“The Scent of the Nile: Jean-Claude Ellena Creates a New Perfume”, 2005-03-14 ():
[Profile of French perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena. One of several high-profile perfumers, he is hired by the luxury brand Hermès to develop a new perfume that can compete with their envied competitors, Chanel. Ellena is charged with creating a new perfume embodying the concepts ‘Egypt’ and ‘the Nile’, somehow.
The process of prototyping perfume candidates is long and involved, requiring many back and forth exchanges, and changes of ingredients to economize or work with suppliers: how a perfume smells straight from the bottle is not how it will smell when being worn and gradually evaporating from body heat, and tweaks in combinations can lead to an entirely different psychologically-perceived smell. The Hermès executives only know it when they smell it. A visit to Egypt itself eventually turns up some candidate ideas, like mangoes. Then the process of iteration begins.]
A master perfumer like Ellena has memorized hundreds, if not thousands, of recipes for manufacturing smells. Many complex natural scents can be conjured with only a few ingredients. The scent of freesia, he explained, is created by combining two simple molecules: beta-ionone and linalool, both synthetics. (To give freesia a cold, metallic edge, a touch of allyl amyl glycolate is added.) The smell of orange blossom is made by combining linalool and methyl anthranilate, which smells like Concord grapes.
In my presence, Ellena once dipped a touche [paper strip] into a molecule called isobutyl phenal acetate, which has a purely chemical smell, and another touche into vanillin, a synthetic version of vanilla. He placed the two paper strips together, waved them, and chocolate appeared in the air. “My métier is to find shortcuts to express as strongly as possible a smell”, he explained. “For chocolate, nature uses eight hundred molecules. I use two.” He handed me four touches—vanillin plus the natural essences of cinnamon, orange, and lime. The combined smell was a precise simulation of Coca-Cola. “With me, one plus one equals three”, Ellena said. “When I add two things, you get much more than two things.”
…Ellena is proud to be an illusionist. “Picasso said, ‘Art is a lie that tells the truth’”, he told me. “That’s perfume for me. I lie. I create an illusion that is actually stronger than reality. Sketch a tree: it’s completely false, yet everyone understands it.” The point of Un Jardin sur le Nil, he said, was not to reproduce the scent of a green mango but, rather, to create a fantasy version of green mango.
…Ellena was now finishing work on a luxurious new collection of scents that would be called the Hermèssences. In Paris, Dubrule had told me that wearing an Hermèssence would be like dining with Pierre Gagnaire or Guy Savoy—“great French chefs who are going to search out unexpected contrasts. We will be able to use some very Hermès materials.” By this, she meant expensive. Her culinary description was metaphorical, but, in fact, Ellena was creating a scent called Ambre Narguilé—a narguilé is a water pipe—which smells of sliced apples wrapped in leaves of blond tobacco and drizzled with caramel, cinnamon, banana, and rum. And on his desk was a vial that contained the beginning of the next Hermèssence. It smelled, he said, like a leather bathing suit emerging from a swimming pool. He was working on a scent that smelled like leather sprinkled with sugar. His goal at Hermès, he said, was “to show that the perfume is not the result of chance but a reflection of a reasoned process.” He made a series of stepping motions with his hand, squinting at a target ahead. “When you start out, it’s more about your passions. At the end, it’s intellectual.”