The Three Forms of Perfume Writing According to Jean-Claude Ellena

One of the most enlightening parts of Jean-Claude Ellena’s March 11 talk at the Institut Français de la Mode concerned his take on the evolution of perfumery since the late 19^th century, when “chemistry freed perfumers from the constraints of nature” and “man became a god by creating smells that didn’t exist in nature.”

1/ The Naturally Classic Era (from the 1900s to the late 1970s)

For 70 years, he says, perfumers had “a sense of materials for the sake of materials”: for them, jasmine smelled of jasmine, rose of rose, etc. They had seven jasmines, five sandalwoods, and so forth, at their disposal. When they used synthetic materials, it was to recreate different types of, say, jasmine: green jasmine, indolic jasmine, jasmine in the early morning, at dusk, etc. They were into the expression of nature and used complex formulas – which he calls “millefeuilles” after the French pastry. Fragrances were “rich, unctuous, fatty, generous”, like a painting by Boucher.

They also had respect for tradition, and reinterpreted what others had done.

2/The Age of the Cursor (from the 1970s onwards)

As fragrance because an economic stake, factual issues take over from artistic concerns. All smells are measured on a scale for their intensity, tenacity, etc. Quality must be demonstrated according to measurable elements.

Enter marketing with its briefs and consumer panels…

Perfumers start working differently: they want to make their perfumes harmonious and stable, so that they don’t evolve too much during their development because they are targeted at a wider audience than the original clientele of fine perfumery, the haute bourgeoisie.

Ellena quotes marketing tests in which is a distinct difference appears between the expectations of mass-market consumers and those of the more traditional consumers of fine perfumery – the signs associated to fragrances by the two milieus. The mass market wants fragrances that don’t change, “that don’t fool you”; for the “elite”, “perfume must vary along with me, adapt itself to me and my various moods during the day”. More linear fragrances thus prevailed.

Ellena draws a parallel with the evolution of music: in the same period, it abandons the variations of intensity you could find in classical music and jazz, in favor of forms adapted to passive listening.

3/ Evolutive Perfumery

Here, Ellena speaks mostly of his approach.

Time: In the development of a fragrance when worn, “I don’t privilege time; I don’t try to obtain an infinite time; it is as it is.”

Variations: “Each time you smell the fragrance, there is an olfactory experience”, an interplay of change and evolution.

Style: Style prevails over materials. “Materials are what I make of them, no longer what they are.”

Please remember that this is what I gathered from my notes and not a transcript of Jean-Claude Ellena’s exact words, unless they are between quote marks.

Image: Three Ages, Salvador Dali (1940).