100ml—it’s €300,000. You can do a simple artwork on the bottle for €0.05 or a complicated decor that adds a full €1. You can use pistolétage, an enameled paint that can cost a little or a lot, a special pistolétage called nacré, or strass, plastic jewels that are—intentionally—the height of kitsch. (Unsurprisingly, several Versace bottles use strass.) Strass can add an appreciable amount to the cost because a robot must glue each jewel onto the neck.
Then there is the cap. Plastic (inexpensive), solid metal (expensive), or a treatment with a mechanical process called décoltage (very expensive). For economy, do a metal cap with plastic injection and un lest, a weight buried inside to fake the sensation of heft. Your tube and pump, which connect to the cap, usually cost around €0.15 for 200,000 units minimum, and you can cloak the tube in TPX (polymethylpentene plastic), which adds around €0.10 per tube. One executive told me, “Just the fucking pump for Gaultier’s Fragile cost €200,000 to develop because they wanted a pump you can use from the bottom. And that kind of special-order stuff isn’t all that rare.”
(And then there is the packaging the bottle comes in. “The design of the packaging is an absolutely huge investment,” says a French executive. “Everything has to be modeled. There’s stock packaging. You’d be surprised how much stock packaging costs. I’d rather not give examples. Still, it’s a good business decision, the box is no big deal, but people are very sniffy about it.”)
The meeting in Hélène Dubrule’s office on the flacon (the bottle for Nil) took place on June 9 at 11:30 A.M. Dubrule faced the problem of what to do with her bottle for Un Jardin sur le Nil.
Hermès had endured a long, slightly tortuous experience with flacons. Dubrule and Gautier had talked about it. This is what they’d had: The bottle for Calèche (1961) had been created by Annie Beaumel. It was a simple, elegant vertical sheath of glass with rounded shoulders, quintessentially good taste, and had been used for almost every perfume, the sheath astutely quoted: For Hiris, the sheath had been done in blue; for Orange Verte, it was tinted green and scaled down. Hermès had departed from this design only four times: 24 Faubourg, Rouge, Rocabar (which was supposed to be shaped like a horse blanket), and Eau des Merveilles.
Gautier and Dubrule had decided that the Annie Beaumel—designed bottle really was the best physical representation of Hermès scents, and they’d chosen it for the Jardins collection. This was wise in terms of the economics of the thing (no development costs) and the marketing, or, as the specific phrase went, “brand coherence.” But if they would now adapt it to Nil, the trick was in capturing the look of the lotus motif in this piece of glass. This was what the meeting was about.
Dubrule ran it, a quietly taut session at the round table in her office. Anne-Lise Clément, the perfume group manager, was on one side of Dubrule, and on the other Guirec Boidin, her assistant head of product, young, blond, and always looking freshly showered. Across the table from her were Philippe Bleuet, the director of purchasing and development, and Virginie Lamejer, the head of packaging.
Bleuet and Lamejer were staring critically at the flacons Clément was briefing them on. They were debating four proposals from the French glassmaker Saint Gobain. They had done three different mock-ups using the 100ml bottle and a fourth mock-up with the 50 ml. Saint Gobain had done very subtle, almost transparent pistolétage on each of them. The trick was to make the colors blend correctly, not too much green, not too little blue. One of the 100ml bottles had an aqua blue bottom, another green, the third yellow, and the 50ml had yet a fourth distribution, intermediate aqua-esque coloring, each one carefully worked out.
They needed the bottles by August. So they were (a bit tensely) looking at June 15—six days from now—to launch the final orders on them, “which was late,” noted Clément; Dubrule pursed her lips and asked everyone their vacation dates during the upcoming August shut-down of France. She wrote down each person’s absences and glared at the dates for a moment as if they themselves were impeding the process.
Back to the bottles. Saint Gobain was using a glass vernis (the technicians would regulate the paint jets to produce precisely the effect they’d choose) dried by UV light and then baked.
Clément: “The fifty-milliliter coloring is the freshest.”
Dubrule (eyeing the bottles): “There’s less of a green background in the fifty.”
Clément: “We found that when we forced it, the color flipped and we got a gray effect. See here”—she picked it up—”you’ve got this grayness? On the bottom?”
Dubrule pursed her lips here. “I don’t see it,” she said squinting, then dismissing it for the moment, “We have to see what it looks like next to the box.” She reminded them that June 21 was the deadline for the final box mock-up.
Bleuet was flipping crisply through pages: “On scheduling, we’re looking at the fifteenth of June to launch the orders so as to have the bottles by August.” After discussion, they decided that, in fact, the 50ml bottle really was perfect. (Clément and Bleuet looked subtly relieved.) In production they’d copy it to the 100ml but “forcer un peu la couleur,” add more intensity.
Lamejer consulted her notes. She had long brown hair and a practical manner, and you could see her calculating the variables in her head. “The doc for the text on the bottles, 13 August. I can’t do it faster than that.” The text would be silk printing —sérigraphie—the silk a polymer, cooked at 600 degrees Centigrade. She pointed at the flacons. “The word Paris”—which would go below the words Un Jardin sur le Nil—”is always printed nineteen millimeters up from the bottom of the bottle,” she said to them. “C’est la règle.” That was the rule with every Hermès perfume. This was so that when the Hermès store manager stocked a bottle of Nil next to a bottle of, say, Eau des Merveilles, the logos would always be at the same height.
They turned their attention to the étui, the box, as its colors had to match those of the flacon. They discussed what color yellow de Mareuil used in her leaves. “Jonquil!” said Lamejer. They were actually a rather khaki green. Dubrule touched one: “A bit too red here …” She pointed at a tiny dot on an étui leaf, pointed at another tiny dot, pointed at a tiny dot of black.
Clément shook her head. “The problem is that the blue turned green when we added more black here.”
Bleuet: “We have to rework it in the real tint.”
Boidin looked at the 50ml bottle. “It’s going to be slightly more difficult because it’ll be two scans.”
Dubrule: “Anne-Lise, you verified this model in natural daylight?”
“We’re going to verify it,” said Clément. Moving on, she got out some perfumed incense sticks, the first samples sent by the supplier. These actually weren’t perfumed with Nil; the maker had sent them simply so they could look at the sticks’ length. (Dubrule absently smelled one, frowned, murmured, “Wait, what is this scent …?” She put it down, and Boidin picked it up with an interested, tentative expression. Smelled it. “Oh!” he said, frowning intently, “what is this scent …?” They stared at each other.)
“He can do the right length of sticks for the coffret,” said Clément, referring to the incense manufacturer. “They’ll be wrapped in tissue paper so they don’t move around. Notice they won’t be the full length of the box because we need to leave room for the tissue paper that will wrap them.” (They were extremely fragile.) “Or transparent paper or cellophane—we don’t know yet.”
Dubrule changed gears with an intake of breath and a look: “OK! So now we do our big scheduling!”
The 2005 theme of the year—rivers—would be announced in January, but they’d reveal Nil to the press in November 2004 so that the press would be playing a guessing game re the theme.
Clément: “The cap—weren’t we talking about a metal cap?”
Lamejer (bluntly): “Metal will change the size of the box.”
Dubrule: “Is it a problem for you to have two caps?”
Lamejer thought about it an instant, clicked her tongue no.
And the sophistiqués, what they called the minisprays that would be filled with Nil as échantillons, samples. This was a possible headache caused by chemistry: The question was what would happen when Ellena’s molecules came in contact with the bottle plus the tube and the cap that Dubrule was designing—or with the alcohol, or the body lotion base it would be mixed into? Sophistiqués and perfume bottles must be able to go from Iceland to Saudi Arabia, so Ellena’s juice would be heated to fifty degrees Celsius and frozen to below zero, baked and shaken and have an electric current sent through it, then analyzed for any alteration. Aside from already being late, the five at the table were acutely aware of what had happened with Ellena’s first Jardin juice; with Méditerranée they’d had to throw out all the sophistiqués in plastic—standard industry sophistiqués used for any number of fragrances—and hastily replace them with glass because his formula had interacted with the plastic. No one knew why, it was impossible to predict; it happened rarely, but it happened, and what was strange was that any two molecules together rarely interacted; each formula was its own question mark. And the immediate problem was that Ellena’s formula for Nil was not yet finalized and thus couldn’t be tested. The question was: Would the plastic change the smell?
And in the factory they’d put in the preservatives, which virtually all perfumes have, antioxidants (oxygen atoms damage perfumery materials) and radical scavengers like butyl hydroxy toluene (BHT) and benzophenones. (BHT has been used for many years with good success and is added to many essential oils. Benzophenone is a ketone with a faint rosy/metallic scent that can be used as a perfumery material for its smell. It is also edible and so can be used to make flavors. When used as an antioxidant it’s dosed at such low levels that it has no effect on fragrance.) And the more advanced anti-UV sun-filter molecules they were starting to use (the industry calls them UV absorbers), basically sunblock for perfume, like a mix of Parsol MCX (2-ethylhexyl 4-methoxy cinna-mate) and Parsol 1789 (4-tert-butyl-4’-methoxy dibenzoylmethane) or you could try Tinogards like Tinogard TT (3,5-bis[tert-butyl]-4-hydroxy benzenepropanoic acid). They prolonged life from a few months to a year, but it was tricky because each fragrance had to be fitted with the sunblock that worked for it. The ideal was to have an opaque bottle, like the one Tom Ford used for Black Orchid, and the truly ideal was to store the perfume in the fridge, but this stuff helped; take one scent with, one without, let both stand in normal sunlight, and, a perfumer would tell you, you can smell the difference after a single month. (There were the inevitable ideological objections to the preservative molecules, but, noted a perfume chemist, we swallow C17 H18 F3 NO • HCl—aka Prozac—and 2-(4-isobutylphenyl)propionic acid—ibuprofen—via our digestive systems, which send these molecules to our brains. We have botulinum toxin type A—Botox—injected into our faces. But we don’t want BHT sitting on top of our skin? “It is,” said the chemist, “irrational.”)
Moreover, the decomposition products caused by UV radiation can cause allergies or, worse, be toxic, which means that contrary to the claims of the all-natural movement, preservatives actually preserve health.
The chemists would use one of a number of alcohols—40B, 38C, et cetera—the only difference being the denaturing agent, plus half a percent of water. “Denaturing” alcohol, which is ethanol, just means adding something to it that makes it undrinkable—put in phenolphthalein or isopropanol, which give a terrible taste. Otherwise alcoholics would drink perfume. It’s actually an important financial consideration: There’s no import duty on denatured alcohol; if it weren’t denatured, a bottle of Un Jardin sur le Nil would have the added cost of the taxes on Stoli.
The sophistiqués were a problem because they had to go out first. The deadline for the dernière validation, the definitive juice, was July 15. Which was late, said Clément with a sigh.
Bleuet: “We can gain some time if we don’t do the preseries for the press of the lait de corps,” the body lotion. It needed to arrive four months before being put on sale; this was another problem with chemistry: The molecules in the concentrée, the pure ingredients in Ellena’s formula, needed at least six weeks of maceration in alcohol to mature its full scent. “We’ll just do the parfum.”
Dubrule: “Excellent idea. The 10 July, validation of the jus, the documents for the étui, 13 August at the latest. And we have to pressure them for the list of ingredients for the incense. It’s 9 June today.”
Dubrule was unconsciously waving one of the incense sticks in the air for emphasis, a conductor with a tiny baton before an invisible orchestra. She suddenly froze. She held the stick under her nose. “Ah! I know what this is:fleur d’oranger!” Orange blossom.
She gave it to Boidin, and he smelled it and smiled and nodded vigorously: Of course, it was a wonderfully fragrant orange blossom scent. They were relieved to have figured it out. Nothing makes you crazier than to have before you a scent that you know perfectly well and not be able to identify it.
Ellena was in Grasse, working and thinking and evaluating some new molecular machines he’d created.
With an eye to future Hermès fragrances, always searching for new scents to create new olfactory sculptures elegant and (he hoped) marvelously strange, he was working with Frédérique Rémy and LMR to create literally new materials—tailor-made molecular distillations of naturals, designed to his specifications. Rémy had just sent over a dozen of these for his perusal, and he opened them at his desk. Hermès was one of the few houses that could shoulder the expense, but the result was worth it. Under his direction, Rémy’s technicians were teasing out very specific molecules found in natural rose, violet leaf, and summer straw, only the molecules Ellena wanted (they dropped the others on the cutting-room floor), thus making an Hermès rose, an Hermès violet leaf, straw, something new under the sun—not absolutes; not essences; not naturals; not synthetics.
This is what one molecular distillation of Turkish rose absolute looks like, and it is thus only eighty-some molecules; the list of the total, unedited molecules contained in Turkish rose would give you between eight hundred and a thousand different molecules, depending on the species, and go on for pages. This analysis was done by GC/MS. This rose—not synthetic, but not natural either, rather a hybrid in-between—is a carefully engineered scent, a rose greatly (very greatly) simplified into a flower that doesn’t exist in nature but is, for being engineered by us, even more naturally spectacular. Amounts are in percent of formula. Notice that none of the ingredient names is capitalized (except the acronyms) since only commercial trade names of synthetic molecules are capitalized (Exaltolide) while natural molecules are lowercase (citronellol), and these are all molecules built in flowers by nature.
citronellol |
45.07 |
geraniol |
17.91 |
nerol |
9.60 |
nonadecane |
3.21 |
eugenol |
2.98 |
PEA |
2.67 |
linalol |
2.14 |
heneicosane |
1.33 |
alpha-pinene |
1.08 |
0.99 |
|
geranyl acetate |
0.91 |
citronellyl acetate |
0.76 |
heptadecane |
0.73 |
nonadec-I-ene |
0.72 |
caryophyllene |
0.63 |
rose oxide I |
0.58 |
alpha-terpineol |
0.57 |
isoamyl alcohol+ 2—methyl butanol |
0.56 |
eugenol |
0.56 |
terpinen-4-ol |
0.52 |
phenylethyl-acetate |
0.52 |
germacrene D |
0.43 |
hexanol |
0.43 |
neral |
0.33 |
alpha-bulnesene + pentadecane |
0.30 |
eicosane |
0.29 |
tricosane |
0.29 |
alpha-guaiene |
0.28 |
farnesol-trans-trans |
0.26 |
alpha-humulene |
0.25 |
rose oxide II |
0.25 |
beta-pinene |
0.24 |
myrcene |
0.18 |
neryl acetate |
0.17 |
heptanal |
0.16 |
nerolidol |
0.13 |
isovaleraldehyde |
0.13 |
nonanal + hexanal diethyl acetal |
0.12 |
heptanal diethyl acetal |
0.10 |
farnesol |
0.10 |
gamma-terpinene |
0.08 |
limonene |
0.08 |
0.07 |
|
methyl-geranate |
0.07 |
pentacosane |
0.06 |
cis-3-hexenol |
0.06 |
p-cymene |
0.06 |
amyl alcohol |
0.06 |
ethyl decanoate |
0.06 |
heptadec-I-ene |
0.05 |
linalol oxide I |
0.05 |
citronellal |
0.05 |
hexanal |
0.05 |
beta-bourbonene |
0.05 |
docosane |
0.05 |
beta-elemene |
0.04 |
octanal |
0.04 |
octadecane |
0.04 |
phenylethyl-isovalerate |
0.04 |
phenylethyl-tiglate |
0.04 |
methyl heptenone |
0.04 |
linalol oxide II |
0.04 |
phenylethyl-benzoate |
0.03 |
delta-cadinene |
0.03 |
ethyl hexadecanoate |
0.03 |
sabinene + benzyl methyl ether |
0.03 |
hexadecane |
0.03 |
eicos-I-ene |
0.03 |
heneicos-I-ene |
0.02 |
octanal diethyl acetal |
0.02 |
ethyl dodecanoate |
0.02 |
1,8-cineole |
0.02 |
trans-ocimene |
0.02 |
phenylethyl hexanoate |
0.02 |
dimethyl styrene |
0.01 |
0.01 |
|
cis-ocimene |
0.01 |
methyl salicylate |
0.01 |
ethyl benzoate |
0.01 |
phenylethyl-isobutyrate |
0.01 |
Total |
100% |
Ellena was creating these, peering into flowers and leaves and roots and choosing exactly what he wanted, and Rémy’s technical wizards were then going in with their scalpels and slicing out what he didn’t. So he was designing new olfactory tools for himself, natural smells that had never before existed in nature, to build future perfumes.
Gautier and Dubrule had decided that the European press launch for Nil would be November, early December in New York, and the product needed to be in the U.S. stores in February. Summer was moving much too quickly. They’d set the deadline for final acceptance of the juice for mid-June, now long past, and so—new deadline—Gautier stated she would need to make a final decision on the formula by the beginning of September “at the very latest.”
In July, Ellena went back to Paris for the next submissions.
From AG2, AJ1, AJ2, AJ3, he had come up with AJ and shown it to Dubrule and Gautier. They’d been putting themselves through the usual anguish over it: Was AJ too cologne, too citrus, too eau fraîche, too bergamot? Was it not sufficiently “perfumey”? Due to years of acculturation, primarily from Chanel No. 5, people had come to think of a “perfume” as a juice that had aldehydes, the powdery soapy smell. Ellena and Gautier had to think about the preconceptions of the market. AJ was a completely different beast from the scarlet Parisian boudoir vanillic plush of Shalimar, the French-fundamentalist animalic of Miss Dior, or the light-gold-evening-gown paradigm of Jean Patou’s 1000, that wonderful rich, hard-as-diamonds elegance that is like a spotlight at a Cannes movie premiere. Nor was it a contemporary electrical, like the Hilfigers (some of which are excellent, Calice Becker’s Tommy Girl being a masterpiece of the genre).
It had no tired clichés like dihydromyrcenol, the smell of bland, freshly showered jock, but on the other hand, the clichés were easily accessible and thus easy to sell. It had the beauty and presence of Givenchy’s glorious Amarige—which is one of the greatest formal scents and manages a zipped-up elegance without stuffiness. But it didn’t have Amarige’s wonderful artifice, the sequins, the sense of being constructed, no olfactory luxury logo in gold lamé letters sewn into the silk lining. Which brought them back, finally, to the same question, and now it came down to this: They smelled it again and, a bit grimly, acknowledged it was “not perfumey enough.” AJ was not their Un Jardin sur le Nil. Ellena needed to do more work.
OK, so where were they right. They did want to keep AJ’s delightful (as Dubrule said) fraîcheur vivifiant, its enlivening freshness, and at the same time give it (Gautier on this point) plus d’épaisseur, heft, body.
So Ellena flew back to Grasse and got to work. He modified ingredients, put things in, took others out, and got on a plane back to Paris and presented them with the next modification: AS.
AS was much more flowery/fruity, a bit sweeter, a bit more ripe mango. Gautier didn’t really like it, finding it too easy. A bit too “sixteen-year-old girl,” she said. Dubrule, on the other hand, found it quite good, then tried it on her skin and pronounced it in fact too sweet. It lacked a certain elegance in her opinion.
Ellena got on a plane, flew back to Grasse, and thought and drummed his fingers on his desk and balanced milliliters of molecules against other milliliters of molecules. He began creating A*.
A* began a gentle swing toward the woods. He was editing and rewriting the formulae, draft by draft, sending each draft to Monique, his lab tech, like sending in a photographic negative, and then looking carefully at the colors and details of each developed photo she sent back to him. He lowered the natural citrus and excised a third of the bigarade, the bitter orange, then he welded on three Monique Rémy materials: an incense at €150 per kilo (a material that smells of summer camp: fresh mountain + pine tree), a bigarade essence (usually €100 per kilo, but Frédérique gave it to him at €80), and an absolu de miel (honey absolute) at the rather significant price of €1,629 per kilo. If successful, Nil would generate annual sales for Monique Rémy of 500 kilos of bigarade, 50 kilos of incense, and 50 kilos of honey; Rémy would use 10 tons of bitter oranges to obtain the 500 kilos of bigarade, and she would import them from the Ivory Coast, unless there was a problem, in which case she would go, reluctantly, to Italy. The Ivory Coast quality is excellent, and the production cost is of course much lower. Italian oranges are twice the price for, in Ellena’s estimation, an only slightly better scent.
He smelled a bit and thought about it, went home and had dinner and didn’t think about it. Came back to the lab and added an expensive synthetic that hadn’t been in AJ called ambroxan, made by the German company Henkel, a lovely amber that cost €500 per kilo, as well as muscone (another costly synthetic; he wanted it in this case mostly for the persistance, for helping the perfume last on skin, rather than for its scent character). He added a very inexpensive IFF synthetic called Iso E Super at €15 per kilo, a beautiful woody cedar note, very diffusive, terrific for the sillage. (Lauder’s Beautiful is powered by Iso E Super.) And he used the new Hedione. Hedione was a 1970s synthetic, one of Firmenich’s fabulous captives, these new patented molecules that took the world by storm, but Hedione High Cis at €150 per kilo (ten times the price of the original) was the company’s new captive. It was more a white flowers scent, whereas the original molecule smelled flowery/citrus. The High Cis version had more épaisseur and would help, to use Ellena’s phrase, donner du gras to A*. Give fat.
In First, for Van Cleef & Arpels, he had used 160 ingredients. There were exactly 30 in A*. He smelled it. It was green mango, the very instant before being picked. But not the fruit, exactly. He’d wrapped it in both a fresh water and a warm, clean desert air, and you smelled Ellena thinking about the mango, on the tree, above the sandy dry road. It was an idea he had created of the fruit, the scent abstracted, fed through his mind, which registered all the loveliness, the limpid quality of the one moment in one season when, if you were in the right place at the right time, the scent existed, unripe, just before disappearing. Beautiful because ephemeral.
On August 16, he went back up to Paris, and, in the offices at Pantin, he presented A* to Gautier and Dubrule.
Days passed. He waited. It was the usual—he wondered when he was going to hear, wondered why Gautier didn’t simply take it because he knew it was terrific, knew why she didn’t take it (because it didn’t work at all, because he’d forgotten to do this material, to do that one, to balance better that other thing; “Those are the truly unpleasant moments,” he said). At other moments he actively didn’t think about it, or tried not to. Gautier, he knew, was someone who, even as the deadlines raced closer, believed herself obligated to ask questions as long as she possibly could—Can I make it better? Can I go further?—and the decision to lock in the formula, on a deadline hopelessly receded, was clearly going to be made at the very last second. Bernard Bourgeois at the Normandy factory had to ensure correct maceration, which meant he needed the formula. Gautier would wait until the factory started screaming.
And when he wasn’t actively not thinking about it, Ellena was tweaking the perfume. He’d put in things, take things out, ask himself constantly: Does it diffuse enough? Is the persistance sufficient? Mostly technical problems now. The aesthetics he’d already worried into the ground.
On September 7, 2004, at the last possible second, Gautier called him and took it. The scent was registered in the laboratory. A* was Un Jardin sur le Nil.
It is a perfume that smells like early evening on an island where it is always summer. It is the smell sunlight makes coming out of a blue sky, the air scented with the tang made as the light warms the smooth unblemished peel of the greenest mangoes hanging from the branches of the young trees, just out of reach.