A perfumer who sees and feels scents

By Chantel Tattoli

NEW YORK: Christine Nagel, head perfumer at Hermès, works from an office on the ninth floor of the luxury brand’s headquarters near the Élysée Palace in Paris. Occupying part of the space is a laboratory with a scale, along with refrigerators where ingredients are stored. Nagel has a background in organic chemistry and has confected dozens of perfumes for multiple brands. Her favorites fall into a category known as chypre, fragrances that traditionally have citrus top notes, floral centers and base notes of patchouli and oak moss.

She has created about 20 chypre perfumes; her most recent, for Hermès, was in development for about a decade. Most other fragrances that Nagel has made, by contrast, have taken a couple of years to complete. “For this one, I really took my time,” Nagel said, while sitting in her office on an afternoon in July. She spoke in French through an interpreter.

Nagel, who is in her 60s and lives in Paris, began developing the perfume not long after she started working at Hermes in 2014. It is the first chypre perfume to be released by the brand since it started selling fragrances in 1951. “When I arrived, I told myself, ‘One day, you’ll make them a chypre,” Nagel said.

Bergamot oranges from the Calabria region of southwest Italy — plucked when the fruits were still green — were a source of the perfume’s citrus notes, and its floral elements included components derived from lilies native to forests in Madagascar.

“I’m very curious,” said Nagel, whose process for developing perfumes includes reading scientific journals and talking with researchers. “I pick out what I want to work with from all that breadth of information.” “I am interested in what’s in the natural world as well as biotechnology,” added Nagel, who began her career working in a lab focusing on research and development for Firmenich, a Swiss fragrance and flavor manufacturer.

Some of the perfume’s patchouli notes came from akigalawood, a synthetic ingredient that Nagel described as “basically a biotech patchouli.” Since its introduction in the 2010s, akigalawood has been used in perfumes for other luxury brands: Comme des Garcons’ “Blackpepper,” Prada’s “Miracle of the Rose” and Issey Miyake’s “Le Sel d’Issey,” among others.

Oak moss, a musty-smelling lichen, has historically been one of the four main components of a chypre perfume. But in recent years, the International Fragrance Association, a regulatory agency, and other groups have placed restrictions on use of the ingredient, which was found to include irritants that could cause rashes.

Nagel, who described the smell of oak moss as “humid,” said she wasn’t interested in using it. Instead, she used an ingredient derived from toasted oak wood. “It smells almost like rum,” Nagel said with a smile. “Like rhum arrange” she added, referring to a flavored version of the liquor.

The perfume, Barénia, shares its name with the calf leather that Hermès uses to produce Birkin bags. Someone once described the leather to Nagel as a material “that caresses you back as you touch it,” she said, a tactile property that reminded her of how the new fragrance seemed “so close to the skin” after applied.

Nagel has synesthesia, a neurological condition that mixes the senses. Other perfumers who have it include Frédéric Malle, Dawn Goldworm and David Moltz of D.S. & Durga.

Synesthesia affects a small percentage of the global population: less than 5%, according to some estimates. People with it might say they hear colors or taste sounds. In Nagel’s case, she sees and feels scents.

When it came time to name the new perfume, she knew exactly what to call it. “This definitely is Barenia,” she said.