Jean-Claude Ellena: A Poet Entrusting Scenes to Simple Scents

Three Periods for Understanding Ellena

I have always thought of Jean-Claude Ellena as being like Picasso, whose work can be divided into many periods.

Frédéric Malle

Jean-Claude Ellena identifies three periods in the development of Ellena’s perfumery style.

1. The first was a period of working within an organization and fulfilling the instructions given by brands. This was Ellena’s youth, when large numbers of ingredients were used in an attempt to create complexity. First for Van Cleef & Arpels belongs to this period.

For one brand, however, following the instructions produced a fragrance Ellena disliked and clearly felt would not sell. The brand representative said it was fine, but in the end it did not sell at all. From this experience, Ellena decided not to keep simply obeying instructions and making perfumes that did not seem good personally.

2. The period of minimalism. This was a time of creating scents with a limited palette of ingredients. The first perfume was Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert for Bulgari. This period continued through the work with Frédéric Malle and until Ellena stepped down as Hermès’s in-house perfumer.

After finishing as Hermès’s in-house perfumer, Ellena took a short rest and then set off again. This became a period of a thoroughly refined style, created by an Ellena who had been polished and had emerged at Hermès.

3. A new period after leaving Hermès. A period of simplicity, pursuing the simple more thoroughly than ever before. It is a culminating period in which the fewer ingredients used, the more the perfume speaks.

The less I use, the more it speaks.

Jean-Claude Ellena

Ellena’s Early Life

Ellena was born on April 7, 1947, in Grasse, France, to a father who was a perfumer. Because Ellena’s mother disliked it, the father rarely talked about work, but had a habit of constantly smelling not only food but books and everything else. This influenced Ellena from childhood, and the habit continued with Ellena’s daughter Céline.

Many of the smells etched in my memory are the result of unconsciously imitating what my father did. My father’s habit was always to smell food and drink before putting them in his mouth. Whether fruit, cooked dishes, salads, dressings, bread or wine, my father smelled everything. He even smelled water, which might seem elusive. My mother disliked it, scolded the two of us for our bad manners, and tried to make us change.

Jean-Claude Ellena

Ellena’s mother was a woman who wore Madame Rochas (Rochas, 1960, Guy Robert). That memory has remained etched in Ellena’s mind.

I could not imagine my mother wearing any other scent, nor did I want her to. Perhaps, around this time, I was beginning to become aware of my mother as a woman in her own right.

Jean-Claude Ellena

As a child, Ellena helped a neighbor of the paternal grandmother by picking jasmine and selling it to perfumers. Through the scent of jasmine that lingered on the arms, Ellena learned about perfume and the scent of women. School results were not good, and Ellena’s father was always saying, “You will have to work,” while Ellena’s mother was also worried.

As a teenager, Ellena spent about one week every two months with a maternal uncle, a music teacher, learning to play the piano. But when Ellena played, the family showed no interest at all.

Encountering a Perfumer

At 16, in 1963, Ellena began working the night shift at Antoine Chiris in Grasse, staying for three years. This company had supplied fragrance ingredients to Coty in the first half of the twentieth century and was one of the world’s oldest manufacturers of essential oils. Here, Ellena gained experience in extraction, distillation and analysis, and became acquainted with many different scents.

At 19, in 1966, Ellena left Chiris for military service. With no idea what occupation to pursue in the future, Ellena was still considering the question when military service ended.

At just this time, Ellena’s father handed over an issue of Dragoco Report, the magazine published by Dragoco. It was an entire issue devoted to the perfumer Edmond Roudnitska. This was Ellena’s first encounter with Roudnitska.
Deeply moved by an article titled “The Young Composer of Perfumes and Scents,” and already acquainted with Roudnitska’s son Michel, Ellena arranged to meet Roudnitska at home a few months later. The two would become lifelong allies.

In 1967, at 20, Ellena married Susannah Cusak, whom Ellena had met at 18. She came from a family of Irish ancestry and was extremely intelligent; her influence led Ellena to read writers such as Baudelaire and Jean Giono.
The following year, 1968, their daughter Céline was born.

The Challenge of Becoming a Perfumer

In 1968, at 21, Ellena enrolled in the first class of Givaudan’s newly reorganized perfumery school. Each day, the students memorized and classified natural and synthetic fragrance ingredients, and learned such things as how to construct the scent of jasmine.

Ellena soon grew tired of all this and asked Maurice Thiboud, then Givaudan’s master perfumer, for an opportunity to do practical work. Thiboud first assigned the task of recreating existing perfumes, smelling a scent and reconstructing it, which Ellena carried out perfectly for nine months.
Thiboud then made a special arrangement for Ellena to leave school and work under Thiboud as a junior perfumer. In the end, Ellena spent only nine months in what was supposed to be a three-year course. As a laboratory assistant, Ellena weighed ingredients according to the formulas of three perfumers and learned more and more about scent. Incidentally, the first perfume Ellena composed there was for the African market, made with orange, patchouli and other ingredients.

After Jean François Laporte (d. 2011) founded Sisley with Roland de Saint Vincent in 1972, Ellena composed the brand’s first perfume, Eau de Campagne, in 1974. Sisley requested the scent of Normandy, where lettuce and apples grow, and Ellena created it by adding the smell of tomatoes grown at home.

1. The Period of Using Large Numbers of Ingredients

In 1976, Ellena composed First for Van Cleef & Arpels and left Givaudan.

With First, Ellena sought to use the intensely floral notes of rose, jasmine and lily of the valley found in No. 5 and Arpège, while placing Hedione at the center.

This perfume occupies an important place in Jean-Claude Ellena’s stylistic development because First was made with 160 ingredients, including no fewer than four kinds of jasmine! In other words, the First period was the time in Ellena’s history when many ingredients were used to create complexity. Ellena recalls that both the thinking and the formulas were complex at that time.

I consider First the last perfume of the twentieth century made in the classical way, and the last perfume made without marketing. And today, no one would take such a risk.

Jean-Claude Ellena

The Search for Simple Perfumes

In 1976, Jean Laporte, whom Ellena had befriended at Sisley, founded L’Artisan Parfumeur. Incidentally, Laporte sold the brand in 1982. Originally a chemist, Jean Laporte studied perfumery independently.
When L’Artisan’s first perfume, Mûre et Musc, was composed in 1978, Ellena provided advice. Remaining close to Laporte, Ellena subsequently released perfumes such as Bois Farine and L’Eau d’Ambre at L’Artisan.

In 1977, with growing confidence in a career as a perfumer, Ellena contacted Roudnitska. Through repeated conversations, Ellena came to understand Roudnitska’s ideas about perfume and minimalism.

What I inherited from Roudnitska was the pursuit of concision through minimal formulas based on a carefully selected and reduced collection of ingredients, from which one could go on refining the selection without end, and the pursuit of the concept of form. I preferred Roudnitska’s way of building formulas to his rigor. Even that approach did not dispel Roudnitska’s difficult temperament. I, too, stopped trying to express harmony through the proportions of the ingredients in a composition. And I came to be convinced that the relationships between smells were what mattered.

Jean-Claude Ellena

It was Roudnitska who first created “intellectual” perfumes by placing an accent on simplicity.

Jean-Claude Ellena

In 1983, Ellena returned to Givaudan as chief perfumer, later moving to Haarmann & Reimer (Symrise). Then, in 1989, Ellena felt strongly that “the time had come to say something to the perfume industry.”

I want the wider world to understand that perfume is not something that happens to emerge when ingredients are mixed together, but the crystallization of many layers of thought, a work into which one pours one’s heart and soul.

Jean-Claude Ellena

On April 26, 1990, the world’s largest perfume library, the Osmothèque, was founded by ten people, including Jean Kerléo, Ellena and Guy Robert. It is now in Versailles.
At this time, Ellena decided to stop creating perfumes by analyzing the market.

2. The Period of Minimalism

I do not copy nature; I transform it.

Jean-Claude Ellena

In 1993, having awakened to minimalism, Ellena released Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert through Bulgari, created with around 20 ingredients! It was also then that Ellena met Frédéric Malle, beginning a connection with wonderful perfumes spanning decades.

In 1998, Ellena released Rumba for Balenciaga, In Love Again for Yves Saint Laurent and Déclaration for Cartier, steadily inscribing a name in history.
Véronique Gautier was involved in the creation of Déclaration, a connection that would later lead to Ellena becoming Hermès’s in-house perfumer.
She was then head of Cartier’s perfume division. When Cartier was considering a perfume of exceptional quality that would not follow trends, Ellena showed Véronique a distinctive perfume already in development, and it was chosen.

Founding a Brand

In 2000, Ellena founded a company, The Different Company, with Thierry de Baschmakoff. Originally an engineer, Thierry de Baschmakoff became captivated by the world of perfume and designed the bottle for Bulgari’s Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert in 1992.

Around the same time, Ellena also collaborated with Frédéric Malle, creating four fragrances between 2000 and 2004.

When you talk with him, he never raises his voice. The same is true of the perfumes he creates.

Frédéric Malle

A Revolution in the Perfume World Begins

Smells are words, and perfume is literature.

Jean-Claude Ellena

Jean-Louis Dumas, who had owned Hermès since 1978, saw the success of Chanel’s perfumes under in-house perfumer Jacques Polge and decided that Hermès should follow Chanel’s strategy. At the time, Hermès’s perfume sales were €54 million, while Chanel’s No. 5 alone brought in €180 million.

Hermès’s problem was simple. Customers around the world were picking up bottles of Chanel, Armani and Dior before picking up a Hermès perfume. For a luxury house, the issue of perfume is not merely an issue of image. It inevitably becomes a central business issue. This is because perfume brings substantial profits and is a crucial source of revenue for most high-end brands. For example, at that time, perfume accounted for 83.5% at YSL.

Chandler Burr

Dumas first hired the experienced Véronique Gautier, who had handled perfume operations at Chanel and Cartier, to take charge. The question confronting the two was why Chanel No. 5, even after 80 years or more, still reigned at the top of the world’s bestsellers.

The two began with a mystery of the industry: Donna Karan and Ralph Lauren perfumes are not made by Donna Karan or Ralph Lauren; the designers neither know how to make them nor even touch them. Most perfumes are made by an expert group of ghosts called perfumers, hidden in the designers’ shadows. They were simply given a concept and told to make it. But do they know the brand’s aesthetic values, tastes or style? Most perfumers know nothing of them.

Hermès began in 1837 as a harness workshop opened by Thierry Hermès on rue Basse-du-Rempart. It moved to 24 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in 1879 and began making bags in 1892. Craftsmanship was synonymous with Hermès, and the quality of the saddles was reflected in the leather goods. There was just one exception: perfume.

Only one brand also reflected its traditions, memories and aesthetic values in perfume: Chanel, which had employed an in-house perfumer since 1921. Of course, Hermès wanted Chanel’s commercial success, but it was looking toward something more important. It wanted a perfume collection expressing the elegance and consistency of its leather bags and silk ties. In other words, it wanted perfumes that distilled the pure essence of Hermès and satisfied French pride.

The answer was to welcome a man named Jean-Claude Ellena as the in-house perfumer. Véronique, who had created perfume with Ellena at Cartier, recommended Ellena.

Fashion does not interest me at all. I like luxury, but I do not use it as a status symbol. I am not interested in luxury. However, I am interested in the quality of life brought about by people who are interested in luxury.

Jean-Claude Ellena

Véronique told Ellena that, as a perfumer, Ellena would have the right to go in any direction desired. Ellena, in turn, explained what perfume is.

A perfume must be completely thought through. You have to consider it from every angle. Then you begin to create it, using perfect ingredients. Cost is not the issue. You apply the idea to the most wonderful materials.

Jean-Claude Ellena

Over a year, Ellena exchanged views repeatedly with Véronique and Dumas, discussing such questions as what a brand could do for an in-house perfumer. A contract was then signed in April 2004 under two conditions.

This enabled Ellena to create perfumes freely, without market testing and with a personal workspace in Cabris.

Hermès could not have made a better choice than him. He is a perfumer who devotes his passion to his profession and to making no compromises with his ingredients.

Calice Becker

For his career, this is a true recognition of his work. Jean-Claude Ellena will be able to create true beauty for Hermès, as François Coty did. To understand its history through scent and tell its stories.

Francis Kurkdjian

Ellena then made a resounding name with Un Jardin sur le Nil, the debut creation as Hermès’s in-house perfumer.

The Only Man Flying Freely in the Perfume World

I used to go shopping among chemical engineers for ingredients I liked, to expand my perfumer’s palette. But I soon realized that, among 100 kinds of musk, ten occur in nature and the differences are slight. I also realized that having them did not make me more creative; they merely added a little vitality to the market.

Jean-Claude Ellena

The dedicated laboratory built for Ellena by Hermès has a bedroom and 220 fragrance ingredients. While many perfumers keep close to 1,000 raw materials on their organs and use many ingredients, Ellena uses around 100 of the 220. And in a perfume, the count may be as low as 20, or only 40 to 60 at most.

Ellena’s perfumes at Hermès were created in three broad categories.

Time passed, and in December 2013, Christine Nagel was selected as the candidate to become the second in-house perfumer. Nagel joined Hermès in March 2014 and was appointed in-house perfumer in 2016; Ellena was the one who chose Nagel. At the time, Ellena was 66 and Nagel was 54.

I wanted the next in-house perfumer to be a woman, because I wanted to avoid comparisons and rivalry. Looking at the perfume industry, I also wanted someone who could see the whole process of making a product and had a personal signature. Christine is passionate, not shaped by a school’s format, patient, willing to take risks, and able to turn an intellectual approach into a perfume composition. Above all, her approach to perfume was the same as mine.

Jean-Claude Ellena

3. The Man Who Found Enlightenment in Perfumery

After the contract with Hermès ended, Ellena helped daughter Céline Ellena create perfumes while also working on writing. Ellena saw this as a way of sharing knowledge.

To be frank, I am a bad teacher. I do not want my pupils to copy me. It is not that I do not want to share my techniques, but that I believe everyone needs to find their own way. My way takes a very long time and is not interesting at all.

Jean-Claude Ellena

Inspired by daughter Céline, Ellena returned to the perfume industry with the desire to create perfumes once more, entering a new period. After exploring scent at Hermès, Ellena began creating perfumes with fewer ingredients than ever before. This lay at the far end of the pursuit of simplicity. Yes, he is the man who found enlightenment in perfumery, the first and last man to reach a pinnacle of perfume that even Roudnitska could not attain.
As a haiku perfumer, creating the haiku-like perfumes Ellena aspired to, Ellena began with Frédéric Malle and went on to create fragrances for niche brands.

Minimalism is a misunderstanding of my work. Simplicity is not minimalism.

Jean-Claude Ellena

Want to Know More about Ellena?

Perfume is art. Technique is important, but technique without artistry means nothing. And art without technique is meaningless too.

Jean-Claude Ellena

• Ellena’s sibling Bernard Ellena is also a perfumer, having composed fragrances for Hanae Mori, while Ellena’s son Herve became an architect.

• Particularly influential perfumes include Diorissimo, Fidji (Guy Laroche), Aliage (Estée Lauder), Féminité du Bois (Serge Lutens) and Bois Noir (Chanel).

• Ellena is a perfumer admired by Mathilde Laurent, Cartier’s in-house perfumer.

• A particular favorite ingredient to include in perfume is Hedione, a supporting ingredient with a watercolor-like touch. Ellena also includes pyrazine in every formula, using it so much as to call it the “Ellena signature.”

• Favorite writers…Jean Giono and Albert Camus.

• When feeling troubled, Ellena listens to Mozart; when creativity is needed, to jazz.

• Ellena is interested in Buddhist Zen thought and Taoism.

• Favorite art: Soulages. Like Soulages, Ellena limits the palette and tries to find new shades within it.

Ellena’s Books

Perfume (2010)

The Diary of a Nose (2011)

L’Ecrivain D’Odeurs (2017; French only. Purchase it here.)

Atlas of Perfumed Botany (2021)

Perfume Creations

Year	Brand	Name	With
1974	Sisley	Eau de Campagne
1976	Van Cleef & Arpels	First
1978	L’Artisan Parfumeur	L’Eau d’Ambre
1982	L’Artisan Parfumeur	La Haie Fleurie du Hameau
1989	Balenciaga	Rumba
1992	Bulgari	Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert
1994	Van Cleef & Arpels	Miss Arpels
1996	Bulgari	Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert Extrême
1998	Cartier	Déclaration
1998	Yves Saint Laurent	In Love Again
2000	Frédéric Malle	Angéliques sous la Pluie
2000	The Different Company	Bois d’Iris
2001	Frédéric Malle	Cologne Bigarade
2001	L’Artisan Parfumeur	Ambre Extrême
2001	The Different Company	Osmanthus
2001	The Different Company	Rose Poivrée
2002	Frédéric Malle	Bigarade Concentrée
2002	Amouage	Amouage Dia pour Femme
2003	Frédéric Malle	L’Eau d’Hiver
2003	L’Artisan Parfumeur	Bois Farine
2003	The Different Company	Bergamote
2003	Paul & Joe	Blanc
2003	Acqua di Parma	Colonia Assoluta	Bertrand Duchaufour
2018	Houbigant	Essence Rare
2019	Frédéric Malle	Rose & Cuir
2019	Perris Monte Carlo	Rose de Mai
2019	Perris Monte Carlo	Jasmin de Pays
2020	Perris Monte Carlo	Mimosa Tanneron
2020	Perris Monte Carlo	Lavande Romaine
2023	Frédéric Malle	Heaven Can Wait
1998–2016	Hermès	Rose Ikebana, Osmanthe Yunnan, Brin de Réglisse, Vétiver Tonka, Vanille Galante, Paprika Brasil, Santal Massoïa, Ambre Narguilé, Iris Ukiyoé, Poivre Samarcande, Épice Marine, Cuir d’Ange, Muguet Porcelaine, Rocabar, Un Jardin en Méditerranée, Un Jardin sur le Nil, Elixir des Merveilles, Terre d’Hermès, Kelly Calèche, Un Jardin après la Mousson, Kelly Calèche Parfum, Kelly Calèche Eau de Parfum, Eau de Gentiane Blanche, Eau de Pamplemousse Rose, Eau Claire des Merveilles, Voyage d’Hermès, Un Jardin sur le Toit, Voyage d’Hermes Perfume, Jour d’Hermes, L’Ambre des Merveilles, Bel Ami Vetiver, Jour d’Hermes Extrait de Parfum, Jour d’Hermes Absolue, Le Jardin de Monsieur Li, Eau de Neroli Dore
2019–2022	Le Couvent Maison de Parfum (often in a supporting role)	Mimosa, Tuberosa, Ambra, Vetivera, Nubica, Lysandra, Hattaï, Saïga, Heliaca, Theria, Agapi, Tuberosa, Ambra, Vetivera, Nubica, Lysandra, Hattaï, Saïga, Heliaca, Theria, Agapi, Tinhare, Kythnos, Palmarola, Anori, Solano, Aqua Majestae, Aqua Imperi, Aqua Nymphae, Aqua Millefolia, Aqua Amantia, Aqua Mahana	Mimosa, Tuberosa, Ambra, Vetivera, Nubica, Lysandra, Hattaï, Saïga, Heliaca, Theria, Agapi, Tuberosa, Ambra, Vetivera, Nubica, Lysandra, Hattaï, Saïga, Heliaca, Theria, Agapi, Tinhare, Kythnos, Palmarola, Anori, Solano, Aqua Majestae, Aqua Imperi, Aqua Nymphae, Aqua Millefolia, Aqua Amantia, Aqua Mahana
2019–2023	Laboratorio Olfattivo	Arancia Rossa, Baliflora, Bergamotto, Limone, Mandarino, Pompelmo, Tuberosis