If you’re any kind of a fragrance follower, and should you ever run into Christine Nagel, the in-house creative director of Hermès perfumes, be sure to give her a good sniff because the woman is a walking perfume NDA. “My skin is my working tool so I’m always wearing the fragrance I’m working on,” she says. “At the moment, I’m wearing one that’s going to come out in 2027.” An exclusive let loose on the streets of Paris.
One fragrance that is no longer under wraps is the latest iteration of that great pantheon of men’s fragrance Terre d’Hermes; bid bienvenue to the new Eau de Parfum Intense which follows on from two other Terre extensions by Nagel: Eau Intense Vetiver and Eau Givrée.
Playing with this classic – or “monument” as she calls it – started out as more an experiment for Nagel. Originally created by her predecessor Jean-Claude Ellena, when she first arrived at the house and worked alongside him she says “I would never have thought of touching it”. But when he retired and she found herself “alone at Hermès”, she thought she would try to understand Terre D’Hermes, “and so I dismantled it, slowly undressed all the ingredients it as it were, until I got to the very core, the heart, and realised the signature of Terre was still there – that’s the proof that it’s a monument.”
As she put it back together, she played around a little, replacing the cedar with vetiver; she shared the result, the Maison loved it – and a new hit was born. More importantly, the process “allowed me not to be scared of Terre anymore”. So, a few years later she reinvented it again with “an image of a field of frost” in her mind; to create this icy-inspired version she utilised juniper.
With this new creation, the earthen element is a more fiery one: volcanoes. “I love that internal force, the strength of the Earth that ejects lava”. Plus, she says, the Terre wearer has “something very intense” about them “as they’ve been faithful to it for 20 years”. How to represent all this intensity in fragrant form? “Terre always has that fresh entry note so I wanted to work and associate my bergamot with black pepper (added to the cedar heart) to give a sort of dark, burning hot element.” But a lucky meeting meant she could push the boundaries further.
“While I was working on this idea of fire, a supplier came and presented different raw materials to me: first a roasted coffee which has that burnt feeling and was very interesting for me to work on. And I was very lucky to receive natural liquorice wood – all the liquorice notes in perfume making are technically made by a perfumer, it’s a mix of different ingredients. This was the first time that I actually saw natural liquorice. With the cedar, roasted coffee and the liquorice it gave a woody, warm, very hot note.’
But another key part of Terre is “a minerality, and for this Jean-Claude Ellena used a flint accord that I kept in the other versions. But when you take on a subject like volcanoes you have to work with lava stone. But there’s no lava stone extract. So, I created one, something to represent both its density and lightness – because that’s its dichotomy”.
The result really is full of heat, a deep and sexy aroma, but there’s a lightness, a breeze to it, that feels enticing, enveloping – but not overwhelming. And that’s important to Nagel. “Today, a lot of houses want to make very strong perfumes, and that bothers me somewhat. Often, I make the comparison with a good meal: if it’s either too hot or too spicy, you can’t taste the finesse of it, the strength hides everything. And I’m very lucky with Terre d’Hermès to have a fragrance which, even at a small concentration, has a lot of substance. My work [here] was to give it an intense signature and not make it intense by materials, not overpower the concentration.” Her work here is done. Shop here.
Photography courtesy of Hermès.
