This month, Hermès will launch a new extrait version of last year's Kelly Calèche fragrance for women.
Perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena has reportedly tweaked the floral leather Kelly Calèche scent to make it “more sensual”.
The packaging features a refillable steel bottle shaped like an Hermès lock…
It is a sweaty day in February, and Ellena is taking stock of his myriad inspirations, at the charming 25-acre Kumarakom Lake Resort on the shores of Vembanad Lake. All the rooms are cobbled out of the region’s 200-year-old teak cottages (tharavadu). His face is all nose, a tapered sensor whose nostrils tingle and flare with the same emotion that plays in most people’s eyebrows. They flare as he talks about the truffles in his freezer, procured in a furtive daylong transaction with all the drama of a drug deal.
— Columnist Phoebe Eaton of the New York Times describes perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena's journey to Kerala looking for inspiration for Hermès Un Jardin après la Mousson. Read more in Liquid Assets.
There is a short film on the Hermès website of perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena talking about his inspirations for the Kelly Calèche fragrance. He recalls…
…a visit I made to the place where the Hermès leather is stocked…and what surprised me with all these leathers was their smell…
I’m sure many of you have had this experience: you read about a new fragrance. It sounds perfect. You start to build a smell-picture in your mind. You wait, and then you wait some more. It finally launches, but is only sold someplace inconvenient (there are few phrases in perfumespeak more dispiriting to me than “exclusive to Saks”). Finally, you get your hands on it. You spray, and — oh! It is not at all what you expected.
Un Jardin après la Mousson is the latest from Hermès and the third fragrance in their Jardin series, and it isn’t the first of perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena’s creations to surprise me in this way, although more often than not, I manage to adjust. I liked Osmanthe Yunnan as soon as I smelled it, but it somehow wasn’t what I thought it would be, and I could not help but feel a sliver of disappointment…
Long before his appointment as the world's first professional perfume critic, Chandler Burr had made a name for himself as a perfume journalist with a bit of an edge. His excellent New Yorker article on the creation of Hermès Un Jardin sur le Nil, which gave us a glimpse behind the scenes of this secretive industry, was followed by his regular contributions for The New York Times on the current state of perfumery, in which he wrote passionately about his aversion against the mystification, the anachronistic traditions, and the unspoken rules in the perfume trade. The vastness of his contacts is the envy of most perfume bloggers, and sometimes I wonder if he made more enemies than friends in the past years — which I mean as a compliment, of course. Hardly surprising then, that his latest book was so highly anticipated by many, including me.
If scientific controversy was a central theme in The Emperor of Scent, The Perfect Scent takes a swing at the maladies of the perfume industry. Burr uncovers its deeper mechanisms, from the dilemmas faced by manufacturers who are forced to accept assignments without contracts, to the pointless secrecy in which perfume formulae are still enveloped…