Chandler Burr - The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York

O N J UNE 9, 2004, just before 5:00 P.M. , Jean-Claude Ellena was being driven to a meeting at the offices of Parfums Herms in Pantin, just outside the priphrique to the northeast of Paris. Ellena was a famous ghost, a member of an elite group of perfumers who create fragrances sold under the names of designers and luxury houses while keeping assiduously to the shadows. But he was just at the point of becoming particularly, and rather extraordinarily, visible to the world. He was on his way to Herms to submit his first essais, his olfactory sketches, for an important scent he was creating.

Paris was enjoying a spell of Los Angeleslike weather. You could look from the top of rue Mnilmontant down over the Centre Georges Pompidous industrial modernism all the way to the Eutelsat balloon floating over the Parc Andr Citron. In the deep-cobalt summer sky, the cloud of aerosolized filth from the Paris traffic hovered in the blue air. The sun shone brightly. The Parisians walked around wearing black, smoking cigarettes, exhaling ashen fumes into the air, and throwing the butts and packets onto streets where Africans in cotton bleus de travail uniforms swept them into sewers.

From his car, Ellena looked out at the bus stops. It seemed as if every single one featured an ad for Chanels latest feminine perfume, Chance. It was a bit startling. The car crossed an avenue, stopped at a light: Chance. It turned right: Chance. Ellena looked left; from every vantage the publicity image of a wispy blond girl floated spectrally over the round metallic glass Chance bottle. This display represented a breathtaking marketing outlay. If you were in the perfume industry, if you were the competitionsay, another immaculate luxury house like Hermsyou might not show any reaction. You might smile, eyes focused just beyond the ads. But you would register them as they slid by your car, this show of Chanels stunning power, a silken reminder of the might of this billion-dollar titanium luxury machine. The bus ads were not a campaign. They were a statement. We are here. Their ubiquitousness was profoundly intimidating. This was the intention.

Herms had, in fact, two responses. The first was the three small vials in Ellenas pocket, each containing a pale golden-colored scent. The second was Ellena himself.

A cross the Atlantic not many months later, at 1:00 P.M. on October 29, 2004, the actress Sarah Jessica Parker arrived at the offices of her agent, Peter Hess, at Creative Artists Agency at 162 Fifth Avenue in New York City. She was there to meet representatives from Coty, Inc., the international perfume licensing corporation, whose headquarters were just up the street. Parker and her representatives would be discussing the final details of a contract for the creation of a perfume that would bear her name.

They met in one of the white CAA conference rooms. Along with Hess, Parkers rep Ina Treciokas from the public relations agency IDPR was present. The Coty contingent numbered four, all perfume industry executives and creatives (as those in charge of developing a perfume are called in the industry). There was excellent sushi and a big bowl of popcorn, a neat line of drinks, and bowls of ice. Parker was dressed in relaxed stylejeans and a T-shirtbut she was quite alert to the significance of the meeting and to the variables at play.

Parker had for years been a star on stage and on screen, but she was as aware as anyone of the risks of attempting to transfer the mercurial, amorphous good of celebrity to other domains. In both a symbolic and a literal sense, she was funding this project with her public equity. But she had for years wanted to create a perfumedreamed of it, as she expressed it eagerly to the Coty team that day. Peter Hess and CAA had been pursuing it for her, making the contacts, talking to the players in the perfume worldthe luxury juggernauts like the Lauders and LVMHs, with their brands and labs and marketing armiesand Hess had found the process far from easy; the perfume industry is brutal, and the financial stakes increasingly high. Yet Coty was interested in Parker, and the lawyersCotys and the starshad been working on the contract for many months. It had been a complicated negotiation.

Hess naturally shared Parkers concerns. Were she to give Coty the license to her name and her public identity, the project would entail years of effort on her part and that of the Coty team that would develop the scent with her, millions of dollars put into the launch and a massive promotional campaign, and the risk of her image and reputation.

It would also require of Parker a special, and rather unusual, form of participation. During the development of the scent, she would assume the position known in the industry as artistic director. She would have to guide the perfumers who would build her scent. She would be responsible for directing them toward a precise olfactory representation of an idea of a perfume she already had in her head. Parker had never played the role beforeit was the perfumers who understood mixing rose absolute with dihydrojasmonate, not sheand she didnt, truth be told, know exactly what to expect.