Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (18 page)

Today, a mere
10
percent of the ingredients used to create perfumes are natural. The remaining
90
percent are synthetic. Ellena told me, surprisingly, that this is not such a bad thing. When I asked him about the quality difference between synthetics and pure ingredients, he said, “I put natural and synthetics at the same level. They are constructive materials.”

Ellena ushered me into his lab—a small sunny room next to the living room—to make his point. He reached over to one of the two turning stainless-steel stands that hold the clear glass flacons of the
115
odors he prefers to work with. About
40
percent are natural, the remaining
60
synthetic. He opened a flacon containing a synthetic called alcohol phenylethylique, dipped a white
touche
into it, and handed it to me to smell. The odor was chemical and bitter. He dipped another into geraniol, put it with the first one, and I took a whiff: tea rose. He took a third
touche,
dipped it into ionone beta. Alone, it smelled of coconut oil, like Hawaiian Tropic sunscreen. But when Ellena put it with the other two, the overall odor was Chinese rose. “With a hint of sake,” he added. He dipped a fourth into acetate de benzyle and added it to the mix, and we had a big, full-blossomed rose like you find at the florist. “I am an illusionist,” he said with a laugh. “I make you believe.”

He dipped a
touche
into essence of rose Turque, and handed it to me. It was potent and dense—far more than the synthetics. I smelled honey. “And Armagnac,” Ellena pointed out. “If I’m looking for the smell of aged alcohol, I’d say, ‘Ah! Rose Turque!’ If I want the smell of sake it’s alcohol phenylethylique. Geraniol is sparkling. If I want a perfume with bubbles—tight, compact bubbles that move—I use geraniol. I don’t use materials for what they smell, but for what they do.”

The first synthetic, Ellena told me, was created in
1853
: aldehyde benzoic, which smells of bitter almond. By the late ninetieth century, there were loads of synthetics in perfume: Guerlain’s famous perfume Jicky, introduced in
1879
, included synthetics. “During the Industrial Revolution, we believed in progress, that it would solve all the problems of the world,” Ellena explained, “and perfumes profited.” By
1920
, chemists had come up with
80
percent of the synthetics used today.

Ellena has spent his whole life immersed in the perfume business. Raised in a small town near Grasse, he quit high school at the age of seventeen because he didn’t like formal studies. His father, a perfumer, helped him find a job manufacturing essences such as jasmine, clove, sandalwood, and lavender. Soon he was promoted to nose. In the late
1960
s, Ellena spent a year in the United States to learn about the American market, then in the early
1970
s moved to Paris, where he worked for Givaudan. He created his first luxury brand perfume, called First, for Van Cleef & Arpels in
1976
. He was twenty-eight. Since then, he has produced more than one hundred scents, including Declaration for Cartier, In Love Again for Yves Saint Laurent, Eau parfumée au thé for Bulgari, Night for Her for Emporio Armani, and Bazar Femme for Christian Lacroix. “I never know if a perfume will be a success,” he says, “but I know what to do to not make a bad perfume.”

Today Ellena is one of eighty noses in France, and one of the most efficient. He prefers to use
10
to
20
different odors in his formula, versus
150
to
300
, which is the norm in the business, and he is known to work quickly. He came up with the basic formula for Hermès’s Un Jardin en Méditerranée in two weeks and spent three months finalizing it. His initial inspiration was the scent of fig leaves lining a tray that was being used to serve champagne at a cocktail party. Ellena lives some of the legends of being a nose—he doesn’t eat garlic, and his house has no scents whatsoever. But he debunks other myths, like the idea of top notes and base notes. “That’s bull,” he said. “When you smell perfume, you smell everything at the same time.” When I asked about making different perfumes for men and women, he scrunched his nose and waved his hand dismissively. “That’s just marketing.”

In
1998
, Ellena met Véronique Gautier, then head of perfumes for Cartier; she hired him to create Declaration. Not long after, Gautier joined Hermès, and she asked Ellena to do their new scent, Un Jardin en Méditerranée (A Garden in the Mediterranean), which launched in
2003
. The company was so pleased with its success that the next year Gautier brought Ellena in-house, where he created Un Jardin sur le Nil (Garden on the Nile), which would serve as the centerpiece for Hermès’s theme the following year, “As a River Runs.” The brief Gautier provided was extremely brief: the name Un Jardin sur le Nil. “I had an idea in my head of what the perfume should be—jasmine, orange flower, lotus flower, spice, and saffron—because these are the smells I imagined you smell in Egypt,” Ellena told me. Then he traveled to Aswan, Egypt, to confirm his idea and discovered there were no jasmine blooms, no orange blossoms, and no lotus flowers. “It caused me great anxiety,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep that first night because I had to wipe this idea completely out of my mind.”

The next morning, Ellena set about constructing a new recipe. He went to the Aswan souk, where he saw lotus root soaking in glass bowls filled with water. He took a whiff and found that the water smelled of lotus flower. He went for a hike on Elephantine Island, across the Nile from the Old Cataract Hotel, and pulled leaves off the trees and bushes and scrunched them to release their odor. He was most taken with the scent of sycamore. “I kept that smell,” he said. He went down the Nile to a Nubian village where the mango trees were covered with ripe fruit. He found that odor enchanting and decided to make it the theme of the perfume. He returned to Paris, wrote down the formula that was in his head, and gave it to his assistants. It was
70
percent of what became the final perfume in the bottle. “In the beginning of the twentieth century, perfumery was more figurative. It was floral bouquets,” he told me. “Now we are in narrative: the perfume tells a story.” Next, he says, perfume will be olfactive: you will be able to smell a place. Like Un Jardin sur le Nil. You can smell the souk, the mango groves, the heat, and the dry desert. “You will travel with perfume,” he said.

Ellena constructed Un Jardin sur le Nil with both synthetic and natural ingredients. For naturals, Ellena turns to Laboratoire Monique Rémy (LMR), a small lab in Grasse that is the leading supplier of
100
percent pure raw materials for the perfume industry. I visited LMR a few days after meeting with Ellena. When I drove up to the headquarters, tucked in the middle of a charmless industrial park on the outskirts of town, and saw the place—two big navy corrugated metal warehouses with poured cement floors—it was hard to imagine LMR as the perfume equivalent to a couture atelier. But as soon as I stepped out of the car, there was no doubt: even there in the parking lot, I was bowled over by the aroma of flowers, grasses, and spices.

I entered the administrative office’s small reception room. On the wall hung a
1997
Certified Vendor Award from Estée Lauder Companies, “presented to LMR for outstanding quality and service in providing essential oils.” Displayed in glass cases were some of LMR’s recent hits: Prada’s signature women’s fragrance, Givenchy’s Very Irresistible and Organza, Viktor & Rolf’s Flowerbomb, Dior Homme. LMR’s general manager, Bernard Toulemonde, a kind, gentle man, walked in, introduced himself, and explained to me the LMR mission. “We work with only the most noble extracts: white flowers, roses, tuber rose, daffodil, narcissus, jasmine, mimosa, and iris, which is the Rolls-Royce of perfumery,” he said. “There is a parallel between what we do and haute cuisine. The best food is only achieved by using the best ingredients.” Same with perfume, he explained. “There is not a great perfume today that does not have LMR products in it.”

LMR was born out of frustration. From the
1960
s to the early
1980
s, Monique Rémy worked for the big perfume groups, including Unilever and Pfizer, as a chemical engineer specializing in natural ingredients. It was a time when tycoons had started to take over luxury brands and demand more profits in all product areas, including perfume. “As a plant manager, she delivered what the industry wanted: the same but cheaper,” Toulemonde explained. “They started stretching the product with solvents to make it cheaper to the point that nobody knew what natural was anymore.” Ellena remembered that period well. “Grasse had lost its soul,” he told me. “Most companies there were doing scents like ready-to-wear. If Givaudan wanted a rose at this price, the lab said, ‘We’ll do it, and cheaper!’ They would dilute their good products with less expensive ones. The quality had changed and was uneven.”

By the early
1980
s, Rémy had grown so disillusioned that she decided to go into business herself. Her idea, as Ellena recalls, was “stupidly simple”:
100
percent pure ingredients. Her products cost far more than the diluted ones that were in use. To sell them, she bypassed the commercial and marketing departments of the big laboratories and went straight to the noses. Once the noses got a whiff of her goods, that’s all they wanted. “The perfumers started telling the buyers to buy at LMR,” Toulemonde said. And the business took off. “It was very courageous of her,” Ellena told me. “She did the inverse of what the market was at the time.”

Like the couturiers in Paris a decade earlier, Rémy sold her company in
2000
to a big group—International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF)—with the idea of soon retiring. But she wasn’t pleased with how the corporate executives were running the company, and she fought with them for LMR’s autonomy. She won. In
2002
, she hired Toulemonde, a food engineer who had worked for Nestlé and Sanofi, as her new general manager. The following year, she retired and left Toulemonde in charge; her daughter Frédérique, who had worked as the company’s commercial director, left in
2005
. LMR is small: it has thirty-four employees and does about €
13
million ($
16
.
3
million) a year in business,
40
percent of which is with IFF. The remaining
60
percent of LMR’s business is with the other big groups, Hermès and Chanel. “Those two houses use more naturals than anyone else,” Toulemonde told me.

He handed me a pair of plastic protective eyeglasses and guided me into the plant next door. The room is the size of an airplane hangar, with towering, mad-scientist-like contraptions of aluminum tubes and big Pyrex glass balloons that percolate and steam and drip various fragrant potions and oil-drum-sized vats filled with orange, brown, or green goo. I walked over and sniffed one and nearly sneezed. I read the label: hay. On the shelves sat canisters as small as
250
grams and up to
10
kilos. In the back was a walk-in refrigerator that contained about half a year’s production, from two years ago, as inventory and insurance. “We’re dealing with nature,” Toulemonde pointed out as we stood in the chilly walk-in, “and nature generally delivers once a year and sometimes only a fraction.”

LMR’s specialty is made-to-measure ingredients, a complicated and expensive process that only a few top brands, such as Hermès, can afford. “Say I buy the best quality lavender on the market,” Ellena explained to me. “Lavender has three hundred molecules in it. I tell the lab to cut it in slices for me, like a sausage. This is high tech, to slice it like this. I go and smell all the slices and choose the ones I want, the best ones, and have them put those molecules back together. I have a unique quality and it becomes the beginning of a creation. I created the essence of orange in Un Jardin sur le Nil like this with Monique Rémy. Sure, it’s more costly, but that’s not a problem at Hermès. The industrial level can’t do this.”

LMR has given birth to a small renaissance in Grasse. Toulemonde tells me that a handful of young entrepreneurs have moved to the region and are reviving the flower-growing business. It’s a boutique industry: they are small firms, many of which are following practices of sustainable agriculture, like LMR. “It’s very trendy, like organic vegetables,” Toulemonde said with a laugh. No one, though, grows Centifolia—they leave that to Joseph Mul. “It’s a high-cost flower, and yield is too small,” Toulemonde explained.

The perfume business has now become like luxury fashion. There’s the tiny couture division, with a handful of small producers in places such as Grasse, the Comores, Turkey, and Egypt, which supply exclusive labs like LMR. And there are the ready-to-wear producers in third-world nations such as India and China that churn out synthetics for the big boys. The reasoning for the shift is the same as in fashion: cost. “You can’t earn enough in raw materials,” Ellena said.

I
N THE MID-1990S
,
luxury brands began to test-market their perfumes. “[Luxury perfume] has become such a big business that brands want to make sure their investment is worth it,” a perfume lab executive explained to me. Chanel didn’t start testing until the creation of Allure in
1996
, and it tests only for the color of the juice and the packaging, never the scent. For Allure, the color tested badly in the United States, so it was changed. Ellena insists that Hermès does not test its perfumes in any way before a launch. “Market testing is the best way to repeat or copy perfumes consumers already know,” he told me, “not to create.”

Once a perfume is ready to go, the marketing department organizes a “launch” to get the press rolling. Some launches are restrained: I remember attending one for Issey Miyake’s Le Feu d’Issey in
1998
that was a low-key luncheon for fifty reporters and editors at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris with speeches by executives and samples of the perfume to take back to the office to try out. Others are less restrained. When Yves Saint Laurent, then owned by the Gucci Group, launched Nu in
2001
, it threw a wild late-night party at the old French stock exchange with topless dancers in flesh-colored thongs rolling around in a giant Plexiglas corral. “All I see is an orgy,” cracked American fashion designer Jeremy Scott at the fete. “[This launch] is all about money. It’s in the Bourse. It’s a money event.”