STYLE : STYLEMAKER : Nose for the New
To Jean Kerleo, the question was as intriguing as it was superfluous: Would he like a peek at the long-lost recipe for Napoleon’s cologne? As head of the new Osmotheque, a museum of historic odors near Versailles, Kerleo couldn’t say no. And soon the emperor’s signature scent of lemon, orange and bergamot essences floated through the air once more.
But Kerleo is more than a preservationist and collector. The in-house “nose” at Jean Patou in Paris since 1967, he formulates and composes each batch of the perfumery’s fragrances by hand. Relying on as many natural raw materials as possible, he is also one of the last of a breed.
“Chanel No. 5 and Joy were made for a specific category of women--women who had money. Now perfume is for everybody,” he says. The fragrance explosion has prompted most companies in these budget-conscious times to hire outside labs to develop their perfumes, many containing cheaper synthetic ingredients. Patou, Chanel and Guerlain, by contrast, harvest fresh ingredients and limit the use of petroleum-based additives. “Patou consumers,” he insists, “know the difference.”
Kerleo’s latest creation is Sublime, a semi-amber floral introduced last month. Like 1000, the perfumer’s first fragrance for Patou, Sublime took almost 10 years to conceive, create and bottle. It also follows in the tradition of Patou’s original scent, Joy, a consensus classic since its debut in 1930. “Sublime has an orange top note and a vanilla bottom note,” he says, “but it has the roses and jasmine from Grasse that give it the same sophisticated personality of Patou’s other perfumes.”
Soft-spoken yet intensely passionate about his work, Kerleo landed in the business quite by accident, when he left the army in need of a job. At 22, he began his apprenticeship at Helena Rubinstein, scenting lipsticks, creams and powders. In 1965, he won a prestigious French perfumers’ competition for an anonymous, unmarketed fragrance, part of which eventually ended up in 1000. Two years later, he moved to Patou, where he has pursued both the art and the science of perfume ever since.
Now 60, Kerleo has seen sweeping changes in the perfume world. Conditioned air, for example, dries the atmosphere and doesn’t allow a scent to develop on the skin. Stronger perfumes are the result. (“If Joy is classical music, then Giorgio is hard rock.”) And though Kerleo believes that magazine scent strips can never reproduce a fragrance exactly, they are much better today than they used to be. Thus Patou approved its first scent strips for the introduction of Sublime.
As he nears retirement, Kerleo has made sure that Jean Patou’s future is in good hands. He is training a successor, passing on his love for making perfume the old-fashioned way: “It is fantastic to be able to create a product from raw materials that are only odors, fantastic to create something that makes you dream.”
