Jean-Claude Ellena is an illusionist, a characteristic that has served to make him one of the world’s greatest perfumers and, since 2004, in-house composer for Hermès. Where other noses work with a palette of 1,000 or so materials, Ellena uses just 200; where the average modern fragrance contains more than 100 ingredients, his have 20. Alchemical genius that he is, Ellena deploys such small beginnings in ways that have changed the face of his discipline, most recently with the sublimely flinty Terre D’Hermès...

— Columnist Hannah Betts of the UK Times Online visits perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena in Scent of a man.

"I am a pilferer, a thief, a scavenger of odors," he said, adding he's not interested in copying nature but rather "transforming it" and conveying aspects of nature using as few materials as possible. "It's a challenge to be simple," he said. "If I'm simple, the better [one] understands." If a composition is "too complex," he said, "the message is lost."

— Perfumer Jean Claude Ellena discusses his approach in a talk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute in New York earlier this week. (via Women's Wear Daily) His latest: Hermès Kelly Caleche.