(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- It took Christine Nagel, the in-house perfumer at Hermès, 10 years to create the Barenia eau de parfum natural spray ($170 for 100ml). Between working on other scents such as the floral Twilly d’Hermès and the men’s H24, Nagel toyed with the ingredients needed to make a hit chypre for women, as Terre d’Hermès has been for men.
Woody and balanced in structure, chypres always include certain key elements: a leading citrus note, followed by a floral heart, and then a base combining woody scents (such as patchouli or oakmoss) with musky labdanum (a common incense ingredient).
Nagel’s result combines bergamot, butterfly lily, oak wood and two kinds of patchouli, plus a West African red berry known as miracle fruit.
Named after a particularly supple leather used by the house, Barenia is bright without being saccharine, and mossy without the dankness of other musky perfumes.
That balance means it won’t be too overpowering for the office or too bold for a first date—in other words, it’s a fair candidate for a signature scent. “When you love a chypre,” Nagel says, “you love it your whole life through.”
Nagel says sales don’t measure success; what really matters is how many times one goes back to buy the same fragrance. “Hermès women tend to really trust in their own instinct,” she says. “They have a very assertive, confident taste.”
Even so, US sales of high-end fragrances reached $3.6 billion in the 12 months leading to May of this year, according to NielsenIQ. Generation Z is a major driver of perfume’s growth, and it’s not uncommon to see influencers on TikTok—and especially the obsessive corner known as #PerfumeTok—recommending different perfumes for specific outfits. But Nagel knows it takes more personal resonance with a fragrance to make a hit.
“TikTok is an accelerator,” she says. But “perfume is all about instinct.”
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