In search of the next big note, perfumers get their passports stamped
It stirs the imagination to know that in India, the fragrant, wiry roots of vetiver grass are woven into fans or manipulated into screens that are dampened and set on verandas to load the air with their cool, earthy scent. However, mention India to those with a nose for economics and they smell emerging market.
The trade routes of antiquity have been reversed. Instead of rare aromatics arriving from the East — vetiver and sandalwood from India; frankincense and rose from Arabia; camphor and musk from China — Western brand of luxurious scent now waft through stores in Bangalore, Dubai and Beijing.
Russia, with its growing middle class, has also contributed to the financial growth in the worldwide fragrance industry. In late 2007, when Frédéric Malle (a Frenchman who has enjoyed global commercial success as a champion of perfumery a aesthetic pursuit) opened a shop within a shop in the Russian department store Tsum, Women’s Wear Daily enthusiastically declared that Moscow had turned “from drab workers’ paradise into luxury brand heaven.”
More likely to cause a double take is the fact that between 2001 and 2006, the market for fragrances in China grew more than 10 percent annually.
Perhaps that’s not surprising. After all, Ernest Beaux, the nose who composed Chanel No. 5, was born in Moscow. Recent research even suggests that a version of that composition — the most famous fragrance ever — was available in Russia before it became a hit in Paris.
More likely to cause a double take is the fact that between 2001 and 2006, the market for fragrances in China grew more than 10 percent annually. According to conventional wisdom, that’s not supposed to happen. As perfume critic Chandler Burr observed in The New York Times last May, “The Chinese have no tradition of wearing perfume.” But, as he also pointed out, that is changing. That’s why he was in Shanghai reporting on the launch of Tuscan Soul, the latest fragrance from Ferragamo Parfums. The company thinks that its perfume business in China is just dawning; its managing director told Burr that he expected sales there to double in three years.
Sylvaine Delacourte, creative director at Guerlain — a venerable French beauty brand that started doing business in China back in 1993 — says that it’s a misconception to think of the country as being fragrance-free. “Because the climate is hot and the air is polluted, they really like freshness,” she says. Aqua Allegoria, Guerlain’s series of lightly scented waters, has done well; so has L’Instant de Guerlain, which, in troduced in 2003 and intended to be a worldwide success, includes a note of Chinese magnolia.
