Illustration: Ben Lewis Giles
How to Make a Perfume Smell Expensive
Small fragrance creators such as Maelstrom in Paris are influencing a $49 billion global industry.
Last year a juried competition was held to re-create a 1940s-era cult perfume called Iris Gris. Created by the perfumer Vincent Roubert and released by the designer Jacques Fath, an influential French couturier, the fragrance went out of production when Fath died of cancer in 1954. Eventually, Roubert’s son donated the formula to the Osmothèque, a scent archive in Versailles, France. Recipes owned by the archive cannot be reproduced for commercial purposes.
Iris Gris has widely been considered one of fragrance’s holy grails. People buy and sell vintage bottles on EBay, and “it’s become a legend,” says Rania Naim, the current creative director of Jacques Fath Parfums.