'My perfumes are my poems': One of the world's premier 'noses', Jean-Claude Ellena has created five new scents for Hermès. Deirdre McQuillan takes a sniff
As he plucks several touches (smell strips) from a glass holder, sprays one with vanilla and the other with orange, Jean-Claude Ellena smiles. "Perfume is a work of illusion, I like to create an impression." When I inhale them together, I get the slightly fruity smell of panettone, Italian Christmas cake. When he adds curaçao to the mix, and I sniff again, it's unmistakably gingerbread. He grins with the knowing look of a magician at my surprised reaction.
Then four sticks together, cinnamon, orange, vanilla and lime and my God, it's Coca Cola. His final flourish is vanilla plus phenylacetate isobutyl, and the smell of chocolate is immediate and precise. "Natural chocolate has 900 ingredients; I use two," he says proudly. It's a beginner's introduction to the skills of the perfumer - creating, composing, blending, and harmonising - words equally applied to other arts such as music. The comparison is apt, for Ellena maintains that both follow a similar process. "I have all the ingredients in my mind, like all the notes, and then I compose."
Master perfumers such as Ellena can remember hundreds, even thousands of formulas for the making of scents.
Ellena is regarded as one of the world's premier "noses", and is the creator of many successful fragrances such as Eau Parfumée for Bulgari, Eau de Campagne for Sisley and Cologne Bigarade for Frederic Malle. Two years ago, he was appointed Hermès's first inhouse perfumer, responsible for its "olfactory heritage and creation of future fragrances". Hermès is now the only fashion house, apart from Chanel, with a resident perfumer. Ellena's new Hermèssence collection is a quintet of fragrances, each with its own distinct character.
"My way of talking is with odours. You write with words, I write with odours," he says. He is a handsome man with an easygoing manner. His laboratory, more like an art gallery, is a starkly beautiful l970s house built of glass and surrounded by pine trees. From his desk there are distracting views down to the Mediterranean coast and the Côte d'Azur. It is a stone's throw from Grasse, the perfume capital of the world, where he was born.
Ellena is the son of a perfumer, and at the age of l7, he started studying at the town's school of perfumery, where his olfactory talents were honed and developed.
His scents are subtle, light and complex, but their formulas are short, with a deceptive simplicity that takes years to perfect. "You try to give a strong impression with a few lines. It's like an artist's sketch, or watercolour painting," he says.
His laboratory has less than 200 ingredients, where normally there would be around 1,000.
"I like short formulas because I like control of what I do." Creative freedom is important. He is dismissive of trends and proud that Hermès doesn't do marketing tests. "Marketing should follow the artist, not the other way around. I don't care about trends. My perfumes are my poems."
Chemistry, he says, made perfume an art. "It has given odours that didn't exist before and that don't exist in nature. Ancient fragrances would be disgusting to us today." He uses natural ingredients such as lavender when he wants to, but to his own exacting specifications. Perfumes may have strong emotional associations for those who wear them, but the mechanism of scent is physical chemistry.
Each of the five fragrances in the Hermèssence family has a different story. With Rose Ikebana, Ellena wanted to create the scent of a rose in the early morning dew. He softened the earthy vetivier with hints of hazelnut. Poivre Samarkand, "a story about pepper," he says, was stimulated by the memory of cutting down a big oak tree in his garden. "I smelled pepper, smoke, musk," he recalls.
Watching Egyptian men smoking water pipes in Aswan, their tobacco perfumed with cinnamon, apples and honey, inspired Amber Narguile, one of the most successful of the five scents. An olfactory memory of China and a tiny, but strong-smelling flower in Beijing's Imperial Garden informed Osmonde Yunnan, "a scent that grabbed my nose," he says.
Ellena is a keen watercolorist and a regular visitor to Dublin, where his wife, who is of Irish descent, has relations. He loves Ireland, especially Dingle "and the cold and windy north". But when it comes to his work, what is important to him is the relationship between the person and the fragrance. "People dress themselves with fragrance, which can also be a kind of barrier. You feel complicity when somebody chooses to wear your perfume. Perfumes can be noisy, but I like to think of mine as quiet - they do not disturb."
He is constantly at work on new ideas, and confesses that 95 per cent of them go into the bin. "To be a perfumer, you have to be passionate and have a strong memory of odours. My wife says that I may not remember a friend, but I always remember a formula I wrote 30 years ago. You put a lot of yourself in a bottle."