I happened upon this article about the inspiration behind Hermes perfumes via Asian Window. This year has been declared by Hermes to be the Year of India, with " silk scarves … vivid with raw pinks and fleshy mangoes, elephants harnessed to carriages and tigers rampant." Parfumeur Jean Claude Ellena travelled through Kerala, India in search of olfactory inspiration for his new ‘Jardin apres la mousson’ (‘Garden after the monsoons") set to be released this summer.
(As with all overwrought prose dedicated to the exotification of India and the monsoons, this article has its hilarious bloopers, which will undoubtedly pass unnoticed by the majority of the target audience. A sampling below:
"all rooms are cobbled out of 200 year old teak cottages (tharavadu)" –Tharavadu means family, not cottage
" Women wear their saris differently here than they do up in the north, draping them like togas" – Sarongs are a more appropriate comparisons.
"And when the first monsoon blows in from the Arabian sea….the modest women of Kerala rush out into the rain…"and the saris cling very close to the body" " –Sounds like a Bollywood rain song, not reality
But I digress ,as usual.)
Ellena travels about the world, inhaling scents and attempting to recreate their most pleasing elements not with the original source, but a palette of chemicals such as geraniol, indole, castoreum and a whole host of other derivatives from floral, animal and other sources. It’s a fascinating field that revels in the blending and mixing to generate a whole forest of sensation in a single sniff.
While Monsieur Ellena cooks up his olfactory masterpieces and Hermes markets them at astronomical prices to the cognoscenti, another company has taken a different kind of potshot at the Asian mass market.
You might think twice before telling a friend, and you would bite your lip
rather than mention it to your boss, but one soap company has no qualms
about telling 3 billion Asians that they need to use a deodorant.Unilever is preparing to confront the issue head-on with a marketing and
advertising push directed at a new Asian generation.Russell Taylor, global vice-president for Axe, the Unilever-made deodorant
marketed as Lynx in Britain, said that no one had yet found a way of making
Asians self-conscious about body odour. “Asia is a market we have never
really cracked. They don’t think they smell, but people everywhere smell,”
he said.He said that the region was a billion-pound opportunity – “the last empty
space on the map”. He estimated that only 7 per cent of Asians used a
deodorant, with consumption in India virtually nil, and his team is dreaming
up advertisements that will induce shame about sweat stains and odour across
the region.
All this, despite the fact that body odor is not really a pressing problem in these countries, where frequent baths (even twice daily in the hot season) are the norm. But that won’t deter the marketers from creating an illusion of need to sell their product. The question is whether their audience will be receptive or oblivious to these blandishments. That’s still up in the air, just like the "Jardin apres la mousson", I guess.
Accidental Blogger 
2 responses to “The Cognoscenti of Perfumes (Sujatha)”
The Hermès page for Un Jardin Après La Mousson describes the perfume thus:
“Though Kerala is a region renowned for its spices, Ellena eschewed hot spicy notes in favor of cooler vegetable notes such as cardamom, coriander, pepper, ginger and ginger flower. He also included a vetiver accord of his own creation.”
I found that a bit intriguing. Cool or not, aren’t cardamom, coriander, pepper and ginger all spices rather than veggies? I myself prefer cool fragrances with a touch of spice and wood (sandalwood, cedar, sage, bergamot, rosemary, cucumber, basil etc.) over heady flowery or sweet fruity perfumes. I wish Ellena would have devoted his skills to capture the “real” monsoon scent – the fresh clay smell of wet earth which lasts only for a short time immediately after the first showers. That is a beguiling aroma that I have never encountered anywhere in the world except in India.
As for malodorous Asian throngs needing deodorants, I am afraid Unilever is not exactly wrong. (Have you ever ridden in a crowded bus or train on a hot Indian day?) But the phenomenon has more to do with poverty than personal hygiene. The affluent, with easy access to soap and water are already perfuming themselves. The poor, who can’t afford a proper shower on most days, are hardly likely to spend their hard earned and limited resources to spray themselves with parfum.
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That was another of the bloopers from no less than the Hermes PR department. Cardamom, coriander, pepper and ginger would inject ‘hot spicy notes’, not ‘cool vegetable notes’. The monsoon scent is quite unique, and some day an actual scientist may even be able to identify the precise composition of the fragrance- surely something to do with the composition of the earth and rain water falling on the overheated soil. Ellena can merely sniff it and be inspired by it, but not recreate it in toto. Reality is not his intent, as he mentions in the article.
I also followed this link to an interesting review of the scent in question.The reviewer states:
“The Ellena phenomenon is thus also that, perhaps more so than with any other living perfumers, his scents do not come innocently presented to you in bottles but are usually encapsulated in paragraphs, maxims about perfumery creation, sources of inspiration, and are thus made more narrative in their forms thanks to these appended details.”
So the description is supposed to enhance the experience of the perfume by telling you what to imagine as you inhale the scent. Kind of like the reams of paper used to expound on some, especially abstract art- you cannot be sure what the artist means unless accompanied by a 2 page description of the source of inspiration.
Malodorous throngs on buses and trains? Now that you mention it, I remember the buses with fishwives and their baskets overflowing with fresh fish- noticeable, but not unpleasant; the smell of coconut oil on wet hair, but not usually mixed with sweat until the end of the day. But then I had the advantage of living in a place where water and baths were aplenty. It might have been different in a drier dustier locale.
Actually, to my nose, human smells are not a problem after the first whiff. Perfume sprays, or even heavy floral garlands(rajnigandha,for instance) on the other hand, are powerful migraine triggers for me. That’s not to say that I dislike sandalwood, incense, attar and other such fragrances, just that for me the plain actual odors are more evocative and less annoying than the synthesized perfumes.
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