To have radical conviction today as a perfumer means having resistance. Resistance in this context, however, does not equate to synonyms like defiance or refusal. It is the acceptance that the industry has morphed into a beast that needs to be fed, with the addition of a social media algorithm that the beast has developed a healthy appetite for.
The commercial success of a product —regardless of the perfumer’s genuine intentions or not — cannot be curbed or ignored. A rising tide of fortunes lifts all boats, no matter who is on board.
Time, with all its generosity and misgivings, is no doubt a catalyst for creatives. For Christine Nagel (the in-house perfumer at Hermès), it allows her to align with her own creative, intellectual, and emotional values. There is value in creative risk (the House’s sales rose by 33%at the start of 2022 according to BoF) and in this continuity — the combination of inspiration and aspiration taps into the zeitgeist — comes the fantasy that comes with change.
“My luxury as a perfumer is enjoying the enormous and perhaps unique creative freedom given to me by this House. There are no briefs, fixed deadlines, focus groups or market tests; there is just a small-scale collective decision when choosing the fragrance, and this enables me to go where no one else does. They are fragrances of conviction selected by the Hermès perfumer and the Chairman ofHermès fragrances. It’s a luxury that I appreciate every day.”
“I’m not given any particular timeframe. Among all the tools provided to us by Hermès, one is immaterial and yet essential: time. At Hermès, the time given to creation is about quality, not quantity— you take the time you need to create something beautiful. As for an interesting fact, I would say all the stages in the creative process are interesting: the research, testing, procrastination, progress, the successes and failures, the “What if..” and the “Oh no…” moments, the moment you lean back in your chair and say “That’s it, I’ve got it”, the future.”
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To simply relegate Terre d’Hermès Eau Givree as a flanker to its 2006 origins would be doing it an injustice. In lesser hands, a flanker becomes a creative copout. When too many are involved inits production, a flanker loses its original distinction.
The right notes, commercial, creative, and computerised success come when a perfumer treats it with a subtlety that bears significance.
“I want to insist that Terre d’Hermès Eau Givree is a fully-fledged creation in its own right, even though it belongs to a family. It’s even perhaps a little more difficult to create a fragrance within an existing family because it involves respecting its spirit, structure, and imaginary world while adding your signature. My quest fora heightened, more intense freshness took it far away from the citrus classics. Each fragrance tells a story, opens up a particular imaginative world, and promises a new journey — this one is icy.” “ I’ve seen the Icelandic landscapes where lava and frost, and fire and ice coexist. An idea came from this vision of a pure, untouched land alive and well beneath a cloak of frost. A protected and preserved land that gives and receives, and gives back and takes again.”
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Iceland, unlike most places on Earth, presents a furrow in time. It is a land with extreme daylight and darkness, awaking dream of mountains and lava fields, and a place of contradictions — at once archaic and modern that tempers with the lush and brutal. Iceland is an outpost in an alien world, a nice-bound island country that sits between two active tectonic plates.
For all of its harshness and eeriness — stony deserts, icy glaciers, and lava fields — comes an ephemeral essence — one that suggests that beauty is at its best when it is untempered.
“With Terre d’Hermès Eau Givree, I wanted to express the fresh, biting intensity of the earth covered by ice. It’s an alchemistic fusion in which a fragrance has been infused, like ice that slowly melts and waters the earth. We’ve all felt the burn of ice — when it is so cold it feels like it is burning the skin. It’s just a sensation. In fact, the sensory receptors that are activated by extreme cold are found near the ones that are activated by extreme heat.”
“ This new fragrance was inspired by two seemingly contradictory and diametrically opposed concepts: the fertile earth and frost. For even under the ice the earth pulsates, vibrant under a protective frost that captures its essence and its power. This dialogue is a moment of grace between two essential substances and sources of energy for mankind.”
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Less a reedition and more of a chapter that continues the tale of Terre d’Hermès, Nagel points polar by redefining what a fragrance defined as fresh could smell like.
When the sky is blanketed grey and the frosty wind picks up speed, Nagel’s use of juniper (“it gives a crisp sensation, like footsteps on ice”) and Timut pepper (“it brings its power and sparkle to the fragrance”) mimics the stunning electricity of liquid burning cold.
Terre d’Hermès Eau Givree is a fragrance that mimics the push and pulls of nature. It takes as much as it gives(confidence comes with a cost), reacts to the climate one is using it in as all fine fragrances should, and evolves in time while retaining a nostalgic effect for anybody who has had the luck to bear witness to its original beauty.
“Perfume ingredients are there to serve an idea, a story told through scents, and not to express themselves for themselves — like a palette of colours is used to paint. I also don’t have any preferences for or biases towards certain ingredients. All raw materials interest me. And when I work on a material, I want to take it all the way, experiment with it, and test its boundaries. Ultimately, I like to transform things, I like to make green notes warm, woods liquid, and flowers hostile.”
“Every perfumer, of course, has their unique concepts as far as ingredients are concerned. Everyone experiences a different emotion when encountering the same scent. It’s mysterious chemistry that largely depends on our olfactory memories. We each have our idea of freshness. There are so many ways to express it, just as there are so many different styles and schools of landscape painting. I am truly interested and amused by the unconscious and subjective side that the word freshness conveys in perfume. It’s also a concept that I have been exploring and developing for a long time. To my mind, in Terred’Hermès Eau Givrée, this freshness had to be intense, bracing, and almost biting, like ice or frost.”
When the ice thaws, however, and when complexity demands commerce is when the most pertinent question is asked. In the grander scheme of algorithms and digital admiration and with a fragrance market worth USD$33.5billion just a year ago, where does Terre d’Hermès Eau Givree sit in the digital clouds of sales and stocks?
Nagel unsurprisingly believes the present has its purpose and the future is on one’s self to make.
“There is the short term: when you buy a fragrance, you want it to leave a trail and to feel like it lasts. I realise that all my life, I’ve looked for relative volatility that is weighted and present. And then there is the long-term and the process of becoming a classic: a fragrance that transcends time and is unaffected bypassing fashions or trends, with a clear expression. Being classic means rejecting trends and fashion; it is a form of resistance. It means creating not from a concept, not from reason, but from the desire to tell a story that belongs to you to share it.”
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