Historical perfumes: scents of time

the allure of The forbidden is a good topic. With a ban, or better said: what does this mean in French – could Givenchy already in the middle of the 20th century. Century perfumes selling, with L’Interdit. Chanel was No. 5, Lanvin Arpège, for Givenchy L’Interdit was the first and long the most important perfumes of the house. So how is it in the business with beauty usual, flew by the scent at some point: L’Interdit was set. Now you have brought it out again.

Jennifer Wiebking

editor in the Department “life,” the Frankfurt General Sunday newspaper.

F. A. Z.

And this is happening more and more frequently. As well as in the fashion of old houses dusted, and under new creative and economic leadership in the Here and now the meaning, as in the classic Design re-launched to be the beauty industry uses of their heritage. And sometimes even on the legacy that actually belongs to someone else: Joy, for example, is a legendary fragrance by Jean Patou to buy even more Dior has since this autumn, however, a perfume with the same name. For safety’s sake, you called it “JOY by Dior”.

“Both, Joy and L’Interdit, are very good names,” says the perfumer Dominique Ropion, is not for the Joy-new product introduction responsible. The naming will always be heavier. “A lot is blocked.”

If the industry be running out of names, it is also because of the numerous new launches in each year. Dominique Ropion is involved in many. His Name is known only to connoisseurs known after his work, but millions of people will smell when you apply, for example, Euphoria from Calvin Klein, Armani Mania by Giorgio Armani, Very Irresistible Givenchy, Trésor by Lancôme or L’homme by Yves Saint Laurent. Since the eighties, he creates fragrances.

You will meet him on this autumn day, when his employer, IFF, one of the largest manufacturers of fragrances in the world, in Neuilly, a Western suburb of Paris. At the reception, bottles with the scents of the future, on his Desk, they split into their substances. Who is not a perfumer, could hold the mountains of samples in small plastic bags, which are provided with Clues, for Chaos. Dominique Ropion can classify the many samples.

Sweet and tart at the same time

The majority of people are in need of a packaging, a Celebrity, the whole Marketing Tam-Tam to summarize that, what’s in the bottle, somehow. In the case of L’Interdit, you can now follow actress Rooney Mara, who reminds so much of Audrey Hepburn, that one imagines himself in the past, when the friendship between the Hollywood Star and the Couturier Hubert de Givenchy created the fragrance first, just for you. Only a year later, in 1957, launched him to a wider audience.

Today, this heritage is a nice reference point, measured in the many new scents, the summer and winter editions, the sweet or tart variants, it must clearly give all the.

Dominique Ropion had finished in the eighties, his training in Grasse, the city of the scents, and began working as a perfumer in Paris. “Back then, you had a lot of brands, now there are only a few.” Ropion speaks of L’oréal, Estée Lauder, Coty, LVMH and Puig: “The are five. Earlier there were hundreds.“ These five are still more new fragrances per year, and as hundreds of individual brands previously, which is now run under the umbrella of the corporations. “When I started in 1984 with the work of a first perfume for Givenchy, it took me two years,” says Dominique Ropion. “And in the time I have done anything different.”