If Jean Claude Ellena is more into Cezanne aquarelle and his style is to modern perfumery what Mies Van Der Rohe was for XXth century architecture, in this new Hermessence fragrance he goes back in time and in art history. Vanille Galante is a modern take on XVIIIth century in the same spirit as Sophia Coppola offered a vision of Marie Antoinette through modern eyes. If you look at several paintings done in the XVIIIth century (Watteau, Fragonard, Quentin de la Tour but also Tiepolo) there is at least one thing that makes them different from the next neoclassic David. La legereté (if it's your life statement, they call it "frivolité").Things are depicted in their delicate and ephemereal motion and the light is like a veil. A powder that surrounds life with something from the sfumatto of previous Da vinci. It is also a real powder in the case of much prized "pastel art" as seen in Quentin de la Tour. That obsession with fragile light, material like the powder of the wigs, but also the blue-gray sky in Paris (those clouds that are so close in nuance to bleu Trianon), but also like the dust of great houses, dissapeared from our culture but was kept intact elsewhere. The pastry and the great tradition of sweet sins in France. Transforming the sugar and the vanilla into a delicate powder, a cloud or veil that gives a subtle flavor to a plate and by this working against the gravitation seems to be the theme of the perfume. From Shalimar to Vanille Galante we are in the process of dematerializaton of sugar. The heavy becomes a cloud. The bean becomes a feather. It is also about pastry "grand art" obssesion of transforming the heavy into the lightest - soufflé, meringue, crème fouettée. What was achieved with "molecular cuisine" seems to be achieved in this perfume. The vanilla becomes the veil that surrounds everything (the verb in french is "effleurer"). The heavy bottom note (usually sirupy) become a diffusive particle and defies gravitation. It doesn't matter if it's vanillin, ethyl vanillin or an exquisite expensive vanilla absolute (that can contain even 80% vanillin) it's the construction of the perfume that is amazing. In fact, what Jean Claude Ellena offers here is neither a vanilla perfume, nor an exotic orchid. His take seems to be more a small detail of many flowers - that particular "sweetness" that goes beyond the individual note (think of the sweet "qualia" of honeysuckle, tuberose, gardenia, etc.). Looking into the GC of many flowers there is almost always a very very small dose of vanillin or related compounds. But a flower is radiant, diffusive while it is not the case for the heavy crystaline vanillin. The quality and the work for Vanille Galante should be tested not on the blotter but in the air surrounding the fragrance (another perfume to test that great and amazing difference is l'Heure Bleue). Jean Claude Ellena offers here is pure "sillage" and "atomized" vanilla. Both Hedione and Salycilates (cis 3 hexenil, benzyl and to a lesser extent isoamyl) have a great property - an impressive diffusion. They will fill the space like white flowers do in the evening and Jean Claude Ellena surrounded them with a sweet veil. If classic perfumery assumed to vanilla/vanillin and other sweet balsamic notes the property of fixation (an anchor inside the perfume to decelerate evaporation), Jean Claude Ellena put wings on the crystals. Like in several XVIII th century paintings he put the notes on the canvas in a diffusive movement of imprecision. There are no defined limits and his airy sweet flower can be a lily, a delicate tiaré, a wisteria or anything else. The shape is flou. The perfume is also about decomposing a note and recomposing it after analogies. For those who appreciate chemistry, it's a history about "the phenolic structure" and all the different odorants born from the same "root". Think of eugenol/isoeugenol/vanillin/Ultravanil/methyl Dianthalis/guaiacol, and so many other molecules somewhere between sweet/spice/smoke/animalic. The perfume was also a lesson for me - how to evoke the strange note of wisteria, that purple grape flower with such a massive amount of methyl eugenol in its GC. For the new century, vanillin crystals escaped from caramel and became air. It has a name in physical chemistry but can be done only under special pressure conditions. For Ellena that condition had a name: ART.Vanille Galante is the modern version of 2 classic pastry concepts - Meringue + Soufflé - the air moulded in a solid with a sweet delicate taste. Suave et exquis, un délice pour Zéphir!
The image is from Vogue.fr and I have no press material or sample from Hermès :) Second image is Jean Honoré Fragonard, Les hasards heureux de l'escarpolette - 1767
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Fragrance is the 8th Art - Octavian Coifan - Le Parfum est le 8ème Art
