Hermès perfume: scents of beauty

Every morning at eight o’clock, Jean-Claude Ellena makes the two-mile journey from his home in the hills of Provence to a 1960s glass-walled house, cocooned by a Saltzmann pine forest, in the medieval village of Cabris, above Grasse. Once inside, he takes a Nespresso capsule from a red leather box and pops it in the machine, drinking in the view of the Provençal hills and, in the distance, the Mediterranean. Then, at 8.30am, he goes downstairs, sits at a large Ikea desk and begins work.

Work is smelling, thinking and smelling again. Ellena, 68, has been creating perfumes exclusively for Hermès since 2004, but began working in the industry at 17. The son of a perfumer, his is a strict, minimalist approach fuelled by a metaphysical appreciation of fragrance, but that doesn’t mean he can’t have a little fun. “One part of my job is to find the shortest way to express a smell,” Ellena explained on the scorching day in July when I visited the house, which has a laboratory in the basement. “Take this,” he instructed, a touch of the twinkly showman in his eye as he handed me a touche he had dipped into a glass vial containing a molecule called Fructone. We sniffed the paper blotter: it smelt like apples. He dipped another touche into a molecule called Ethyl Maltol: a whiff of candyfloss. He placed the two strips together and waved them in the air. The scent was immediate, drawing shy smiles beneath the poised noses of the assembled group: strawberry.

Ellena has access to more than 1,000 ingredients, natural and synthetic, but his lab stocks only 200. They are kept in three large fridges manned by two  female assistants. Over the years he has “decreased, decreased, decreased” the collection. “When I started, perfumery was very complicated,” he said. “Everyone was making rose or muguet [lily of the valley] with complex formulae, so of course I did too. When I created First [for Van Cleef & Arpels in 1976] I used 160 products. Terre d’Hermès [launched in 2006] is only 30.” He laughed his long, hearty ha-ha, then grew serious. “My belief is that perfume is an art. If I can use fewer products I can be more precise but still do a lot of things.” He paused for effect. “There are 500 molecules coming together to give you the taste of strawberries. I give the effect with two.”

In the 11 years since he took up residence here, Ellena has transformed Hermès’s perfume division. Classic scents such as Eau d’Hermès (1951) and Calèche (1961) sold moderately prior to his arrival but were no match for the success of rival luxury juggernauts. Under his nose Hermès has launched the Jardins collection, inspired by gardens all over the world, and Hermessence, a boutique line, as well as colognes and other individual fragrances. It has worked: sales of scents were up 10 per cent last year, contributing to an overall increase in the house’s annual revenue, to an estimated €4.1 billion.

Not that Ellena professes to care about sales. For unlike other contracted perfumers, provided with marketing-led briefs by fashion houses who seek to prioritise profit over pong, Hermès has always given Ellena carte blanche. “The sales figures are interesting for Hermès,” he said, laughing, “but there are no briefs. Our philosophy is that of the storyteller. Creation is une mise en récit – a narration. If I meet just one person who is very pleased with their perfume and the story, that is enough for me.”

The perfumer-as-artist patter masks a shrewdness. Ellena’s latest perfume, Le Jardin de Monsieur Li, was released in March and is a fresh citrus cologne inspired by the gardens of China. “I’m not stupid in the way of a marketing approach,” he conceded. “When I told a Chinese fellow what I was going to call the new perfume, he said it was a good idea because there are 20 million people called Monsieur Li in China. That’s 20 million bottles. I’m rich!”

His sagacity extends to the question of legacy. In March Ellena named a successor in Christine Nagel, a perfumer 10 years his junior who previously held the reins at Jo Malone. Half-Swiss, half-Italian, she could not be more different from Ellena. Nagel is not from a family of perfumers, neither did she grow up in Grasse. Where Ellena was once an apprentice to the great master perfumer Edmond Roudnitska (he who successfully bottled the scent of lily of the valley for Diorissimo), Nagel, who trained as a chemist, faced serious opposition when she decided she wanted to create original perfumes. An extrovert, she refused to let her sex or her background count against her, eventually winning the mentorship of the perfumer Michel Almairac. In 1997 she was snapped up by Quest International, then a major perfume producer, and began creating hits such as Miss Dior Chérie (2005), Narciso Rodriguez For Her (2006) and Giorgio Armani Sì (2013). 

Ellena, who had long pondered the issue of an heir, invited her to visit him in 2013. Nagel remembers her arrival as an arresting experience. “It is a bubble. But one feels free,” she told me, gesturing around the cool, calm living room. “The house was magical. I was so happy.” When Ellena proposed she come and work for Hermès, she punched the air.

The two have since established a harmonious working relationship that navigates Ellena’s slow progress to more of an ambassadorial role, in parallel with Nagel’s emergence as the chief nose. Nagel, who lives in Paris, spends Fridays being a “sponge”, absorbing all things Hermès at its HQ in the Parisian suburb of Pantin. She concocts perfumes, lives with them on her skin all weekend and makes corrections on Monday. She then emails a revised formula to the Cabris lab technicians, who have prepared samples for her by the time she arrives at the house on Wednesday morning. Wednesday and Thursday are spent making further adjustments – she sleeps in the house and works late on Wednesday evenings – before she returns to Paris.

Ellena, a self-confessed “lone fellow”, has had to adapt to Nagel’s trial-and-error methodology. They work on separate projects in the same room, their desks facing one another’s. “My approach is very intellectual. I don’t do a lot of work,” he said, smiling. “I’m thinking a lot and making tiny changes. Christine is trying 20 times – her approach is much more intuitive.” On the day that we met, this was made manifest by two blue stickers on Nagel’s arm – perfume trials that she had been working on earlier that day. Ellena, by contrast, never wears scent – save for Terre d’Hermès about three times a year – the better to neutralise his nose. Despite their differences they clearly enjoy a close rapport and tease each other with the ease of old friends. “Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. But he respects my ideas, and I respect his,” Nagel said, before Ellena interjected. “Sometimes I don’t agree with her but in my head I think, give it time, she will change. She will think the same way as me.” They erupt into giggles.

Their jollity is offset by a third perfumer working in the house: Céline Ellena, Jean-Claude’s daughter, has held a post here since 2010, when she was assigned the home-fragrance line. By far the most ethereal of the three, Céline, 47, worked for the perfume supplier Charabot for five years until she was made redundant when it was acquired by Robertet in 2007. Having always harboured dreams of being a journalist (and having studied linguistics and psychology prior to perfumery), she began to write a blog about her reactions to smell – anything from expunging the odour of teenagers with Febreze to the smell of espadrilles – to pass the time. Her musings, entitled Chroniques Olfactives, came to the attention of Pierre-Alexis Dumas, the creative director of Hermès, who was suitably impressed and asked her to meet him.

Céline was hesitant. “I was quite afraid. It was Hermès and they already had the connection with my father, and working with him was not so easy,” she told me, as we meandered down the road to a local restaurant for lunch. “Pierre-Alexis had already discussed the idea of home fragrance with Jean-Claude, so asked me to make some trials. I said I would, but insisted that if it was not right they should let me go and not feel an obligation.”

She began working on ideas in the winter of 2011, becoming engrossed with the concepts espoused in Gaston Bachelard’s influential book The Poetics of Space and the notion of the home being ‘a safe haven for dreamers’. The fruits of her experiments were a scented pebble and five scented candles, inspired variously by footsteps in the snow, open windows, rainy days, fresh air, and a saddled-up horse. Each was accompanied by a haiku and encased within white, textured, Limoges porcelain vessels dreamt up by the French designer Guillaume Bardet. ‘Home fragrance is very private,’ she said. “I didn’t want to overwhelm that smell you get when you’ve been away, open your front door and say, “I’m home!”’ Replacements for your plug-in Glade air freshener these are not.

I asked her what each perfumer has learnt from the others. “In the beginning my father taught me philosophy but never technical perfumery,” she said. “I have learnt from him not to be afraid of feeling empty. Even if you have no ideas – just work, just try.” Her father said the same of her. “After I finish a perfume there is always frustration. Often ideas fail to appear on demand. Céline has taught me to be patient.” As for Nagel, she is still chasing “la clarté du propos” – a clarity in her perfumes that she says is a hallmark of the Hermès aesthetic. “I know my work, I am a perfumer, but Jean-Claude has taught me the spirit of Hermès. And now I have that spirit in my perfumes.” We walked back to the house, Nagel picking her way carefully down cobbled streets in her dainty Hermès slingbacks. She opened the door and breathed in the air. “Ah, c’est beau!”