The Atlas of Perfumes
The gods created scents; humans make perfumes. Naked and frail, they survive only by artifice (trickery).
In the late 1960s, Jean-Claude Ellena, an apprentice perfumer in France, tried to reproduce Eau Sauvage, a cologne from the fashion house of Christian Dior. Ellena made good headway and got to the very final note, which he intuited, was from a chemical found in both basil, and tarragon. So, he tried essential oils from both herbs in his promising mix but though he came close, he could never rebuild Dior’s “olfactory cathedral,” as he calls it. Even today, despite all the advances in analytical techniques, the formula of this Dior fragrance remains a mystery to him, says Ellena now the Creative Director of Fragrance at Le Couvent.
Ellena has crafted several sought-after perfumes in his long career as a virtuoso perfumer. In his delightful new book, “Atlas of Perfumed Botany,” he writes, simply and with great feeling, about his approach to making plant-based fragrances. The art of perfume is born, he tells us, from the convergence of products of both natural and chemical origin.
The book is divided into segments based on the part of the plant the essential oil is drawn from – the woods, roots, leaves, flowers, fruits, gums, or the seeds. The fragrance of iris, for instance, comes from the leaves, not the flowers, while the scent of carrot is drawn from the seed, not the stubby root. Every chapter is devoted exclusively to a particular plant which is prized for its scent. Ellena writes about the plant’s provenance, the history and cultural lore surrounding it, and his own experience of crafting perfumes with the ingredient.
The self-taught Ellena, who worked in a perfume factory in his hometown Grasse in southern France as a teen, says he learned geography by reading the addresses of suppliers on jute sacks full of dry, redolent material. Patchouli leaves came from Sumatra, sandalwood from India, tears of incense from Somalia, benzoin from Laos, and oakmoss from Morocco or Yugoslavia; cloves, vanilla, and pepper reached France from Madagascar, and tonka bean from Peru. Fresh materials – rose, lavender, and jasmine – came from the nearby French countryside.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, however, the scents of flowers, plants, and fruits could be produced synthetically in chemistry labs. When hedione, a chemical compound with “the French fragrance of jasmine,” became available, Christian Dior used it in Eau Sauvage in 1966. Ten years later, Ellena, who crafted First for Van Cleef & Arpels, included several jasmines: benzyl acetate (a major component of the extract of jasmine), hedione, the natural extract of Indian jasmine, and two other jasmine-scented bases combining both natural and chemical components.
Initially, Ellena says, he composed perfumes like those before him, faithfully reproducing the complexity of nature, which is to say not unlike a skilled photographer capturing reality. Over time, he writes, it became possible to simplify the formula to the extreme, yielding a caricature of sorts—readily identifiable, yet something different from jasmine itself. The goal now, he says, is not to copy nature but to add to it, to find a different mode of expression or even invention. So Ellena now works like an artist who revels in impressionism, even abstract art.
These days, Ellena also takes more interest in less-used natural scents. Consider, for instance, the essential oil of carrot, he says. When one smells it for the first time – it has an earthy, muddled note, but give it time to dry on a strip of blotter paper, and the scent takes on a tender quality, like dried apricot. In fact, this smell reminds Ellena of a fragrant variety of apricot, which happens to have a smell and taste found in mango. Carrot, apricot, mango — what is the connection, you ask in mild exasperation. The link between carrot, apricot, and mango Ellena points out, is the pigment carotene, which when exposed to sunlight, produces a fragrant molecule. Ellena used this link in created an Egypt-themed perfume.
There is a narrative behind each of Ellena’s creations. When Ellena went to Egypt to create a perfume for the luxury good maker Hermes, he wanted to look beyond incense, jasmine, and wood smoke — cliched scent-associations that came to mind when one thinks of this Middle Eastern country. When Ellena took a whiff of the green-skinned mangoes on trees along the banks of the Nile, he knew he had found something unique. The complex, fresh and fleeting scent of the mango – pluck the fruit from the tree and, poof, it is gone kind of aroma – had to be trapped in a bottle. To craft the perfume, Ellena combined the essential oil of carrot, with that of black currant buds, to create the base of the perfume, which the world now knows as Un Jardin sur le Nil.
You will never guess from walking down aisles of duty-free shops or department stores which stock high-end perfumes – fragrances are unisex and have no gender, says Ellena. In the West, vetiver is often considered a male fragrance, while in Mali, women associate strongly with the fragrance and the idea is for the women to exude vetiver-scented sweat — so they drink water boiled with vetiver-flavored root. In southern India, vetiver root is woven into blinds. On hot days, when this curtain is sprayed with water, everyone in the room enjoys a whiff of the root’s delicate scent. Ways to enjoy fragrances are ultimately tied to culture. These days, “gender neutral” and “genderless” have become mainstream concepts, integral to fashion, makeup and fragrance — according to this 2022 NYT report.
This sumptuously produced book, with its stylized botanical illustrations, touches upon it all – the art, culture, and the science of perfume-making. The eclectic book belongs in any aesthete’s bookshelf — even aesthetes who don’t necessarily like to wear perfumes.