Cuir d'Ange - Jean-Claude Ellena - Hermés

In what will be one of his parting gestures as Jean-Claude Ellena passes the baton at Hermés to Christine Nagel, he makes certain his legacy is set in stone. Ellena is, despite his exclusive tenure in this conservative bastion of haute-luxe, an elegant radical. Perfumers have been riffing on the theme of leather for centuries. Indeed Grasse in the middle ages was a center for leather tanning. Clever attempts to disguise the material's natural odor (the perfumed gloves presented to Catherine De Medici) resulted in the variety of olfactory marriages between leather and aromatic oils which continue to this day. That Ellena has succeeded in entirely transcending all known renderings of the smell of leather shouldn't surprise us. Having delivered a bouquet of alien flowers with Jour d'Hermés, a perfume of dazzling ingenuity, he now presents us with the virginal, androgynous skin of an impossible creature to wear as our own. Like most of his work Cuir d'Ange is luminous, spacial, audaciously clever and exquisitely beautiful, blooming on warm skin like remembered sunlight.  It will doubtless be much imitated and should become a turning point in the olfactory depiction of the sublime surface. A surface so beguiling that one forgets to enquire beneath it.