Deluxe

by Dana Thomas

  The roses are brought into the plant, weighed into fifty-kilo—about 120-pound—batches, and dumped into one of Mul’s four vats, called extractors. There are five levels of fifty kilos each in the extractor, each separated by a giant disklike grille so that the flowers aren’t crushed. The vat is filled with a volatile chemical called hexane, which dissolves the molecules in the flowers and extracts their principal fragrance. When the process is complete, the five layers of brown, spent roses are pulled out—it looks like a giant hazelnut layer cake without icing—and discarded in a regulated compost receptacle. The syrupy liquid that remains is cooked in a still until the solvent evaporates and is captured for reuse, leaving approximately six hundred grams of concrete, a waxy burnt orange substance that smells like pungent rose candles. Concrete is stored in tin canisters and has a shelf life of about two years.

  When perfumers are ready to make their perfume, they mix the concrete with alcohol—which, at Chanel, is made from beets—and chilled at–15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit). The fat rises to the top, leaving the absolute in the alcohol. The potion is reheated at 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), the alcohol evaporates, and what remains is the absolute. It takes four hundred kilos of roses to make one kilo of concrete, which itself is made up of four hundred grams of wax and six hundred grams of absolute.

  Another method used to capture scent from flowers is hydrodistillation to extract essential oil. Flowers are heated with steam at 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit) until their sacs of scented oil burst. The steam carries the oil into a chilled condenser, where the steam turns back into water. The essential oil is then separated from the water and bottled. Sometimes, the fragrant water is bottled, too. Rosewater, for example, has long been known for its healing properties, and is used as a refreshing wash or antiseptic. As Chanel uses only Centifolia absolute for its perfume, the Muls do very little hydrodistillation—only enough to provide friends and visitors bottles of rosewater each May. Essence and absolute have different attributes and therefore different uses in perfume creation. Absolute is “more rich,” Jean-Claude Ellena, the perfume creator—or “nose”—for Hermès, explained to me. “Essence is more exciting, vibrant and alive.”

  THE PERFUME INDUSTRY does $15 billion a year in sales. Some perfumes are the old stalwarts we all know: Chanel No. 5, Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium, Diorissimo, Nina Ricci’s L’Air du Temps. But the majority are new. About two hundred new perfumes are launched each year—double the number from a decade ago. The reason is simple: perfume is luxury’s most accessible and powerful product. It’s easy to sell, and it crosses borders, cultures, and target audiences with ease. For example, 30 to 35 percent of all successful male-targeted perfumes are worn by women. Perfume serves as an introduction to, as well as a flag-bearer for, a brand—and it reaps great profits. “[Dior’s perfume division’s] relationship with Dior Couture is extremely important,” Parfums Christian Dior’s chief financial officer, Jacques Mantz, explained. “All the communication and what happens around the couture brand helps our [perfume] division, and the broad presence of the perfumes in selective retailers around the world supports the Dior couture brand.” In other words, perfume allows you, as the tycoons like to say, to buy into the dream.

  At the same time, perfume has a mystical, magical quality. It catches your attention, enchants you. It complements and enhances your personality. It stirs emotion, within you and others around you. “Perfume was a link between gods and mortals. It was a way to contact the gods,” Hermès’s Ellena told me. “Now it is a profane link: it’s between you and me.” French poet Paul Valéry said, “A woman who does not perfume herself has no future.”

  One day a few years ago, a woman went to the Osmothèque, a perfume conservatory in Versailles, and told its president, Jean Kerléo, that she wanted to find her mother, who had long ago died. Kerléo was taken aback. Her mother, the woman explained, always wore the same oriental floral scent, called Arlequinade, introduced by Paul Poiret’s Parfums de Rosine in 1920. Her clothes smelled of it. The house reeked of it. A cloud of it lingered whenever she passed by. Arlequinade was her mother. Arlequinade disappeared in 1928 after Les Parfums de Rosine went bankrupt. The only place it still existed was in the Osmothèque’s inventory of seventeen hundred perfumes. Kerléo took a touche—a strip of white absorbent paper used by perfumers to test scents—dipped it in the tiny brown vial, and handed it to the woman. She inhaled, then sighed. “Ah, mother.”

  Perfume, like luxury, has a history as long as civilization itself. Prehistoric man applied scent to his body, and the Mesopotamians burned incense for the gods. The Egyptians discovered enfleurage—the process of crushing aromatic plants such as roses, crocuses, and violets in oil, which they kept in elaborate glass bottles and used for massage and their daily toilette. For parties, they would throw flower petals across the floor that perfumed the room when guests trod on them. Cleopatra was so obsessed with scent that the sails of her cedar ship were perfumed. “From the barge / a strange invisible perfume hits the sense / of the adjacent wharfs,” wrote Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra.

  In Crete, athletes anointed themselves with specific aromatic oils before the games, wrote Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses. Greek writers suggested mint for the arms; thyme for the knees; cinnamon, rose, or palm oil for the jaw and chest; and marjoram for the hair and eyebrows. Alexander the Great liberally perfumed his body and had his tunics soaked in saffron essence. Romans bathed in perfume, saturated their clothes in it, drenched their horses and pets with it. Gladiators massaged their bodies with various scented lotions before battle.

  In the thirteenth century, a Spanish alchemist named Arnaud de Villeneuve refined the process of distilling alcohol—called aquae vitae (waters of life)—and soon after, modern perfume as we know it was born. “Alcohol was used as a medicine, and to make it more agreeable, it was perfumed with lemon or herbs,” Kerléo explained to me when I visited him at the Osmothèque in October 2006. Kerléo knows perfumes better than anyone else today: he served as Patou’s chief perfumer for thirty-five years, and in 1990 founded Osmothèque, which he still runs.

  He took out a touche and dipped it in a small flacon labeled Eau de la Reine de Hongrie (Queen of Hungary Water), which Kerléo said was the first aromatic alcohol, created in 1370 for Queen Elizabeth of Hungary to treat rheumatism and gout. It smelled of rosemary and burned my nostrils slightly when I inhaled. The queen used it liberally most of her adult life, and it is said to have preserved her great beauty.

  French king Louis XIV had a team of servants on hand to perfume his rooms with rosewater and marjoram and to wash his clothes in a bath of spices and musk. He ordered his perfumer to create a new scent every day. For parties at the “Perfume Court” of Louis XV, the staff doused doves in scent and released them to fly about the guests, each flap of the wing filling the salons with a rich aroma. During the eighteenth century, women perfumed their clothes and bodies, dusted their hair with sweet-smelling powder, and scented their rooms with potpourris. Napoleon doused himself in two entire bottles of eau de cologne, from Cologne, Germany, during his morning toilet.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, perfume as we know it today came about when French perfume houses such as Houbigant and Guerlain began creating scents for old-moneyed aristocrats and the new-moneyed industrialists. Like couture and leather goods, perfume was an independent business, its own domain, until 1910, when couturier Paul Poiret introduced his first scent, Coupe d’Or (Golden Cup), Kerléo said. He dipped a touche into a small flask of Coupe d’Or and handed it to me. I inhaled its spicy, floral musk. “It’s very modern, no?” Kerléo said. “Something you could wear today.” He was right. I wanted to dab some on right then and there.

  Poiret produced thirty-six perfumes in fifteen years, straight through World War I. One, a rich sweet scent called Fruit Défendu (Forbidden Fruit), was launched during the war, causing a great scandal. “How you could produce something so luxurious
when our sons are dying in the trenches?” the public howled. They bought it nevertheless. Poiret’s products sold, but he lost a fortune in the 1929 stock market crash. Shortly after, he went bankrupt and fifteen years later he died a pauper. His perfumes and his couture designs have mostly been forgotten. But his idea of couture brand perfumes lived on. Chanel, Lanvin, Schiaparelli, and Patou all launched perfumes before World War II. The scents were heavy, full of spice and flowers. The bottles were works of art, produced by fine crystal makers as Baccarat and Lalique, and the customer base was extremely limited. Perfume—known in the business as extract, because of its potency—became an essential part of upper-class dress, like made-to-measure clothes, good shoes, fine leather gloves, and elegant chapeaux. The masses wore eau de cologne, a cheaper version that was a small dose of extract diluted with orange blossom or lemon water. “Eau de cologne was very fashionable in the 1920s, 1930s, before the war,” Chanel’s nose Jacques Polge explained. “It was sold in the mass market and worn in great quantities. Now it has practically disappeared.”

  In the 1930s, luxury perfume brands introduced eau de toilette, which is 6 to 12 percent extract diluted with solvents such as ethanol and water, and it became commonplace in the 1950s. Unlike eau de cologne, it smelled like a weaker version of the extract and sold for a fraction of extract prices. “Eau de toilette was created to take perfume to the street,” meaning to the middle market, Polge explained. “It was the beginning of the democratization of luxury perfume.”

  Shortly after Bernard Arnault purchased Dior in 1985, the luxury perfume business underwent a radical acceleration in creation, production, marketing, and consumption. At Dior, for example, in its first forty years, it created twelve perfumes—one every three or four years—including Miss Dior, Diorissimo, Diorella, and Eau Fraîche. In the twenty years since Arnault took over, Dior has introduced more than thirty. In 2005 alone, it launched four. Many are sequels: Dior’s 1985 hit Poison, for example, gave rise to Tendre Poison in 1994, Hypnotic Poison in 1998, and Pure Poison in 2004.

  In the 1980s, when luxury brands began to focus more on the middle market, they marketed eau de parfum, a more potent product—it is 8 to 20 percent concentrate, blended with alcohol—that sells for slightly more than eau de toilette. A 1.7-ounce bottle of Dior’s J’adore eau de parfum, for example, retails for $62; the same size eau de toilette is $50. It was a wise marketing ploy: by incorporating the word parfum (perfume) into the name of the product, luxury brands offered to the middle market what appeared to be a true luxury product, a piece of the dream. Perfume—known in the business as “extract”—is made of 15 to 30 percent concentrate blended with alcohol; it is still the most expensive scent product—J’adore perfume retails for $215 an ounce—and makes up for a small slice of sales. It has, in fact, become like couture: a modest portion of the business, targeted to the rich. To reach more of the middle market, and to earn more profits, luxury brands have extended their perfume scents into other product categories such as body lotion and bath oil.

  Today perfume in all its many forms is an essential component of a luxury brand. Old-time luxury brands that have nothing to do with fashion, such as the jewelers Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, all have perfumes. Newcomers such as Narciso Rodriguez and Stella McCartney have launched scents as soon as their fledgling companies could support it. Only one major luxury brand does not have one: Louis Vuitton. The company has a policy of strict control of distribution—it sells its products only in its own boutiques and Louis Vuitton sections of department stores—and it believes that is not a large enough retail network for a viable perfume business. Original perfume brands such as Coty have become corporate behemoths that churn out perfume products like Kraft makes cheese. Luxury brands dominate the perfume market: their glossy, gleaming counters clutter department stores, and their high-design packages dominate the shelves of duty-free stores, and perfume chains such as Sephora (owned by LVMH), shoving smaller houses such as Patou out of the picture.

  The greatest challenge to luxury brand perfumes today is the recent rise of the celebrity perfume, such as Sarah Jessica Parker’s Lovely and Jennifer Lopez’s Glow, both produced by Coty. Celebrity perfumes have a short, explosive life: they hit the market with a tsunami of publicity, sell vast amounts to the middle market, and then disappear. And they have pushed luxury brands such as Chanel, Dior, and Givenchy to do the same. “The industry has educated consumers to be volatile,” said Michael Steib, a consumer goods analyst at Morgan Stanley in London. “The challenge for the big labels is to differentiate themselves from the other brands that are often discounted, have a very short shelf life, and are totally dependent upon the names associated with them.”

  THE GRANDDADDY of modern perfumes is Chanel No. 5. World War II GIs fighting in Europe brought it home for their sweethearts. Mari lyn Monroe declared it was all she wore to bed. In 1959, the Museum of Modern Art added No. 5’s packaging to its permanent collection, and Andy Warhol produced a silk-screened image of the No. 5 bottle in a rainbow of colors. No. 5’s spicy oriental bouquet is the scent that young perfumers try to duplicate: it is the standard by which one measures a nose. It is said that a bottle of No. 5 sells every thirty seconds somewhere in the world every day.

  In 2003, Chanel’s beauty business reportedly did $1.6 billion in sales, thanks in large part to No. 5. According to Women’s Wear Daily, No. 5 produces a profit margin of 40 percent—more than four times that of its competitors. This reliable and substantial profit allows Chanel’s owners, the Wertheimer family, to grow the company cautiously and invest in long-term projects, such as the Muls’ farm. “No. 5 is outside of fashion,” Jacques Polge told me over dinner in Antibes following my visit to the flower fields. “It comes from another era, and each year that passes, the more strange and foreign it becomes.”

  Chanel’s founder, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, came from even more humble beginnings than Louis Vuitton. She was born in Saumur in 1883, one of three daughters of a sickly mother and a philandering father who worked as a traveling salesman. After their mother died of tuberculosis when Gabrielle was eleven, their father deposited the girls at an orphanage in the rustic region of Auvergne and was never to be seen again. At eighteen, Gabrielle was sent to a Catholic boarding school where the nuns taught her how to sew. She worked as a shopgirl for a local lingerie company and moonlighted at a tailor’s shop. She spent evenings at the town’s cabaret, singing for soldiers stationed there. Her two standards were “Ko Ko Ri Ko” (Cock-a-Doodle Doo) and “Qui Qu’a Vu Coco?” (Who Has Seen Coco?), a ditty about a lost dog. The soldiers shouted “Coco!” when she sang them. The name stuck.

  She made her way north toward Paris, where she became a courtesan and a milliner for the horse set. One of her beaux, the dashing polo player Arthur “Boy” Capel, set her up in a millinery business in 1910 at 21, rue Cambon, a block west of Place Vendôme and directly behind the Hôtel Ritz. In 1912, she opened a shop in Deauville, the Norman seaside resort and horseracing center for France, and in 1915 in the southwest Atlantic beach town of Biarritz. In 1918, Chanel moved the Paris shop to 31, rue Cambon, and it has been there ever since. She sold hats as well as a bit of ready-to-wear, which she fashioned out of soft, pliable jersey like that used for Capel’s polo shirts. It was a radical departure from the rigid taffetas and wools that were popular at the time.

  In 1919, Chanel was introduced to respected perfumer Ernest Beaux by her new lover, the grand duke Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov. Beaux was born to French perfumers in Russia in the 1880s and grew up in Moscow to become the czar’s official perfumer. When the Romanov dynasty fell, Beaux fled Russia and moved to La Bocca, an inland town on the Côte d’Azur near Cannes. Chanel met Beaux at his laboratory there to discuss the idea of creating a perfume. Back then, perfumes primarily were monoflora—violet, rose, orange blossom—and packaged in extravagant bottles. Chanel found it boring. “I want everything in the perfume,” she told Beaux, “and nothing in the bottle.” Her brief was just as succinct:
an abstract of flowers that would evoke the odor of women. Beaux whipped up a series of exotic essais (samples) that were so rich he needed something to balance them. He chose aldehydes, a group of organic compounds that have a chemical function like alcohol. “It was like putting lemon on strawberries,” Polge explained to me. Beaux presented his concoctions to Mademoiselle. She chose the fifth proposition and called it No. 5.

  Chanel No. 5 was, and still is, constructed of approximately eighty ingredients. The most important is jasmine, which since 1986 has been provided solely by Joseph Mul. There is ylang-ylang, an exotic flower that grows on the Comores Islands off the west coast of Africa, and patchouli, a dried leaf from Indonesia that was used as a repellent in silk shipments. There is orange blossom water and a variety of spices, particularly clove, which back in the 1920s was one of the most popular spices for perfume. And there is a healthy dose of Joseph Mul’s Centifolia roses. For the flask, Chanel chose the most banal shape she could find, a chemist’s laboratory bottle. “Now it’s the Rolls-Royce of bottle design,” Polge said with a laugh, “but then it was very simple.” The rectangular cut-glass stopper was based on Paris’s elegant Place Vendôme.