The winners for the sample draw of Jour
d’Hermès (for the review, click here) are:
Susan, Bee and Annemariec
P.S. Bee has already smelled Jour d'Hermès so she suggested picking another winner:
Phanie Constanta
P.S. Bee has already smelled Jour d'Hermès so she suggested picking another winner:
Phanie Constanta
Please drop me a line at graindemusc at gmail
dot com to give me your address. Don’t forget to state “Jour d’Hermès” in the
header and to tell me your pseudo. And remember I’ll be asking for your
impressions of the flowers you “read” in the fragrance, which I will publish
next January.
I was happy to see that fellow bloggers whose
opinion I value – Victoria of Bois de Jasmin, Robin of Now Smell This and
Octavian of 1000 Fragrances – were also embracing Jour d’Hermès, since like a
great many people in France I actually care
for Hermès and root for it as one of the few major luxuries houses upholding
its integrity and standards.
By hiring Jean-Claude Ellena in 2004, Hermès
has dealt with its heritage as a perfume house in an interesting way, since
Ellena claims a filiation with Edmond Roudnitska who signed Eau d’Hermès back
in 1951. While maintaining almost all of its earlier fragrances, Hermès clearly
opted for a re-foundation that integrated the concepts pioneered by niche in
the 90s, namely “landscape captures” with the Jardins series and materials-driven
composition with the Hermessence (it was the second big house to offer this type
of exclusive line, one year after Armani Privé).
Of course, Ellena had been a major player in
developing both concepts. His ground-breaking Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert for
Bulgari, initially a submission for Fahrenheit, may well have been the first
mainstream fragrance not to be conceived as an extension of a male or female
persona (though the original ads show a skinny-dipping couple in the throes of
passion). And through his Bois Farine, the first scent commissioned by Pamela
Roberts at L’Artisan Parfumeur for a travel-inspired series, he pioneered the “landscape
in a bottle” idea.
Ellena is also one of the very few major
perfumers – and the only one in his generation – to have written books about
his creative process, a bid for transparency initiated with Chandler Burr’s The Perfect Scent. A canny move for
Hermès, of course, since it raises the profile of their in-house perfumer. But
one that couldn’t have happened if Ellena hadn’t actually had creative freedom
in that capacity, unlike other perfumers currently holding similar positions…
Whether
one embraces his aesthetics or not is a personal matter, but if any perfumer
can claim the “artist” label, it’s him: first because he himself acknowledges
in The Diary of a Nose that his approach
is that of an artist, then because he has been able to create a consistent body
of work and to sign it, and finally
because he has defined his aesthetics in writing (critical self-awareness and intention being very much a part of contemporary artistic praxis). Now, whether
that makes him a “luminist” – a short-lived, late 19th century
American style of landscape painting – as claimed by the curator of The Art of Scent is another matter, and one Jean-Claude
Ellena is apt to shrug off with a wry grin…
Dear Denyse/ grain de musc
RépondreSupprimerThanks for picking my name. I must admit that I managed to try it in the meantime, and didn't smell flowers at all, but only lychee (must be skin chemistry)... so maybe you want to make somebody else happy?
Bee
Hi Bee, thanks for giving someone else a chance, I'll put in another name... I wouldn't say skin chemistry -- though perfumes do develop differently on different skins, if they went that much all over the map they'd be badly made. I tend to think it's the way we put together certain notes and associate them with something in our olfactive database. Often, once we've zeroed in on an effect, that's the way we'll go into the fragrance. Lychee is pretty much related to rose, actually, and there are fruity-juicy notes, so if you smell it, it's there!
RépondreSupprimerSorry for the late reply, and yes I did ponder about a possible rose-lychee connection, as I have a lychee-smelling rose on my balcony. So I'm willing to try this scent again in spring. I do firmly believe that skin chemistry, more particularly it's variable oiliness / dryness, can influence the volatility of scent compounds, and thus the rate of their release and the ensuing development of the perceived scent. In chromatography you would talk about adsorption to the stationary phase (skin) and different retention times (O.K., that was quite nerdy). So if very volatile substances are released together (from drier skin, typically in winter) you might have another perception than if they are released slowly one after the other (oilier skin). Bee
RépondreSupprimerBee, there's definitely a difference in development from one skin to another, as anyone who's attended a group-sniffing or a press presentation can verify. I guess it's a bit of both: personal references and impact of skin. Not to mention temperature, humidity and location. Perfumers often say when they present a submission to a client, they're surprised to find it smells different than in their own office.
RépondreSupprimerThanks for this, watch all great content on film plus apk for free
RépondreSupprimer