Coco Chanel once said that a woman who doesn’t use perfume is so pretentious she thinks that her own smell is enough.
published in Harper's BAZAAR
Mademoiselle Chanel’s camellias would curl up if they knew that that is exactly what is planned as the next big thing in fragrance. Hang on to your body hair, musk is coming back. The senior vice president Corporation Fragrance Development Worldwide and the nose for the Estee Lauder Companies, Karyn Khoury says, “There are certain musks that provide warm skin smells. You know, like smooth, clean skin when it’s been warmed in the sun.” Oh yeah, Baby.
Let’s start at the beginning. It was a tense moment at Estee Lauder headquarters in New York. On the way back to the office from a meeting, the Nose had veered into the park – an olfactory Petri dish – and had a flash as to how to modify a fragrance in development. It was a citrusy floral with a green aspect. The problem was that after a minute on the skin the freshness diminished and left a harsh green scent. The team in white coats waited expectantly. The Nose finally said, “It’s like this: imagine a hula hoop going around the body; the freshness has to wrap around the body all the way down.” Aahh. The lab began to bustle. They were used to such metaphors; that was the way their boss, the Nose, worked.
“Perfumers have an abstract way of communicating to people what they smell,” admits Lewis Calwell, one-time senior perfumer at Givaudan, the international fragrance company responsible for L’Air du Temps, LouLou, First, Must de Cartier and Poison. “We are psychosomatic that way. But we are in the business of creating illusions in order for people to fulfil their fantasies. It’s an artistic discipline.”
Once, we were desperate to smell like sex, sex, sex. Calvin Klein bottled this desire with Obsession, which he reputedly contemplated calling Climax. Hedonism eventually stumbled and big pushy florals and amber-hued orientals fell out of favour as women rose up as one to smell like: a fruit bowl (New West for Her, Calyx by Prescriptives, Bulgari Eau Parfumee); then a salad (L’Eau D’Issey): and, if that wasn’t enough, any number of kitchen odours (cloves with Comme des Garcons, chocolate with Angel by Thierry Mugler and cinnamon for Feminite du Bois by Shiseido). A splinter group that eschewed the kitchen for the bathroom paddled happily in ck One and Escape. In fact, water notes proved so popular that its own category was formed. Unbound by Halston, Ultraviolet Metal by Paco Rabanne and Bobbi Beach by Bobby Brown have lately joined the squad.
Now, apparently, we are wearing wet (clean) T-shirts. Not literally but in a metaphorical kind of way, and there’s a press kit by Tommy Hilfiger to prove it. This fragrance represents an entirely new category and is the first to embody non-traditional men’s notes, resulting in a playful, clean, sexy scent designed to capture a new generation.
“Unorthodox notes definitely provide inspiration,” says Khoury. How the heck does wet smell? “It’s an emotion. And it’s a large part of how I work. In fragrance, especially the modern interpretations, you don’t think of notes or effects literally. For instance, the wet, clear freshness of cucumber evokes an emotion. Imagine opening a washed cucumber rind smelling it as you cut through the green flesh. There are an unlimited number of potential new notes in fragrance. It only takes someone with enough imagination to envision these unexpected ideas.”
And whatever is not imagined is trawled from nature. “Every day we are finding new accords from nature. We then reconstruct them in the lab to find new molecules in which to broaden our scent palette,” says Marco Ciccarelli, Givaudan’s Australia Pacific fragrance manager. A flower or plant is sealed in a test tube and its essence milked by a pump into sealable filters. “The flower or plant is still living and breathing,” explains Ciccarelli. “So you get the smell of a living plant. We call this ‘headspace technology’.” There have been 30 separate expeditions around the world, from Costa Rica, West Africa and Brazil to Papua New Guinea and Western Australia (Givaudan calls them “scent treks”), to collect exotic and marketable new smells. Aglaia odorata, for instance, an unusual flower with a floral fruit mint scent that inspired Hugo Woman, was found in Papua New Guinea. A perfumer always accompanies the group of scientists to memorise the smells and ensure the smell is recreated accurately in the lab.
And if nature doesn’t deliver, scientists are able to create scents that don’t even exist. This is called conceptual perfumery or, as Lori Smith, resident futurist of Givaudan, puts it, “The smell of an experience”. At Givaudan, smells are being created from dramatic flowers, such as the hibiscus, that don’t have much scent themselves, attracting pollination by their colour and shape, as well as bamboo. “We’re creating what these things would smell like,” says Celeste Lee, Givaudan’s director of fragrance marketing, “trying to invent smells that nature forgot.”
In some cases, the labs are extracting molecules in entirely new ways. Estee Lauder pioneered CO2 extraction for Pleasures that opened up the bay rose note. Pleasures (created by Khoury) was launched in 1995. It’s still ranked as one of the top five prestige fragrances in the US. “I’m prejudiced of course but I do think that Pleasures will go down in history as one of the landmark fragrances this decade,” says Khoury.
Revlon lobbed the ball into outer space with the crisp scent of Charlie in 1973 and hopes to do it again with its latest fragrance, Absolutely Fabulous. The juice itself initially sparkles like Champagne with a top note of florals and ginger and fades to a creamy amber and musk base. “Ginger is not a new note, by any means, but it has grabbed the attention of perfumers because it has spiciness and is still fresh and clean,” says Michael Edwards, Australia’s fragrance expert and the author of Perfume Legends.
“There has been an explosion of new fragrances,” confirms Edwards. “In my last book (201), I classified and matched over 300 fragrances. For the next book, I’m up to 400 new fragrances so far and I haven’t even finished.” Whatever happens to the new fragrances? “Funnily, the classics are having a resurgence,” says Edwards. “Particularly the white-flower florals. They are managing to be full-bodied but with an air of lightness which makes them different from the heady, cloying numbers from the 1980s.”
“Deeper, richer fragrances are on the rise,” says Khoury. “The search is on for depth and texture in florals to make them bigger, richer, more voluptuous without the heaviness of past fragrances. How do you get the effect of tuberose without smelling like every other tuberose fragrance? There is a desire for new twists using fruity accents – nothing syrupy sweet but those that are more complementary to new floral notes. That helps give a signature to rich floral bouquets so they smell rich but moder. There are also new woody and musky structures that give clarity and sensuality,” she says. Look out for soft musks. “It’s only a matter of time before people tire of being restrained and clean and pure. Sexy musk is definitely coming back,” declares Ciccarelli. Yeah, Baby.