"Today, perfume does $15 billion a year in sales and has been taken over by businessmen who target the mass production, middle-market niche," says Dana Thomas, author of "Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster." "If people want to indulge, a bottle of perfume is one way that brands can reach the middle class: It's easy to sell and is cross-cultural."
"We've gone from the concept of haute-couture perfume to ready-to-wear perfume," Kerleo says. "Perhaps we're heading toward the day where the ultimate prestige will be no perfume."
Ellena, though, will have nothing to do with these approaches. Although he takes pride in using as few materials as possible in his compositions, his scents are sophisticated olfactory voyages. Take his fragrance Terre d'Hermes. It begins like a sunburst of grapefruit sprinkled with sugar and mysteriously morphs into a tramp through the woods with notes of peppery red earth, sun-warmed rocks and a smoky wind above blowing through pines. An hour later, as the vetiver kicks in, tropical ferns magically spring from the soil.
Searching for inspiration is a combination of chance and experience. For the recently launched women's fragrance Kelly Caleche, Ellena wanted to play around with the classic Hermes scent Caleche, adding a touch all his own: a scent that would evoke the mythic Kelly bag.
"I visited Hermes' basement in Paris, a secret place where they store every kind of leather imaginable," he recalls. "As I walked around, I realized that there were certain leathers -- the finest ones -- that smelled like flowers with notes of mimosa, iris and narcissus. That's all I needed for the idea, but it took me eight months to produce it."
Not surprisingly, to research an idea, Ellena prefers to travel, inhaling exotic spices in the local markets, wandering through the streets to take in the rich wafting smells or snapping off fruit from indigenous trees, like the green mangoes that inspired his exotic scent Un Jardin sur le Nil.
Often his inspiration arrives by chance. After searching in vain for an idea in Tunisia, Ellena attended a party on the eve of his departure and was served champagne on a platter lined with fig leaves.
"A young girl tore off a leaf, held it to her nose, and her face lit up with pleasure," he remembers, and in that moment the idea for his fragrance Un Jardin en Mediterranee came to him, based on the memory of the aroma of that fig leaf. The smell evokes a hot summer's day in a hammock under the shade of a fig tree swinging from flowery lightness to woody spiciness.
