François Coty, French perfumer and Founder of Coty Inc.
It’s difficult to imagine now what a dull, monochrome place the world was before synthetic chemistry filled it with vivid colors and smells. Molecules like William Perkin’s mauve, the first synthetic dye [1856], and its olfactory soulmate, the artificial violets smell of ionone [1893], have immeasurably brightened our lives. Until then, perfumery borrowed from plant compositions intended to attract pollinating insects [floral smells] or keep moulds and bacteria at bay [clove, camphor, patchouli]. Nature was the perfumer: nothing was ever chemically pure, all colors were mixed. In the words of perfumer René Laruelle, synthetics gave fragrance its bones, while naturals supplied the flesh. By the turn of the twentieth century, chemistry had come up with a powerful palette of synthetics, and perfumers set about exploring this new hybrid world. The greatest among them, François Coty, promptly created a huge business empire and composed a handful of fragrances that still inspire much of perfumery today.
The flagship Guerlain store on the rue des Champs Elysées, Paris.
Until the mid-seventies, it was considered normal to be faithful for a lifetime to a fragrance one loved, and to have only one or two bottles on ones’s shelf. There’s now a widespread interest in fragrance: not as a signature scent that defines our personality, but as an art form on par with music and literature. If you like records and books, you will definitely own more than one. The same can often be true of fragrances, albeit at a different price point. A major turning point in fragrance occurred in the eighties, when the pace of fragrance launches accelerated, the money spent on launches and advertising increased, and many of the brands were consolidated into large groups (such as LVMH) that knew how to take a famous brand, manage it properly, and make it global. Until the late seventies, a fragrance launch every few years was considered a normal rhythm for a fashion firm like Chanel or even a specialist fragrance firm like Guerlain. Twenty years later, several launches a year is standard.
Hugo Boss’ Boss Bottled Campaign featuring Gerard Butler.
Before World War I, perfume firms were separate from the world of fashion. Between the wars, the combined efforts of Worth, Molyneux, Chanel and others made sure that “elegant” meant “fragrant” (and spawned many smaller companies selling cheaper versions of the “Next Big Thing”). This trend has accelerated continuously since then. At the time of writing this, Michael Edwards’ database www.fragrancesoftheworld.info lists more than 800 fragrance launches in the first nine months of 2014, and nearly 1,000 projected by the end of the year. This does not include the creations of dozens of small niche firms that have sprung up in the last decade; neither does it include the many new fragrances launched by firms unconnected to European and U.S. perfumery. It is, nevertheless, a staggering number: 22 launches a week. Even venerable firms like Guerlain, who released a mere 17 fragrances in total from 1900 to 1975, have joined the game: 13 fragrances this year, including one reissue. To put this in perspective, a similar number [800] of movies were released in U.S. theaters last year, as compared to 300,000 books. On numbers alone, a perfume is therefore more like a movie than a book, and many of the big launches are indeed cinematic: huge advertising budgets, familiar faces in the ads, and vast expenditure almost guaranteed to recoup itself—and possibly many times over.
The peculiarity of the perfume industry lies in its mode of artistic creation. Most fragrances are composed by one, more rarely two or three perfumer[s] over a period which used to be on the order of a year or two, and is now considerably shorter, maybe just two to three months. As an “author,” the perfumer works under unusual constraints: her creations are elicited by a brief devised by the brand and chosen in open competition with the submissions of others. Once chosen, her progress is evaluated almost daily by perfume “editors” known as evaluators and, in the case of large firms with corresponding large budgets, tested by focus groups at regular intervals. Chemistry still reigns supreme. The creative side is dominated by a few large aromachemicals firms that train the perfumers and give them new, proprietary materials (“captives”) to play with. A process of consolidation has reduced the number of large composition firms to five, from a few dozen thirty years ago. All of them typically have at least one creative office in Paris and one in New York. The synthetic chemistry is done all over the planet.
