Hermes' secret to making classic perfumes

The French brand's renowned artisan - Jean-Claude Ellena - believes that using fewer scents will create a classic perfume.

The fashion world shares the saying: "As much as trees need water to grow green, Hermes perfume needs the talented hands of Jean-Claude Ellena."The perfume tycoon, his apprentice and daughter are holding the sweetest scent formulas - the secret to the success of a long-standing brand.

Creating perfumes since the age of 17 with Van Cleef & Arpels, Bvlgari, Cartier... until 2004 when Jean-Claude Ellena was 53 years old, the fashion house Hermes recruited him as the main and exclusive perfumer of the brand. Ellena brought about a breakthrough when the French fashion house's perfume profits tripled, of which the revenue in 2014 was estimated at 5.8 billion USD.

The most popular men's perfume line in France and Europe under Ellena's creative hand is Terre d'Hermes, launched in 2006. The two collections Hermessence and Un Jardin along with many masterpieces such as Elixir des Merveilles (2006), Kelly Caleche (2007), Jour d'Hermes (2012), Voyage d'Hermes (2012)... also brought Jean-Claude Ellena a famous reputation.

Jean-Claude Ellena's job is simply to smell and think about scents.

Jean-Claude Ellena sborn and raised in Grasse - townpoetic regionFrench Riviera, southeastern France - whereknown as the capital of perfume.Ellena was exposed to scents from his childhood because his father and grandfather were perfumers. Moreover, he often helped his grandmother harvest jasmine flowers to sell to the essential oil distilleries in town. At that time, the young Ellena especially loved the scents mixed with the wind and the characteristic damp smell of the garden after the rain. It became the inspiration for his masterpieces later.

Ellena's perfume career at Hermes was initially influenced by Edmond Roudnitska, her teacher and one of the world's most renowned perfumers. Roudnitska created classic, airy, garden-inspired base notes for both Dior and Hermes in the 1950s and 1960s. Ellena reinterpreted this inspiration with Terre d'Hermes. However, Ellena did not simply imitate her teacher. The masculine scent was described by him as "the scent of dry terracotta soaked with the first drops of rain". Its composition, in his hands, was not animalic like musk, but a blend of warm, spicy pepper, fresh citrus breezes and the warmth of cedarwood.

The Master's SecretJean-Claude Ellena is theminimalist, in which the perfume composition he created uses very few pure fragrances to create a new scent.

Ellenachooses a minimalist but coherent approach to each fragrance. “Part of my job is to find the shortest path to the scent,” he says. For example, fructone is the molecule that smells like apples, and ethyl maltol is the molecule that smells like cotton candy. When the perfumer sprinkles the two together, the resulting scent is strawberry.

The artist sees each bottle of perfume as a "work of art". He shared: "When I first started, perfume making was a troublesome job for me. At that time, people created the scent of roses or lilies of the valley with complicated formulas. I followed suit. And the First line of Van Cleef & Arpels was created from a synthesis of 160 different scents. But when I created Terre d'Hermès 30 years later, I only used 30 scents. In my belief, using as few scents as possible to create a perfume is a work of art."

Hermes perfumes are exquisite blends of very few fragrances.

"I used only five fragrances to create the illusion of blooming gardenias, and eight to give people the smell of sweet peas. Likewise, it takes 500 different fragrance molecules to create the artificial smell of strawberries. I only mixed two fragrances," he added.

Hermes' best-selling Un Jardin collection of fragrances was inspired by famous gardens around the world. Le Jardin de Monsieur Li is the latest and final product of the collection. Launched in 2015, it has the main scent of jasmine and ripe kumquat, accompanied by cool mint, the moist scent of morning dew, lake water, pebbles and green bamboo bushes. All exude the image of an ancient Chinese royal garden - a paradise for walking, meditating and finding peace. The jasmine scent, the brightest star of the masterpiece, was created by Ellena with only three fragrance samples with the advantage of being "much milder" than previous jasmine scents. Therefore, Le Jardin de Monsieur Li became the perfume that won the "Best of Beauty" award of Allure magazine last year.

Ellena came across over 1,000 different raw materials, both natural and synthetic, but he eventually kept only 200 of the most basic samples in his studio. Over the years, that collection gradually dwindled in number. No one knows the exact formula, but many believe that Ellena's secret lies in adjusting the concentration and ratio of a few basic scents.

Hermes perfumers can create strange yet familiar things like "the salty scent of the sea breeze" or "the scent of dry, water-soaked wood". In his opinion, today's scent is not simply a fragrant flower or strange grass, warm or fresh, but is also expanded as an olfactory weapon that awakens the senses and brings the user's subconscious into the surrounding natural space.

Jean-Claude Ellena works in aThe 1960s-style greenhouse, nestled in the quiet and secluded Saltzmann pine forest, he says his daily routine is to “smell, think, and smell again.” Even when the world economy was in crisis and consumers were more cautious about buying luxury items like perfume, Hermes did not impose revenue targets like other perfumers, but gave Ellena complete freedom and financial means to create whatever she wanted.

Perfumers Christin Nagel and Jean-Claude Ellena discuss fragrances in their studio.

As a perfumer, Ellena does not have the habit of wearing perfume. He prefers to smell the scents directly from nature, even strange ones. For him, that will create the perfect experience in the journey of creating fragrances. However, Ellena confessed that he has sprayed Terre d'Hermès on himself three times, as a way to "neutralize" other scents after a day's work.

In addition to her main career, Ellena is known in the fashion world as a "perfume writer" with many books written about this industry such as the autobiography Perfume: The Alchemy of Scent, The Perfect Scent: A Year in the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York or the diary The Diary of a Nose: A Year in the Life of a Parfumeur. These books summarize the experiences, thoughts and steps in the career of one of the great monuments of the modern perfume industry.

According to VNE