Hermès will launch Epice Marine, the latest in the Hermessence series, in September. The theme, as captured in the name, is spices and the ocean, and the fragrance was developed in a sort of collaboration between Hermès house perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena and chef Olivier Roellinger…
Eau de Mandarine Ambrée is one of two new 2013 offerings in the unisex Cologne Collection at Hermès, the other being Eau de Narcisse Bleu. Both were developed by house perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena, who notes that Mandarine Ambrée “is quite immediate, the other [Narcisse Bleu] is more complex.” The same contrast might be drawn between the last two additions to the series, Eau de Pamplemousse Rose and Eau de Gentiane Blanche,1 and once again, I find that I prefer the immediate: Eau de Mandarine Ambrée is easily my favorite; Eau de Narcisse Bleu, like Gentiane Blanche, is arguably the more interesting of the pair but was just a tad too mild for my tastes.2
Mandarine Ambrée, which features mandarin, passion fruit and amber, has a similar sparkling start as the Pamplemousse Rose, albeit with much less (but surely some) grapefruit. It’s bright and cheerful, with a beautifully juicy and tart mandarin note that gradually gets fruitier, fuller and sweeter, and then slightly woody, with a sheer amber base and a slight dash of vanilla. It isn’t heavy…
“Craftsman, artist: I have never managed to settle for one or the other of these definitions for myself,” perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena wrote in The Diary of a Nose: A Year in the Life of a Parfumeur, published in English last January. “I feel like a craftsman when I am completely wrapped up in making a perfume; I feel like an artist when I imagine the perfume I need to make. In fact, I constantly juggle with the two standpoints. If perfume is first and foremost a creation of the mind, it cannot actually be created without the mastery of true skill.”
Diary of a Nose follows Ellena’s first book, Perfume: The Alchemy of Scent, a short volume on the fragrance industry released in English in 2009. As Marcello noted in his review of Alchemy of Scent in its original French edition, Le Perfum: Que-sais je? (2007), Ellena uses “some of his well-known creations to explain what he regards as the essence of his profession.” For those who have read industry basics before, the chapters on history, materials, classification, and marketing will be familiar, but told with more depth…
Perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena talks briefly about Jour d’Hermès. If you missed the fragrance commercial, it is here.
Just in time for the holiday shopping season, along comes Jour d’Hermès, a brand new feminine pillar fragrance from perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena at Hermès. Longtime readers know I’m a fan, but just how much of a fan? Thanks (or not) to evidence provided by the damage polls, I can report that I’ve spent just over $2000 on fragrance in the past five years (ouch! bless me Donatella, for I have sinned) and about 28% of that apparently spilled directly into the coffers at Hermès. And yes, that includes the mumble-$100-something I spent on a bottle of Jour d’Hermès.
(If you’ve spent a like proportion of your perfume dollars on a single brand, do comment. I will add that if the entire works of Serge Lutens had been available in the US over that same time period, in the more-affordable export bottles, I’m sure I’d have done a better job of padding his coffers too. It does help, though, that Hermès maintains a boutique in my local mall, conveniently situated just outside the front door of Neiman Marcus, another favorite spot for spur-of-the-moment purchases.)
But back to Jour d’Hermès. It starts with bright citrus…