Interview | Hermès Fragrance Director Christine Nagel

Note: Editor was flown and accommodated interstate by Hermès Australia to conduct this interview. 

It may well be fate that brought Christine Nagel to the house of Hermès.

Christine, the heritage brand’s Fragrance Director, cites her very first memory of scent as the aroma that wafted from inside her grandmother’s most loved handbag- more specifically, the scent of the powder compact that lived within that bag.

“The interesting thing is I look at Hermès,” Christine tells me, “and if you go back to the first Hermès perfume, Caleche, the request that the president of Hermès at the time made was to create a perfume that would recreate the odour of the interior of a woman’s handbag.”

Coincidence or fate, it was many years before Christine harnessed that initial interest in scent and turned it into her career. “When you’re a child, you study many things- how to draw, how to play music, your parents teach you how to taste things,” she lists. “But nobody teaches you how to smell, which is a great pity.

“When I was younger, I was completely ignorant of the profession of a perfumer. What I thought I wanted to do was to study chemistry and do research. It was only after that, having worked with a laboratory which worked with the perfume industry, that I discovered the profession [of a perfumer] and the desire to do it.”

It was while Christine was working as a research chemist beside trained perfumers that she became aware of the power of olfactory parfumerie, watching the perfumers trial their newest scents on the arms of the company’s receptionists.

“What fascinated me was to see the emotion that those scents would illicit from these women. They would talk about it long after the perfumer had left. They’d be sitting there, talking about the emotion the scent had created.”

Watching her colleagues express their emotions and share their personal ties to fragrance lead to Christine applying to a school for perfume- a school she was immediately knocked back from. “There were two reasons,” Christine tells me of her rejection from the school. “First, I was a woman, and secondly, I didn’t have a relationship there. I was not the daughter of some perfumer from the Grasse region or anything like that. I thought it was all terribly unfair, and that made me very determined.” That determination resulted in Christine changing the face of the fragrance industry, telling me that “the irony is that now, in perfume schools, it’s almost only women.”

The year 2014 saw Christine join the house of Hermès, being named the Director of Perfume Creation and Olfactory Heritage two years later.

“Hermes is a very special place, honestly,” Christine explains of what drew her to the heritage brand, and what sets the house of Hermès apart from fragrance houses who develop scents for the masses. “Hermès places an emphasis on detail, on purity and on texture. These are all values which reflect my own values, therefore it was clear to me that Hermès was the place where I should work. I have the great happiness of being able to exercise the real craft of a perfume creator. This is due to, firstly, the choice of ingredients. I get to choose any ingredient in entire world. Secondly, there’s no limits on the budget. Obviously I don’t go crazy with that, but I am free with it. Thirdly, I have the freedom of colours. That is very rare, because often people ask for perfumes to be made with no colour and then they colour it up, whereas Hermès let me use the raw material colour which is a real gift. Fourthly, especially, I have the freedom of subject. I may be asked to create perfume for men or women, but that’s the end of the brief and after that I am entirely free.”

Another element that sets Hermès apart is their refusal to engage in mass-market testing, instead relying on a committee of only five people (Christine included) to decide which fragrances will be made available to consumers. “This is unique,” she explains, “because most of the other great houses of perfume in the world make their final decision by embarking on a giant market testing of thousands of people to decide which perfume they are finally going to release. When you’re developing for the mass market, you’re very limited in terms of subject matter, the colours you can choose, and you’re asked to produce it on a very low budget.”

Limitations are foreign to the house of Hermès, with the brand’s artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas (a sixth generation member of the Hermès family) encouraging her to create her own rules. “I have the freedom to create and choose my subjects,” she tells me. “I don’t have a recipe for success, but I do have the freedom to try. I can capture the entire process with something that Pierre-Alexis Dumas said to me when I first arrived at Hermès. He told me ‘Christine, continue to be bold. There are no limits.’ But he added ‘You can make mistakes, as long as you’re making them while you’re being bold and taking a chance.’ For me, that the most beautiful thing that he ever said to me. I think about it every day.”

I enquired as to whether or not the creation of new iterations of existing scents were pushed by Christine’s superiors, however the Fragrance Director insists that each of her creations has been driven purely by her own desire. “I create because I want to create,” she tells me. “Because I’m inspired. Hermes itself is my primary source of inspiration because it is a house that has great history and is based on values.

“Take, for example, Eau Des Merveilles. I didn’t create that, but I found that the structure was interesting and thought it could lead to something else, something new, so I created Eau Des Merveilles Bleue.

“Take Twilly as another example. I was inspired by the attitude of young women today- they want to subvert all the existing codes of Hermes. It originally had notes of sandalwood, tuberose and ginger. Two years later I found that I was still inspired by the young women of today, so I chose to develop to two more Twilly fragrances.”

My conversation with Christine takes place overlooking the water in Sydney, a mere few hours after Christine arrived in Australia from her home in France. Neither the time difference nor the flight, however, have dampened Christine’s spirits, explaining to me that being in Australia is “a dream.” Christine has such an affinity with the country that she chose to send her children here to learn English, rather than to the United States as many Europeans choose to do. “I’ve always had a fascination with Australia,” she explains. “I’ve always thought culture had an authenticity to it. It’s a culture that values authenticity, simplicity and naturalism.”

Those values also happen to sit at the heart of two of Christine’s soon-to-be-released creations.  “Next year will be a major year for Hermès,” Christine hints. “I have two creations in view to which I’m particularly attached, and I promise you that as soon as I can, I will talk to you as a priority. These perfumes will touch Australia in particular, because the values that I’m aiming to convey are those of naturalism, simplicity and authenticity.”

These scents, Christine tells me, are her current favourite- however her favouritism is a double edged sword. “My favourite perfume, at any time, is the one I’m creating at the moment. When it’s finished and it’s out there in a bottle that means everybody has it, so the one I like is the one that’s just for me.”

As for the future of perfume, as an industry? “What I would like to see are more perfumes that have a real signature, that are bold and that people really remember. I hope that that will be the future of the industry.”

For those wishing to enter the new year with a new signature scent, Christine leaves me on this note- “Dare to follow your instincts. Smell is one of the strongest instinctual senses.”