What Hermès Perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena Taught Me About Writing
A perfumer is a composer is a scientist is a poet and on and on and on.
Perfumed Pages, the fragrance-based writing container I’ve put together, has officially begun. In the month since announcing it, I have spent pretty much every day working on it, shipping out welcome packages after customizing scent samplers, annotating and gift-wrapping books, manually sending each and every email, making a lot of spreadsheets, but most pleasurably - revisiting my archives of beauty books, looking for the takeaways I most wanted to share with the people coming to create with me.
One of the books I sent out and revisited was by the perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena: Perfume: The Alchemy of Scent. Ellena is the nose behind many of the fragrance world’s most beloved scents now: Un Jardin Sur Le Nil1, Terre de Hermes2, Frederic Malle’s L’Eau d’Hiver, Bulgari’s Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert, the list goes on. He was Hermès’ in house perfumer between 2004 to 2016, but has created fragrances for Bulgari, Van Cleef & Arpels, Cartier, Laboratorio Olfattivo, and so on…. ultimately, hundreds of fragrances, truly shaping the oeuvre of luxury smell around the world.
Here is but a brief selection of the fragrances he’s composed.
I will be traveling around Grasse, his perfumer playground, in June - and thought it appropriate to revisit his writing to prepare for the Perfumed Pages co-hort. Here are the lessons from my rereading. Honestly, writers have so much in common with perfumers. I decided to pair both his knowledge with what I know about writing narrative.
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