Chances are that if you are a lover of fine and niche perfumes, Jean Claude Ellena is amongst your favorite perfumers. Diary of A Nose: A Year in the Life of a Parfumeur will be released on February 2013 and our readers will have an opportunity to win a copy.
Perfume appreciation however, requires more than just the casual spritz. Selecting a fragrance can be as sophisticated as evaluating a wine, if approached in a knowledgeable manner. Contrary to the concept of the “signature scent”, our noses prefer variety.
Thanks to online fragrance forums and the blogopsphere, there is more information available about fragrance than ever. Many members and posters are 18-25. Four young perfumistas speak openly about four subjects- their passion for perfume, smell, technology & their feelings about celebrity scents.
I think that there is no fragrance I’ve tried that is not connected to some image in my mind. it is summer in all its glory and The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats poetry evokes many fragrances…but one special perfume by Diptyique
Hermes’ in-house perfumer (M. Ellena) has captured the essence of many of perfumery’s most used “notes” in light and ephemeral creations called the Hermessences. What Jean Claude has done (and rather well, I might add) is to create “perfumed haikus” or poetry in a bottle.
“For ‘Fils de Dieu’ Etienne gave me two films to watch: ‘Reflections in a Golden Eye’ by John Huston and ‘The Masseur’ by Brillante Mendoza. The fragrance thus was inspired by Asian cuisine (hence the rice), a Philippine massage parlor (castoreum!) and the body lotions (musk)”-Ralf Schweiger
