In the morning, my nose is very precise. Obviously by midday I can still smell very well but there’s an olfactory fatigue that sets in. This is something that I noticed early on in my career. Like an athlete, I’m trained now and my days can be much longer.

For me, there’s nothing worse than if I go to a dinner in the evening and people ask me to smell what they’re wearing; at the end of the day I really can’t smell anything anymore. When people ask me this question and I have to smell their neck, I smell them as much as I smell their fragrance. It’s very troubling.

— Read more in Hermès Perfumer Christine Nagel Takes Us Through Her Workday at The Kit.

“This is lime limette. It smells like a lime, but it’s a bit aggressive, like a cleaning product. And this,” Nagel says, handing me another strip, “is cinnamon. You can smell the cake, the spice. Cinnamon is warm; lime is cold. And if you do this,” she says, twirling the two sticks in front of my nose at once, “you smell Coca-Cola.”

— Perfumer Christine Nagel, in ‘You smell Coca-Cola’: the scent secrets of Hermès’ top perfumer at Financial Review.

I didn’t give up on the idea. I decided to work a little bit like a painter might do. When a painter paints a landscape, he might stand in front of the landscape, with an easel, copying the landscape. But there’s a different way of going about it. Some painters might want to have a very intense look at the landscape, absorb it, and then go back to their workshop to paint it from memory.

— Perfumer Christine Nagel, on developing Hermès Un Jardin à Cythère during the Covid lockdown, when she could not travel to Kythira. Read more in Hermès perfumer Christine Nagel turns to memories to create new fragrance at Vancouver Sun.