From: ICatyna Shuliak
To: Jeffrey <jeevacation@gmail.com>
Subject: A Bespoke Perfume Doesn't Come Cheap - The New York Times
Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2017 15:37:38 +0000
http://www.nytimes.corn/2015/03/14/your-money/designing-personal-perfumes.html?2=0
A Bespoke Perfume Doesn't Come Cheap
By PAUL SULLIVAN MARCH 13, 2015
Audrey Gruss is founder of the Hope for Depression Research Foundation. which is seeking a scent that could be comforting to people with
depression. Michael Appleton for The New York Times
As part of a trip to France in 1984 to study floral painting, Dianne Bernhard spent time in
Monet's gardens at Giverny. It was there, among the flowers that inspired him, that she heard
Cartier was creating a new perfume in Paris made with jasmine, roses and vanilla.
"I said, `I'm going to go straight to Cartier as soon as I get out of class,' " said Mrs. Bernhard,
a painter and former president of the National Arts Club in New York. "I loved the smell."
The fragrance she found there was a musk, but she didn't like how it smelled on her skin. But
instead of giving up, she had a chemist begin mixing, and he ended up creating the scent that
Mrs. Bernhard — and only Mrs. Bernhard — has worn for the last three decades.
"It was just something that became me," she said. "If the scent of this woman changed, my
grandchildren, my family and many of my close friends would be sad."
When most people think of bespoke goods, they think shirts, suits, wedding gowns, maybe an
haute couture dress. But bespoke perfume takes the world of personalization to an entirely
new level.
For starters, it costs a lot to find the right mix of flowers and oils to create a smell particular to
you.
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Thomas Fontaine, a perfumer at Jean Patou who helped revive Joy, a perfume that has been
around for eight decades, and create Joy Forever, said it could cost someone $30,000 to
$50,000 to create a personal scent.
"The most expensive thing is the development," he said. "To create a fragrance for only one
person or one million people, the cost is the same."
In contrast, Joy is a comparative bargain at $800 an ounce.
But taste is tough to price. Mrs. Bernhard said her perfume had certainly not been cheap over
the years. She said it cost several thousand dollars for the scent to be created, back in 1984,
and over the years, it has cost the equivalent of several hundred dollars a bottle.
Laurent Le Guernec, a perfumer at International Flavors and Fragrances, a large perfume
creator, and the recipient of eight awards for perfume design, said the challenge was always to
personalize it. When he created Lovely, a scent for the actress Sarah Jessica Parker, the
perfume was meant to appeal to the millions of fans who wanted to smell just like her. But
what was that scent?
"She was creating something for herself and hoped other people would like it," he said. "She
had a very lavender oil, a musk oil and that was basically it. And she said, tan you do
something like that?' "
Each year, about a thousand fragrances are created and introduced by perfume companies in a
similar way, up from about 90 scents in the 1970s, said Elizabeth Musmanno, president of the
Fragrance Foundation, a perfume industry group.
Given that selection — on top of existing perfumes — Ms. Musmanno questioned the need
for a bespoke scent in the first place.
"While I think it's very interesting for certain people to try, it's also kind of the equivalent of
me hiring a great chef and telling him how to cook," she said. "You need training for years
and years to begin to be able to smell the difference in certain fragrances. For a lot of money
you could come out with something that isn't any better than what is on the market today."
For those who want to try, it begins with a conversation.
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Audrey Gruss, a former marketing and advertising executive, is just beginning the process of
creating a fragrance. She has a name — Hope Springs Eternal — and a purpose — to bring in
donations to the Hope for Depression Research Foundation. She founded the charity eight
years ago to find ways to battle depression, which plagued her mother, Hope.
Mrs. Gruss's sense of smell is already refined. "I have a white flower garden in our summer
home," she said. "I love jasmine, freesia and lily of the valley."
Still, the process is daunting. She is debating whether to start from scratch or to go to a
company with a famous "nose" that could combine some existing scents to create something
new. "It's an art form and a science," she said.
Dianne Bernhard had Cartier make a fragrance for her and says her grandchildren associate the scent only with her. Andrew Sullivan for The New
York Times
But Mrs. Gruss, who wants to put the money toward greater research for antidepressant drugs,
said she wanted a scent that itself could be comforting to people with depression.
"Some of those fragrances can be relaxing and soothing and uplifting," she said. "We don't
profess to practice medicine without a license, but the idea of aromatherapy has been quite
well documented."
These days, no scent is unattainable. Mr. LeGuemec occasionally auctions off his perfume-
making skills for charity. He remembers his strangest project.
"A lady said, `I really want to make a perfume that smells like my horse,'" he recalled. "I said,
`Whoa.' "
While the winning bidder was a serious equestrian, she didn't want to smell like a stable but
something redolent of her love of riding, which began in childhood.
"That kind of challenge I don't get every day," he said. "There is not a big brand that wants to
launch a fragrance that smells like a horse. But in the end it was very sensual."
He described what they created as musky and leathery, with orange blossom as the dominant
floral scent.
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Most of the time, of course, people would like to smell like a memory — a spring day in the
mountains or the breeze off a favorite lake. But the struggle is one of translation: Perfumer
and customer often do not speak the same language. One is describing something ephemeral;
the other is trying to translate that into flowers and oils.
"When it's bad, you're starting to speak a lot to know what they mean and what they're
expecting," Mr. Fontaine of Jean Patou said. "It's the same problem you have if you're
working on a project or a brand and they don't know what they want to sell to the consumer."
Typically, it takes six months to a year to create a scent and at least half a dozen meetings. But
that is predicated on the person having enough time to devote to the process, which even some
of New York's most soignée socialites do not want to expend.
Muffle Potter Aston said she had been wearing the same perfume — Fracas by Robert Piguet
— since high school, with occasional dalliances with other scents.
"The olfactory nerve brings back all the memories of smells," she said. "My mother wore Joy
and Chanel No. 5, and if I smell someone wearing Joy or Chanel No. 5, I think of my mother.
My grandmother wore Shalimar. If I smell someone wearing Shalimar, I think of my
grandmother."
Yet when Mrs. Potter Aston first started wearing Fracas, it was a scent she could get only in
Paris.
"If I had a friend going to Europe or I was going to Europe, I always made sure I brought a
bottle back," she said. "Perfume doesn't last forever. You can't just go and buy 10 bottles. It's
elusive."
(Perfume doesn't like heat and light, Mr. Fontaine said, so don't store bottles on the
windowsill in your bathroom.)
But once Fracas became available at Neiman Marcus, the scent was less appealing to her. And
now a couple of her friends on the New York social circuit also wear the scent.
She has been contemplating working with Kilian Hennessy, a perfumer living in Paris and
descendant of the founder of the Hennessy Cognac company, to create her signature scent. Yet
she has been hesitant to start the process.
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"With my twin daughters, I haven't had the time to pursue it," she said. "They're 10, and my
signature scent these days is just clean, out of the shower. So many times I don't have time to
get the perfume on."
But a perfume that is a signature scent provides, it seems, a contentment and confidence —
whether what is in the bottle is off the shelf or concocted just for you.
"I'm happy that in the decade of excess, the perfume I chose was not that expensive," Mrs.
Bernhard said of her bespoke Cartier scent, "but it was the most fabulous thing for me."
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