Deluxe

by Dana Thomas

  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 1960s, Ellena spent a year in the United States to learn about the American market, then in the early 1970s 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 1960s to the early 1980s, 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 1980s, 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.

  IN 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.”

  To celebrate the launch of Un Jardin sur le Nil, in February, 2005, Hermès organized a trip to Aswan for two dozen fashion writers and editors as well as Hermès public relations and communications directors from around the world. Hermès chartered a plane from Paris on Air Egypt, brought along champagne and good bordeaux (which Hermès reps served during the flight, since it was a Muslim-run carrier), and lodged everyone in Aswan’s finest hotels. For three days, there were nonstop activities: boat trips down the Nile, champagne-drenched picnics, a guided tour of the Temple of Isis, a Nubian banquet under the vaulted dining room of the Old Cataract with festive music by an orchestra and choir flown in from Cairo, and of course, at midnight, belly dancing. All of this was to give the Hermès staff who attended a flurry of ideas for marketing and advertising campaigns as well as window and store displays, and to provide the attending journalists color for their Un Jardin sur le Nil stories. Everyone went home with a bottle.

  A few weeks after the Aswan trip, Un Jardin sur le Nil was everywhere. I walked through department stores in Paris and was spritzed by bottle-wielding ladies. There were ads, posters, and magazine stories. “You might spend the same amount in advertising that you’d expect in first-year sales,” Tom Ford told me. “If you are expecting $25 million in sales, you’ll spend $25 million in advertising.” And like a mortgage, you have to keep paying. “You must invest every year in fragrance advertising,” Jacques Polge said. “When you stop investing in publicity, sales drop.” The investment worked for Jardin sur le Nil. In its first year, it did approximately $18 million in sales, making it the number one scent in Hermès’s $100 million perfume stable. Number two was Eau de Merveille, which debuted a year earlier and sold a bit less than Un Jardin sur le Nil. “Today, it’s difficult to have a success,” Polge told me. “When you look at the number of perfumes that are launched and how few remain…The difficulty is not only to succeed, but to last.”

  WHEN A PERFUME does succeed, the profits are formidable all around. The laboratory sells the juice to the licensee at two and a half times the cost. The licensee retails it for two to four times its cost and earns about 30 to 40 percent in profits. The licensee then pays the luxury brand royalties for use of the name. The big money is made in volume, which is why perfumes are pushed on the mass-market level, everywhere from department stores to airport duty-free shops—two thousand points of sale in the United States for major brands such as Chanel or Dior is not unusual. Hermès, by contrast, is in fewer than three hundred.

  Since the late 1990s, perfume sales have dropped, despite a dramatic increase in advertising. Like many in the business, Polge blames the crisis on what he calls the “banalization of perfumery”: the industrialization of creation, which kills craftsmanship, the mass distribution in perfumery chains—which, Polge says, “focus on the ephemeral side of perfume. All that we put into perfume disappears [there]”—and the “quick hits” like celebrity perfumes. They can be very lucrative—Jennifer Lopez’s Glow, launched in 2002, sold $80 million worth in its first three years—but they generally have a short life and contribute greatly to the market’s saturation.

  In response to sluggish sales and declining profits, luxury brands have quietly been slashing the cost of production. One of the easiest places to cut back on cost—and therefore quality—is in packaging. When Alain Lorenzo took over as CEO of Parfums Givenchy in 1996, he eliminated the cellophane inside perfume boxes. Cartondruck, a leading packaging manufacturer, has been told by luxury brands “to look at how we can execute the design at the lowest price,” says Bruce Betancourt, general manager for the company’s American branch in Fairview, New Jersey. “We will run four-color process instead of twelve. We can print metallics instead of restamping them. Sometimes we reduce th
e size of the box so we can print more boxes per sheet.” Most luxury brands have also eliminated what Betancourt called “flute liners”: the protective corrugated paper board around the bottle inside the box. “Now that is rarely used,” he says. The same goes with bottle production. Bottles for luxury perfumes cost on average 10 percent of total production cost, a figure that luxury brands constantly strive to reduce. “Everyone cuts corners, and they do it through the production,” Catherine Descourtieux, marketing director for Saint-Gobain Desjonquères, a leading maker of perfume bottles in Paris. “You can alter the shape of the bottle slightly or work with colors that cost less—subtle things that the buyer won’t notice.” Says Betancourt: “All brands launch their perfumes with what is more design-driven and then later make value-driven decisions to maintain the same look but reduce the aesthetics to reduce costs. This is pretty consistent.”

  But more and more, luxury brands are also looking for ways to produce cheaper juice. For new perfumes, luxury brands submit briefs with a final production price that is half of what it was a decade ago—a price that, Polge says, “is impossible to meet at any quality. They ask to construct jasmine without any flowers. Sure, there’s been a progress in chemistry: we can reconstruct jasmine better than we would thirty years ago, but it’s lower in quality than the lowest of real jasmine. No odor can replace another. Replacing one with another that is less expensive is the greatest error you can make.” One company looked into taking the entire production process to China. “It was going to be produced and filled at the same location,” Betancourt remembered. To lower the production cost of existing perfumes, luxury brands have done something once unthinkable: they have instructed laboratories to change legendary formulas by using cheaper flowers or synthetics, or by simply diluting the perfume. “They say, ‘We need to cut costs. Do what you can to lower your prices,’” Jean-Claude Ellena told me.