Article: Chandler Burr from FAIRLADY

Forty-five minutes later, Véronique Gautier, the president of the perfume division, walked in. Gautier, an elegant woman in her 40s, chatted briefly with Ellena, careful not to refer to the small glass spray vials that she knew he was carrying in his pocket. The presentation of an essai is a vulnerable moment for a perfumer. Finally, Gautier said, "Good. So what do you have?"

Ellena grinned and reached into his sports coat pocket. "Three," he said. He placed three spray vials, labelled AG3, AD2, and AD1, on the table. He picked up several touches – paper smell strips – sprayed them with scent, and handed them to Gautier and Dubrule. After a moment, Gautier broke the silence. "One of them I like," she declared. "One I don't like at all."

Changing themes

Every year, Dumas Hermès comes up with a theme for the fashion house. In 2003, it was the Mediterranean Sea. A year before, Gautier had discussed the project with Ellena, who was then working for Symrise, a German company. He "won the brief" – industry parlance for securing a contract. Gautier and Ellena then travelled to Tunisia and paid a visit to the summer home of Leïla Menchari, who designs the window displays in Hermès boutiques.

He created a scent that was inspired by Menchari's garden – it suggests warm sunlight splashed with cool water. The perfume was named Un Jardin en Méditerranée, and it became the first scent in a new Hermès collection: Les Jardins.

For 2005, Dumas Hermès had chosen "river" as the house's theme. At first, Gautier had considered requesting a scent that conjured a garden in the Amazon Basin. She then shifted her imagination to the Ganges. Finally, after consulting Dumas Hermès, Gautier chose the Nile, and a title: Un Jardin sur le Nil. That was the entire brief.

Egyptian adventures

In early May, Gautier, Dubrule, and Ellena flew from France to Egypt. Before the trip, Ellena had engineered a perfume in his head. Egypt inspired inevitable associations: heavy smells, such as incense, jasmine and wood smoke. Yet he wondered what a real Egyptian garden smells like. Dubrule had learnt of a large garden in Aswan, called Kitchener, and she decided that they would make a visit during the trip.

Upon arriving in Aswan, the Hermès group checked into the Old Cataract Hotel, whose slightly shabby rooms featured elegant wood porches. Sitting outside, Ellena sniffed the air of the Sahara and found it disconcertingly blank; he was so nervous that he couldn't sleep that night.

In the morning, they went to Kitchener, where there were few flowers in bloom. Gautier, Dubrule and Ellena were disappointed, but they nevertheless started smelling. They sniffed nasturtium, a salad green with an anodyne watercress scent. They tried lantana, a perennial whose flowers smell, rather limply, of banana and passion fruit. Ellena smelled the flowers of the acacia tree, which have a soft, frangipani-like scent.

He turned to Gautier and said, "That's not our story." She smelled it and agreed, dismissing it in her forceful manner. As Ellena walked through Kitchener, the perfume he had built in his head disintegrated and blew away; now he had nothing.

The group walked around Aswan. The markets were full of spices, and Ellena smelled lotus roots; when macerated in water, the root produces a smell halfway between peony and hyacinth. He also found some jasmin sambac, which is full of indoles, molecules that smell overwhelmingly animal-like.

Faeces are rich with indoles, he explained to Gautier and Dubrule, and so are decomposing bodies. It's feminine, the smell of death. Calvin Klein's Eternity is a heavily indolic perfume – the name must have been ironic, he joked. But indoles were not their story, either.

Down the river Nile

One morning, Ellena and his companions went for a trip on the Nile in an aged wooden motor boat. The Nile has an opalescent black hue that, in shallow depths, becomes transparent. It has a fresh smell. They motored past wild reeds and feluccas – narrow boats with tall triangular sails until they reached a small island.

Walking ashore, they followed a street that led to a Nubian village. It was during this stroll that Ellena saw, hanging low in the trees that lined the street, plump green mangoes.

The fruit has a complex, authentically exotic smell: It is rich and fresh simultaneously, a rare combination. The scent is also ephemeral. The fruit exudes an odour only when it is on the tree. Once you pick it, the smell deteriorates; within 60 seconds, it is essentially gone. Ellena was beguiled by this elusive fragrance. Green mango, he suggested to his companions, could form the base of Nil.

A surprise element

Back in the conference room in Paris, Gautier slapped the touche marked AG3 onto the table. "I reject AG3 – very clearly," she said. Ellena was unruffled. All three concoctions, he said, had been inspired by the Aswan mangoes. "AD2 is more lotusy, whereas AD1 is more woody," he explained.

And the rejected AG3? Ellena smiled. "AG3 has magnolia," he said.
Gautier's brow furrowed. "That doesn't surprise me," she said. Gautier kept picking up AG3 and saying, "No!," then throwing it down once more. Ellena said of AG3, "I put in a lot of incense."

He added with a grin, "And there's something in all of them you'll never guess." The women narrowed their eyes. "Something we talked about in Aswan," Ellena hinted.
"Papyrus?" Dubrule asked.
"Non," Ellena said, dismissively.
After some silence, Dubrule said, "La carotte?"
"Oui!"

Then Dubrule had held a green mango outside the Nubian village, she had detected a carroty tinge. "A fruit that smells of a vegetable!" she had exclaimed. Yes, Ellena had replied, you're smelling molecules that are common to both.

Gautier was pleased that Ellena had remembered to include this element in the perfume. "Jean-Claude's specialty is atypical things," she explained to Dubrule, recalling that Ellena had once put essence of tomato leaf in a perfume. She stood up sharply. "Now, on the skin," she said. Ellena rolled up his sleeves. Dubrule sprayed his forearms with puffs of his three viscous assemblages; they settled onto his skin in small slicks.

"They smell completely different," Dubrule said, hovering over Ellena's outstretched arms.
"Completely," Ellena said.
"Much less mango," Dubrule said.
The women smelled the three fragrances several more times, glancing at each other. "It's strange," Dubrule said grimly. "Almost the reverse of the touche."

This phenomenon causes significant difficulty for perfumers. The great Guerlain perfumes – Aimé Guerlain created the first, Jicky, in 1889 – were all tested exclusively on human skin, never on paper. They were expressly built to blossom and fade, over time, on the body.

Today's customers, however, don't want five fragrances on their body at the same time; they prefer to sample perfumes on paper strips. As a result, most perfumes today are constructed to smell good, for a few seconds, on a paper strip – which is a perversion, unless you happen to be made of paper. Indeed, many of today's perfumes don't last and they often clash with the body's natural smells.

Striking a balance

Gautier's nose moved once more over Ellena's warm skin. "I prefer AD2 on skin," she said.
"It's AD2," Ellena agreed, lightly.
Dubrule was definitive. "It's AD2," she said. After a pause, she added, "I'm finding a lot of rose in it. It's not bad – it will just need adjusting."
"It's the lotus," Ellena said. "I'll fine-tune that.' "This works perfectly for Hermès,' Gautier concluded. She did have one concern: Would men be able to wear it? Both she and Ellena wanted Hermès to dispense with the archaic division between masculine and feminine scents. Though Gautier was, wisely, cautious of being too radical for the market, she nevertheless had decided that the Jardins collection would be unisex.

After the meeting, Ellena returned to his home, in Grasse, on the Côte d'Azur, and went to his former office at Symrise. (Hermès had not yet provided him with a lab, and Symrise had agreed to let him rent his old space.) He soon received a call from Gautier.

"AD2 sent bon," she said – it smelled good. Yet, she continued, changes were required. She and Dubrule liked the scent's spiky freshness, but Dubrule thought that it was a bit harsh – too much like grapefruit. Both women thought that la persistance, the amount of time the fragrance lasts on skin, needed to be lengthened. And they wanted the smell of green mango to be more present on the skin. Good luck, Gautier said.

Starting over

Ellena was encouraged. "I have no anguish once I've got to the "Ça sent bon," he told me.

On the flight back from Aswan, Ellena had jotted down a formula of 13 ingredients, which had become his rough sketch for AD2. A natural essence of bitter orange, he had decided, would simulate the freshness of the green mango. And a synthetic grapefruit would evoke mango's acidity. (Perfumers don't use natural grapefruit, because it contains many sulfur atoms, which disintegrate to form malodours; the synthetic also has better persistence).

He would also add rosin, the resin that musicians rub on violin bows. Of his original 13 ingredients, he eventually eliminated two. Opopanax, a synthetic that he had expected to produce a resinous smell, ended up evoking mushrooms. Another chemical, lionone, was supposed to help convey the smell of mango, but it interacted with the other materials to create the illusion of apricot. He had replaced the lionone with carrot, and it had worked: AD2.

Now he began responding to Gautier's criticisms of AD2. He added several elements that, when combined, would heighten the scent of mango. Ellena documented the formula of his updated AD2: He gave the name and product code for each material; he detailed how many millilitres of each ingredient were used in making the juice; and he listed the price of each ingredient, per litre.

He then created three additional variants of the original AD2, which his lab assistant mixed and lined up on his desk in tiny vials: AJ1, AJ2, AJ3. He smelled them on the touches, and was dissatisfied. All were too citrusy. He lowered the grapefruit synthetic in all of them; to all except AJ3, he added varying amounts of hexanal trans 2, a synthetic that smells simultaneously of golden apple and glue paste. He smelled his iterations again.

"At the moment, I like AJ3," he told me. "It's the freshest."

Finding inspiration

Ellena drove to Laboratoires Monique Rémy (LMR), a small company in Grasse that is one of the most rarefied suppliers of natural perfume ingredients. LMR supplies Chanel's perfume division with dozens of exclusive materials that no other house can obtain.

For the wider perfume market, the company produces a distillation of tuberose – a flower that blooms on agave plants – that is one of the most beautiful scents ever created. If you need a basil, the company can supply you with a Basilic Essence, for about R450 a kilogram, or a Basilic Grand Vert Absolue, at about R7 540 a kilogram. The company's most expensive ingredient, Iris Naturelle Absolue, costs about R301 600 a kilogram.

Frédérique Rémy, Monique's daughter and the firm's commercial director, is an attractive, direct young woman with dark hair. "Félicitations!" Rémy said, smiling. She has known Ellena for years; they are both natives of Grasse. They put on heavy protective glasses – corrosive solvents are used in the distilling of perfume essences – and chatted animatedly as she took him on a tour of the factory floor.

The machines were huge. Some have blades to hash grains and roots; the essence of iris, for example, is obtained from the root, not from the flower. Other machines make essences: Odorant molecules are distilled from a flower or a fruit rind with steam at 100°C. Still other machines create absolutes: Smells are obtained with volatile solvents at around 30°C. The two methods extract two somewhat different groups of molecules. A rose essence includes the material's top notes. A rose absolute gives you the base notes.

llena began his career among these machines as a teenager, extracting jasmine. His boss had a PhD in chemistry and taught Ellena the science of scent. By taking just one sniff of a jasmine essence or absolute, he can tell you not only the flower's country of origin, but also what kind of machine distilled it – stainless steel, aluminium or steel.

Hermès is committed to giving Ellena creative liberty, and he would be allowed to decide which supplier's materials would be used in the company's new perfumes. Ellena was considering adding narcissus to the base for Nil, and he had heard that LMR had created a new version of narcissus, called Absolue Narcisse de Distillation Moléculaire. Rémy took him to the stockroom, brought out the absolute of narcissus and set it before him. He leaned over and inhaled. It was a beautiful scent, with a raw green hint – and it was, he realised, wrong for Nil. It was not sufficiently tender.

He got in his car, went back to his lab and thought, "That won't work. Now what am I going to do?"

A single scent

When I visited him in mid-June he said, "I'm certain that AJ2 would be the most commercial." He then added quickly, "But I never take a position on the commercialness." He smelled his essais again. "The problem is still the persistance." He paused. "But I'll find the answer." He paused again. "I hope I'll find the answer." Ellena interrogated his four essais again and again, and finally devised a single scent, AJ, that combined elements of all of them.

When he presented AJ to Gautier and Dubrule, their response was tentative. The perfume was lovely, they said, and you could tell that it had been carefully constructed. Yet they were concerned that it might be too citrusy. More important, they weren't sure that AJ was "perfumey" enough – which is typically shorthand for saying that it lacked aldehydes. Gautier and Dubrule told Ellena to keep AJ's enlivening freshness but asked him to give it more body.

So Ellena created AS, which was more flowery and fruity, with a bit more ripe mango. Gautier didn't really like it, finding it too easy. As she put it, it was too "16-year-old girl". Dubrule found it pleasing at first, then tried it on her skin and pronounced it too sweet, lacking a certain elegance. And so Ellena returned to his lab, balancing millilitres of molecules against millilitres of other molecules. He began creating A*.

For Ellena, A* marked a gentle turn toward the woods. Among the natural materials, he lowered the citrus and excised a third of the bitter orange, then welded on a few LMR materials, including an incense redolent of pine trees, and an absolute of honey.

It is finished

In August, he returned to Paris and presented A* to Gautier and Dubrule. It was almost a month after the initial deadline. For weeks, Ellena heard nothing. Finally, Gautier telephoned him. A* smelled fantastic, she said, and it had more body and lasted longer than previous iterations. "Today, as far as I'm concerned, Un Jardin sur le Nil is finished," Ellena said, though he was still tweaking it, "just for the pleasure".

Ellena was now finishing work on a luxurious new collection of scents that would be called the Hermèssences. He was creating a scent called Ambre Narguilé – a narguilé is a water pipe – which smells of sliced apples wrapped in leaves of blond tobacco and drizzled with caramel, cinnamon, banana and rum. And on his desk was a vial that contained the beginning of the next Hermèssence. It smelled, he said, like a leather bathing suit emerging from a swimming pool. He was working on a scent that smelled like leather sprinkled with sugar.

His goal at Hermès, he said, was "to show that the perfume is not the result of chance but a reflection of a reasoned process". He made a series of stepping motions with his hand, squinting at a target ahead. "When you start out, it's more about your passions. At the end, it's intellectual."