Is your fragrance extreme enough? Concentrated scents with language like “extrait” and “intense” are suddenly overtaking the market. “It makes me think about fashion now,” says Delphine Jelk, who won a Fragrance Foundation Award last year for her work with Guerlain. Right now, people will spend “more than $1,000 on a pair of sneakers or jacket” and style it with H&M or Zara, and “it’s a bit the same with perfume,” she says. The more concentrated the scent, or sillage (aka its ability to linger), the higher the price. “In a highly visual, increasingly standardized world, a powerful sillage is a way of standing out, a kind of olfactory signature, and an accessible luxury,” says Christine Nagel, creative director of Hermès Parfums. “And in more prosaic terms, it gives you the impression of getting your money’s worth because it stays on the skin for a long time.”
Sometimes, it can be explained in as straightforward a matter as concentration, like with Guerlain’s Shalimar perfume, for example. “It’s the same fragrance in extrait and eau de toilette, exactly like it was,” says Jelk of the first ambery perfume created a century ago. Guerlain’s L’Art & La Matière signature extracts she created a few years ago highlight the raw materials used within each fragrance, including rose, iris, bergamot, vanilla, jasmine, and tonka bean in scents with 30% extrait-level concentrations.
Since “intense” is a flexible term in the fragrance world, Mugler’s rule of thumb for strength states that “an eau de toilette is formulated with 7 to 12% perfume or perfume oil, an eau de parfum has 10 to 14%, and an eau de parfum Intense contains 14 to 25%.” Their new Alien ExtraIntense Eau de Parfum offers an “extra-amplified version” of the original Alien scent with “excessive florality” in “extra powerful solar flowers” topnotes and “jasmine grandiflorum superinfusion” heartnotes. Flowers actually inspired the lightest eau de colognes, which hover around 4 to 5% since debuting in the 16th century as a “healthy gesture” when bating was rare, Jelk explains, of alcohol and antiseptic ingredients like lavender and rosewater chosen to help ward off illness. Plus, it smelled good, so once perfumery became “more luxurious, more modern,” concentrations leveled up.
Still, “the quality of a fragrance cannot be judged by its strength,” Nagel insists. “When I decided to work on a more intense Terre d’Hermès, I went against this heavy-handed trend for higher concentrations by looking for strength in its signature rather than a powerful scent.” The new Terre d’Hermès Eau de Parfum Intense launched last month, and as Nagel created it, she asked the question: What fascinates me about the Earth? Her answer was volcanoes and “an earth under which a fire smolders. An earth that is darker, but warmer, more fiery, more intense, but I also wanted to explore a more intimate, more intense side of mankind, one that expresses the inner fire that drives him.” There are “mineral notes of intense lava stone” that are entirely new, since when playing with intensity, “it is not enough to simply add more and more high-potential raw materials,” she states.
“Every perfumer works differently, so there is no single method for creating an extrait,” says Aurélien Guichard, perfumer for the new French label Matière Première, which launched its Extraits de Parfum collection at the end of last year inspired by eau de parfum bestsellers Crystal Saffron, Encens Suave, Flacon Leather, Radical Rose, and Santal Austral. His new scents feature a “guest ingredient” that “brings a completely new olfactive facet to the note.” When I mist my signature Crystal Saffron scent in its new extrait form, I immediately pick up on the presence of something different, something darker, and in this case, it’s myrrh oil. While often used as an ambery note, “I see myrrh as a luminous black color,” says Guichard. It’s not dissimilar from Nagel imagining “earth in the form of a rock that is dense and absolute in its blackness.” While concentration may not be the focus, a sense of depth certainly seems to be.
The scent trail is important, too. Dior perfumer Francis Kurkdjian launched Les Esprit de Parfums collection last September with five scents: Gris Dior, Ambre Nuit, Oud Ispahan, Lucky, and the house’s recently released Rouge Trafalgar, which adds pink pepper and roses to the red fruity notes of its original. The identities of these higher concentrations are stylistically “shaken up” as Kurkdjian intended for “their signatures to take a strong aesthetic position for a powerful trail.” French nose Amélie Bourgeois partnered with the decade-old fragrance house Les Eaux Primordiales to create their Collection Supermassive, a line exclusively of perfume extracts, including an Ambre scent with base notes of black vanilla, amber, and tobacco that promises to leave “an infinite magnetic trail.” Guichard values the concept for all of the Matière Première fragrances he creates—eau de parfums and extraits alike–so that they can “leave a scent trail, without being overwhelming,” he says, for “the kind of fragrances that, hopefully, make people stop you on the street to ask what you’re wearing.”
That kind of attention is good for business. While I may prefer the sparkling clarity of my original EDP, I’ve certainly received several compliments on its moody extrait as I’ve worn it around town. Even the day I opened the windows to let it air out a bit on FDR Drive during my ride to the office, wondering if I may have too much sillage for morning meetings. Hours later, I was telling an editor its name when they asked what I was wearing. “It’s important that you get compliments,” says Jelk. “You will never rebuy a perfume if nobody tells you that you smell good–that’s the best compliment ever.”
Guerlain
Jasmin Grandiflorum Extrait 30
Hermès
Terre d’Hermès Eau de Parfum Intense
Matiere Premiere
Crystal Saffon Extrait de Parfum
Dior
Rouge Trafalgar Esprit de Parfum
Les Eaux Primordiales
Ambre Supermassive Extrait de Parfum
