Jean-Claude Ellena. Less, and more.

Grasse, a family in the trade

Jean-Claude Ellena was born in 1947 in Grasse, the town of flower fields and extraction plants in the south of France. His father was a perfumer. The way into the craft came naturally: he studied at the Givaudan school in Geneva, where that materials house trained perfumers.

In his early years he was an assistant in a composition house. It was a time of learning by smelling and analysing other people's formulas. He told Nez magazine about 1972: his house lost a competition to create a scent for Christian Dior. The winner was Diorella by Edmond Roudnitska. That is how he met it, as a lesson that came from the rival's side.

Around the same time he studied Eau Sauvage, which Roudnitska made for Dior in 1966. He analysed it by chromatography, a method of separating a mixture into its parts. What he found was a simple, singular formula. The lesson was not a special material. It was having few things, each in the right place.

Many years later he lives and works in the Grasse region, with a workroom at Cabris, the same hill where Roudnitska once grew his flowers.

Green tea water: a transparent tea

Among the scents Ellena made before Hermès, one is often mentioned: L'Eau parfumée au thé vert for Bulgari. Its name says what it set out to do: a water that smells of green tea.

Green tea is hard to rebuild in smell. It is light, slightly bitter, slightly grassy, a little smoky if the leaves are pan fired. Make it dense and the tea is lost. Make it too thin and only water is left. Penta reads Ellena's choice as a move towards transparency: closer to the steam rising from a cup than to the cup itself.

That approach shows something he repeated throughout his career. A smell does not need to describe the whole thing. It needs only to suggest the right feature, enough for the person smelling to recognise it. Their memory does the rest.

In 2004 Ellena became the exclusive perfumer of Hermès. The position meant working for a single house, taking no briefs from others. In this period he made Terre d'Hermès, among many other scents for the house.

He also wrote. In 2007 he wrote the volume Le Parfum in PUF's Que sais je? series, a short book explaining the craft. In 2011 he published Journal d'un parfumeur, a diary of his craft, later translated into several languages. In 2013 he wrote a novel, La Note verte.

Journal d'un parfumeur is not a manual. It is a set of short dated entries on materials and on the craft. The reader sees a perfumer working much like a writer or a draughtsman: look, choose, erase, look again.

A sketch instead of an oil painting: the short formula

Ellena told Nez that a formula usually has twenty or thirty components, sometimes over a hundred. When a formula is short, every small proportion matters. When it is long, each single material decides less. He chose to work at the short end, where every change can be heard.

He also spoke of wanting to bring into scent the light of a clearing rather than the mystery of the whole forest. He sought simplicity as far as it would go, while avoiding oversimplification. The two differ: simplicity removes what is not needed; oversimplification removes what is.

Penta calls this way of working a sketch. A pencil sketch is not an unfinished painting. It is a picture that decided to stop there. The viewer sees fewer lines, but sees the hand more clearly, and the thing drawn more clearly too.