The Wall Street Journal-20080123-Business Bookshelf- Sniffing Out the Next Big Fragrance
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Business Bookshelf: Sniffing Out the Next Big Fragrance
The Perfect Scent
By Chandler Burr
(Henry Holt, 306 pages, $25)
Richard Nixon used to enjoy telling about the time that Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev stayed at the Nixon home in San Clemente, Calif. Emerging from his room with an attractive, if somewhat Amazonian, young woman, Brezhnev leeringly introduced her as his "masseuse." After Nixon shook hands with her, he noticed a lingering scent that he was able to identify as the classic but decidedly nonproletarian perfume Arpege, because it was one of Pat Nixon's favorites.
Today the classic perfumes are mainly worn by matrons. A young "masseuse" of comparable stature and skills -- ready to ease the tensions of a tired statesman -- could choose Kimora Lee Simmons's Baby Phat Goddess, or Posh Spice's Intimately Beckham, or the Olsen Twins' Coast to Coast. At some future Camp David confab, French President Nicholas Sarkozy's masseuse might want to wear Celine Dion's Enchanting.
In "The Perfect Scent," Chandler Burr, a reporter for the New York Times, offers a portrait of the perfume industry by tracking the development of two new perfumes. One is very much in the celebrity- endorsement line -- "Sex and the City" star Sarah Jessica Parker's Lovely. The other, Hermes's luxury-driven Un Jardin sur le Nil, harks back to the "prestige" brands of yesteryear.
To tell his story, Mr. Burr surveys a lot of competing scents and, inevitably, must find words to describe the indescribable. Some readers will find his characterizations enchanting; some will find them hard-going. L'Eau d'Hiver "smells of ultrafine ground white pepper and extremely fresh, cold crab taken that instant from the ocean"; Yves Saint Laurent's Love Again is "like smelling a three- story-tall gas plasma screen over the Champs Elysees showing a bowl of the ripest tropical fruit"; Ibiza Hippie is "a scent that incarnates the smell of the taut tanned neck of the girl at the beach that everyone wants to dance with -- sea air, sweet beach foods, cotton candy, plus the traces of suntan lotion in her sweat." Some Burrisms are more earthy. Vetiver oil from Haiti "smells like a Third World dirt floor," while Vetiver oil from the island of Reunion, in the Indian Ocean, "smells like a Third World dirt floor with cigar butts." Lancome's popular Tresor "smells like celery, and not in a good way."
For all the preciosity of its product, the perfume industry generates annual revenues of $31 billion; 170,000 bottles of perfume are sold every day in France -- and 170,000 Frenchmen can't be wrong. In 2004, the house of Hermes (the one-time saddle maker that now makes $10,000 handbags) decided to underscore the luxe of its products by ponying up millions of dollars to hire an in-house perfumer and control the production and sale of all its scents. Their choice was the legendary Jean-Claude Ellena, a Byronically handsome Frenchman married to Samuel Beckett's granddaughter.
Every year, Hermes's president, Jean-Louis Hermes-Dumas, announced a "theme" that all Hermes products should somehow embody. For 2005, his theme was "rivers." For its first perfume effort, the Hermes team tried to figure out which world river was most evocative. The Amazon? The Ganges? The Yangtze? The Seine? They settled on the Nile. The resulting complex and costly perfume -- Un Jardin sur le Nil (A Garden on the Nile), bred in Mr. Ellena's laboratory -- accomplished its intended purpose by receiving excellent reviews from the fashion and trade press and achieving moderate sales in Hermes stores.
At roughly the same time that Hermes was polishing its niche at the stratospheric end of the luxury market, Coty, the New York-based beauty-products manufacturer, decided to team up with Ms. Parker and create a mass-market blockbuster. It was a logical thing to do. Coty was flush from several celebrity hits, starting with Jennifer Lopez's Glow in 2002, which inaugurated the celebrity scent business.
The Coty folks were, at least at first, pleasantly surprised by the extraordinary qualities of the star to whom they were hitching their multimillion-dollar wagon. As I can attest from my days at "Late Night With David Letterman," Ms. Parker is an oasis of sense and sensibility in a business that encourages narcissism and enables mindlessness (not to mention, as Dave would put it, her being "easy on the eyes"). Unlike most celebrities, whose greatest input "is negotiating their percentage," Ms. Parker really meant it when she said that she had dreamed since childhood of creating her own perfume.
The fourth of eight siblings growing up outside Cincinnati, Ms. Parker hardly came from an Hermes-like background. Her family was frequently on welfare. She remembered how her mother would save all year to buy one new bottle of perfume and how, when the bottle was ceremoniously opened, everyone would bask in its scent. When the Coty execs asked Ms. Parker what scents she liked, her disarming reply was "body odor." She explained: "I think we all secretly really like it and we're just afraid to admit it."
She then pulled from her purse the three ingredients she had been mixing for years. They were: Bonne Bell Skin Musk, which cost $6.99 at discount drugstores; Comme des Garcons' Incense Avignon, a very expensive men's cologne; and an Egyptian incense she had bought from the tray of a street vendor in SoHo. The resulting aroma was, not to put too fine a point on it, down and dirty. Or, in Ms. Parker's words: "Really dirty. Really dirty, really sexy." She informed the stunned room (although she didn't really need to): "There's nothing on the market for women like this."
And there still isn't. Her perfume ended up being named Lovely, and far from pushing any envelopes, it was marketed as "feminine, timeless, and ageless." There were no references to body odor in the ad copy, which cited hints of paperwhites, creamy orchids, lush lavender and (with a tip of the hat to "Sex and the City") "crisp apple martini."
Be careful what you wish for. Having found the ideal scent-celebrity -- popular, appealing, intelligent and involved -- Coty realized that it would have either to co-opt or to marginalize Ms. Parker to prevent her from creating a dud. The company didn't want her to subvert the image of wistful feminine charm that six seasons of playing Carrie Bradshaw in "Sex and the City" had established. Luckily, Ms. Parker turned out to be professionally pragmatic. She was disappointed that her own idea frightened the Coty folks, but she understood that they knew what they were talking about when they pushed for a product that would exploit the charm and femininity of the Bradshaw persona. Thus, they had her best interests at heart, even while they were breaking it.
Mr. Burr, an appealing writer and an acute observer, tells his two stories well. But his decision to divide them into alternating chapters results in some tiresome repetition, since he must keep picking up and restitching a dangling narrative thread. His vehemence about certain scents can be amusing, although after a while it seems a bit obsessive. (Of Hugo Boss's Number One he writes: "If a cat had morning breath, then ate kibble, then licked its anus, then licked your hand, and if you then smelled your hand, it would smell like this.") And an editor might have saved him from describing French coffee and smoking rooms as "workplace institutions that, by around 10:00 a.m., faithfully re-create throughout the country thousands of filthy little Dachau gas chambers."
Mr. Burr's descriptions of scents may not convince all his readers. But who, after reading that Rose Poivree is "the perfume Satan's wife would wear in hell," wouldn't want to have at least a sniff to see what that is all about?
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Mr. Gannon is a former television producer and former aide to President Nixon.
