“Every day that I work with perfumes I am in search of beauty, yet I still don’t know where it is to be found. What I know is that in order to enchant you, to charm you, to tempt you, to influence you, to fascinate you, in a word, to win you over, I have to manipulate and make a show of what I know, to make the perfume desirable. Desirable – the adjective that for the classical philosophers marks the limitation of art. However, the fact that perfume evaporates and disappears is proof that it cannot be possessed – desire remains desire.”
Jean-Claude Ellena, Perfumer at Hermès,
Perfume, The Alchemy of Scent
