Smooth Air…

If, as many say, advertising is the barometer of our state of mind, then it seems that we all feel better.

Or worse.

As an example of that, let’s consider the launch of the new perfume by Nina Ricci, “L’Air”. It may have created a new genre: the feelgood perfume, in the same way that Hollywood has invented the feelgood movies.

Since the success of “Nina” in 2006, the octogenarian Brand knows an impressive revival. Attractive products, relevant and clear strategy, flawless communication, all these elements combine to give a great vitality to the old “demoiselle”.

With L’Air, Ricci too revisits its great classic fragrance and like others before, it does pretty well. The 1951 famous bottle with doves is reinterpreted in frosted glass, the fragrance is pleasant enough and the name is perfect, in its obvious simplicity.

But the great success of this launch is its TV commercial. A series of charming sketches with a retro voice, flooded by the Velvet Underground. The whole ad is taking its influences from the seventies for its music, from the sixties for its images and from the fifties for its claim. This is certainly not by chance.

With this TV sport, we are transported right into the post-war boom. A carefree period, a period of absolute confidence in the future and, at the same time, of affirmation of the women’s independance. A golden age that the buyers of L’Air will have never known.

Obviously, the Brand has hit the nail again with these delicate Polaroids, at a time when the ambient morale may not be so good…

L’Air, a feelgood perfume ? Perhaps. But do we need anything else from a perfume?

Hervé Mathieu – Fragrance Forward

Of hand and glass (part II)

(…) The burning glass becomes a malleable material. With docility, it keeps the shape imposed by the worker, dimming its brilliance as a sign of goodwill.

The soften glass dough is deftly placed between the iron jaws of the mold that close upon it. Its temperature is maintained by fire burners, and sometimes it flares up. The workers continue their job as if nothing was happening.

Thanks to the preforming, the glass dough is distributed evenly in the mold. After a dozen of seconds, the mold is opened again. The fire caterpillar has been transmuted into a shining butterfly: a perfume bottle that still bears in its golden reflections a hint of fire… Make no mistake: the glass is still hot, very hot.

An additional torching, called reburn, will erase its small surface defects or the seam of the mold, depending on the expected level of quality.

Finally, the glass bottle is placed on a treadmill going at a pace which is almost imperceptible to the eye. The bottles are cooled slowly in a tunnel from which they come out ready to be delicately put in cardboards.

For us visitors, it is always the same astonishment: the radical opposition between the brutality of this industry and the fragility of what it produces: these delicate objects, these precious bottles that will contain the essence of thousands of love stories to come.

And maybe, soon, the fragrances of a new project…

Hervé Mathieu – Fragrance Forward

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Web Fragrant Newsletter Spring 2011

Nathalie Pichard is a fragrance evaluator and the founder of toPNotes.

She publishes an interesting, well documented and pleasant to read newsletter that she has allowed me to share on this blog.

You can read it by clicking on the following link :WFN33 spring_2011_6.04.2011

To contact her : nathaliepichard@orange.fr

Hervé Mathieu – Fragrance Forward

Of hand and glass (part I)

Recently, I went with a client to the Vallée de la Bresle and visit the last French glass manufacturer working in semi-automatic. This technical term is used for the manufacturing of bottles where the molten glass is slowly formed under the hand of man and the pressure of cast iron.

It’s a harsh world, far from the postcard views of the glassmakers of Murano and their spun glass pets.

It’s a tough world of concrete, metal and refractory bricks. A world both industrial and artisanal where the eyes are focused around a single point: the oven, placed in the center of a dark hangar. An ugly Leviathan guarded by hissing pipes of compressed air and surrounded by men focused on their work.

The glass worker who collects the molten glass immerses a cane in the monster’s open mouth, receiving the full brunt of the burning breath. Why his eyes do not burn is a mystery… Just by its weight he knows how much glass he has taken. He’s a funambulist.

The glass is an orange mass, burning, throbbing, almost alive. It is difficult to detach the eyes from it. The man with the cane gives it to another worker who, with absolute precision, cuts the exact amount of glass needed, by the gram. Too much glass, too little glass and the bottle is lost. He is a watchmaker.

The glass is then rocked back and forth by the worker, in a smooth movement. It darkens. The workman preforms it by pressing it against two metal plates heated with a flaming torch. The gestures are swift and accurate. It takes only a few seconds, the glass musn’t be left to cool and harden. (…)

Hervé Mathieu – Fragrance Forward

Pretty Mademoiselle

As one may have noticed, the battle for women’s fragrances is now fought on a new market segment: the rejuvenated classics.

Miss Dior Cherie, Eau de Shalimar, Shalimar Parfum Initial or Trésor In Love – just to name a few -, all launches that have allowed the big Houses to attract new and younger clients, between 17 and 25 years old. A strategy that also allows them to have a more attractive selling price than the original version without the risk of devaluating it.

In short, a nice marketing stunt? Yes, but not only.

These fragrances are, for most of them, really well done. Perfumers who have reinterpreted the traditional juices gave them a nice facelift and have attracted a fringe of the market that is said to be mainly interested in the fruity-floral family where the best (rarely) mixes with the (often) worse …

The advertising TV spots communicate freshness, playfulness and joy. But also sometimes cheap sentimentality, as with the annoying spot “Ange ou Démon le Secret” by Givenchy …

The new commercial for Coco Mademoiselle, featuring Keira Knightley as a modern amazon filmed by the director of “Pride and Prejudice“, departs from the stereotypes associated with youth to tell a story of free and independent seduction. We are there on the historical Brand Territory of Chanel, where it is clearly more comfortable than with stories of posh Lolita that was chosen by tis competitors.

With this spot rooted in its tradition, Chanel paradoxically gives out a modern image of the young Western woman. A mission it has in its genes, inherited from a woman named Gabrielle who did not fear men!

Hervé Mathieu – Fragrance Forward

CLIC HERE to view the New Coco Mademoiselle in full length (and see that Keyra Knightley is still beautiful when wearing a motorcycle helmet)

NYC celebrates a century of invisible art

Some years ago, I visited an exhibition at the Grand Palais, whose theme was related to the technique and how it had transformed our daily lives.
I vividly remember a sound broadcast for the visitors: the typical “grrzzgrrzz” of a diskette in operation. A sound that everyone knew but which would disappear from the soundscape a few years later, like the one of rewinding a tape or the stylus that sits on a vinyl record.

I thought it would be interesting to create a museum of sounds, in the same way that was created a Museum of Perfumes : the Osmothèque in Versailles, France.
Until that day, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York in November 2011 will demonstrate a fine olfactory memory with “The Art of Scent: 1889-2011.”

This exhibition will trace the evolution of modern perfumery through ten iconic creations, from Jicky Guerlain Aimé (1889) to contemporary compositions and through the classics, like Edmond Roudnitska’s Diorama (1949 ), to which Chandler Burr, scent critic of The New York Times and curator of the exhibition refers to as “one of the most beautiful perfumes expressionists in the world”. For what he is right, any North American emphasis aside.

It will also pay tribute to the work of perfumers have created fragrances that have marked the past 30 years: Olivier Cresp (Angel), Jacques Cavallier (L’Eau d’Issey), Alberto Morillas and Annie Buzantian (Pleasures).
One certainly does not need an excuse to go to New York … But for the inquisitive and nomadic nose, this exhibition will certainly provide an additional incentive.

Hervé Mathieu – Fragrance Forward

As (g)oud as gold…

A few days ago, I attended a conference of the French Society of Perfumers on oud wood, also known as agarwood. In the audience was a dozen “noses” and when the speaker asked who had already worked with oud, the hands that were raised could be counted… on the fingers of one hand!

Yet the oud wood is known for hundreds of years, and even more than that if one considers that it is cited in the Bible and the Koran. In the Middle East, oud is an essential raw material, perhaps the most valuable one. Anyone who has traveled in a Muslim country has breathed the aroma of haunting Oud. The odor of both animal and incredibly refined, crude and sophisticated.

I have on my desk a piece of wood wrapped in oud a plastic sheet to protect it from the air. Its vague air of cannabis resin has often intrigued visitors… I personally think it is more addictive than what people are confusing it with! I often discard the sheet of plastic, which has become slightly greasy because of the oil that permeates the wood, and take a deep breath. The perfume has lost its strength over time but it continues to fascinate me. Feeling the oud wood is a bit like seeing an unknown color.

To describe the scent of Oud is difficult. It would be like trying to describe rose or jasmine, these fundamentals of perfumery. The oud smells like oud and nothing else. With this distinction, however, that there are different qualities of oud, younger or older, more subtle or more crude, and different origins – oud from Cambodia being the most sought after.

One should be rejoicing, somehow, that oud is still relatively unknown to the Western perfumers: the tropical tree that provides the oud, Aquilaria, is an endangered species. By weight, the extract oud is indeed more expensive than gold …

Hervé Mathieu – Fragrance Forward