PARIS: JEAN CLAUDE-ELLENA
NEW YORK: SARAH JESSICA PARKER

When the New Yorker magazine sent Chandler Burr to Paris and inside the luxury goods maker Hermès, Burr began what would become a year of reporting on perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena. Ellena was starting the creation of a new Hermès perfume. He was an industry legend who could smell the difference between jasmine absolutes distilled in steel or in aluminum, but he was just assuming a position no one had ever occupied-official Hermès perfumer-and would be shouldering responsibility for the total restructuring and revival of the house's troubled multi-million dollar perfume business. Hermès had agreed to give Burr complete internal access to watch Ellena and its marketers create, from beginning to end, their next scent, which they would be launching one year later on the $31 billion perfume market.

Such access had never been granted before. On the other side of the Atlantic, the New York Times asked Burr to profile the actress Sarah Jessica Parker, who had just signed a license agreement with Coty, Inc. to create her own scent. Parker was-with a mixture of excitement and fear-assuming a role she had never played before, that of perfume creative director. She was entering a risky, brutally competitive world. Parker and Coty invited Burr to come along . . .

The Perfect Scent is Burr's behind-the-scenes report from the secretive, high-pressure, and virtually unknown scent industry, where he would spend an intimate year with two personalities-and their two perfumes-who could not have been more different.

Ellena was creator of the hits First for Van Cleef & Arpels and Bulgari's Thé Vert; Parker was an American movie star. Ellena was building his scent by and for Hermès in Paris and in Grasse, France's traditional capital of perfume. Parker's fragrance was being made in New York City by one of the largest commercial producers of perfume in the world, Coty, Inc., a $3 billion corporation headquartered in a midtown skyscraper. Hermès' scent would be called Un Jardin sur le Nil. Sarah Jessica Parker's, Lovely.

Burr attended corporate strategic meetings, sat in on confidential creative sessions, listened to financial briefings, and here he presents word-for-word conversations with the players in Paris and Manhattan, at every step of the process. The result is a remarkable work of reporting on both art and business, a journey through a secretive and astonishing industry, and a nuanced portrait of two people, Ellena and Parker, who both were setting out to create
the perfect scent.

Publishers Weekly
November 5, 2007
THE PERFECT SCENT
By Chandler Burr

*Starred Review*

New York Times perfume critic Burr (The Emperor of Scent) follows the creation of two new scents-Un Jardin sur le Nil by French luxury house Hermès, and Lovely, a celebrity fragrance by Sarah Jessica Parker-in a kind of travelogue through the international perfume industry, "one of the most insular, glamorous, strange, paranoid, idiosyncratic, irrational, and lucrative of worlds." The former perfume was conceived by Hermès, informed by a trip to Egypt, then crafted by Jean-Claude Ellena, who represents a breed of "ghosts" known in the biz as perfumers. For the latter, Parker worked as artistic director of a corporate scent-making team. Burr illuminates perfumery's clash of cultures and values-French artistic purity versus American commercialism. Worldwide, this highly secretive industry's PR machine propagates several anachronistic myths. For example, it insists that perfume ingredients are naturally derived (the overwhelming majority are not, because of concerns about quality control, ecological impact and allergies, among others) and that the big names on the bottles are personally involved in creating scents (perfumers alone typically do this; Parker was a rare exception). Burr makes a strong case that this mythmaking works to the industry's detriment, and that inviting the public behind the scenes might help to reverse the industry's declining sales. Burr's is a thorough and often hilarious account of perfumery's colorful characters, the science and art of fragrance creation and the human experience of scent itself. (pub: Jan '08.)