Many perfumistas heard the news that Jean Claude Ellena was writing a book several years ago. I was on a waiting list at Amazon.com for at least a year until I finally took it out of my cart, but now there is an English Version called Perfume:The Alchemy of Scent that can be preordered and will be available in November. The French version will be available in October. (I pre-ordered; it would make a lot of sense if major Houses followed in the Amazon way of thinking; many of us love the creations of certain perfumers and perfumeries —sales would go up, you would have the consumers' credit card (quite frankly all the glosssies and so many of the bloggers know what's being released anyway….why all the cloak and dagger marketing nonsense)?
However, M. Ellena wrote another book (only available in French called Journal d’un Parfumeur) and M. Ellena produced a short video to introduce it (not available in English).
“I followed a path of self-education. When I was 16 years old, my father didn’t know what to do with me, so I began as worker in the perfumery industry. Right away I felt comfortable in this environment and I had opportunities to meet several people who gave me the chance to evolve in the perfumery industry. At the beginning I was in Grasse and after I entered a school just created in Switzerland by Givaudan. I moved with my wife and my first child and I learned in this school to become composer of perfumes. I asked a master-perfumer to give me a job. He refused once saying I should go back to my studies and because I was insistent he accepted me the second time. After my studies of 3 years after 9 months I became a junior perfumer; then there was acceleration. I went to the USA and came back to Paris. When I was 28 years old I created the classic perfume for Van Cleef and Arpels: First. So I continued to create perfumes and now I do it for Hermes. Hermes wasn’t a choice but a an inevitablity.
I met with Jean Louis Dumas (Note: We mourn his passing on May 3, 2010) who thought that Hermes was not positioned correctly in the perfume market. It was really a feeling of human seduction with M. Dumas and we spoke a long time. It was one year before I made the decision to become their perfumer, the in house nose for Hermes fragrances. It was also a meeting with a company whose thinking that I liked… I needed to write about this job which is not really understood. There are a lot of misconceptions about perfumery, unknown insights and s my aim was to shed light and to explain my job, which added to the pleasure of writing this book. Today Companies sell an image to which we identify ourselves with more or less but we don’t know that behind this commercial image; there are men and women who create perfumes. So it was in response to this that I wrote. It’s the same thing for perfumes. We speak rarely about the movement and evolution of the creation process so I wrote about the notion of time, detachment and other issues that the public doesn’t ask or know about… I ignore the commercial point. I create what I wish to create and then the public reply”.
Jean Claude Ellena was a student of Edmond Roudnitska, best man to Michel Roudnitska, (Michel is our Contributor Emeritus at Cafleurebon) and worked on many fragrances for houses such as Amouage, L’Artisan Parfumeur, Bulgari, Frederic Malle and owned The Different Company before leaving to join Hermes. In 2005, Ellena created Un Jardin sur le Nil for Hermès. The story behind the creation of this fragrance was the subject of the book The Perfect Scent: A Year in the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York by Chandler Burr
Translated as best as we could together and summarized by Managing Director, Didier Cholay and Editor in Chief, Micheyn Camen.
Michelyn Camen met Jean Louis Dumas in 1999 and yes he was the most seductive man and charasmatic man I have ever met. He chose an Hermes scarf for me called Reves d'australies, "becuase they brng out your eyes and beauty. " He also said find "this charming lady a birkin" and yes, they did!