Facebook X Email Print Save Story What does conspicuous consumption smell like? On a December afternoon in 2013, the Parisian perfumer Francis Kurkdjian was scheduled to meet with the renowned French crystal manufacturer Baccarat at the company’s chandelier-crammed headquarters, near the Arc de Triomphe. The C.E.
O. at the time, Daniela Riccardi, had commissioned Kurkdjian to create a limited-edition fragrance to mark the company’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary. Baccarat planned to produce two hundred and fifty diamond-cut crystal flacons of the new perfume, priced at three thousand euros each, and wanted the scent to reflect the quality and opulence of its vessel.
Kurkdjian (pronounced “cur-zsan”) is a fifty-five-year-old of Armenian descent, with close-cropped hair, smooth manicured hands, and Clooneyesque salt-and-pepper stubble. During three decades in the luxury-fragrance industry, he has created such hits as Narciso Rodriguez for Her, Burberry Her, and Jean Paul Gaultier Le Male. He is the head of his own perfume company, Maison Francis Kurkdjian, and since 2021 has also served as the perfume-creation director for the fashion house Christian Dior, a job that involves reinventing such storied scents as J’Adore and Miss Dior.
(Both Dior and Maison Francis Kurkdjian are subsidiaries of the luxury conglomerate L.V.M.
H.) For Baccarat, Kurkdjian had designed three samples riffing on scents that were popular at the time when Baccarat was founded. But he’d begun to have misgivings.
“I was not happy about what I created,” he recalled recently. “I felt it was too old-fashioned.” As he was about to leave his office, he opened a drawer where he keeps what he calls his “hidden treasures”—perfumes he’s created that have never been bottled—and picked up a vial labelled “ HEVA .
” Kurkdjian had formulated the scent the year before, as a technical experiment in making a new kind of “gourmand,” the industry term for a fragrance that smells like food. Gourmands are often cloyingly literal, emulating the aroma of cake batter or candied fruit. Kurkdjian wanted to “bring the gourmand into the twenty-first century,” using a recipe of synthetic aromachemicals to produce a more impressionistic bouquet.
HEVA was an acronym for Hedione, a jasmine-scented chemical that acts as a smell amplifier; Evernyl, which lends a mossy, musky note; Veltol, which smells like caramelized sugar; and Ambroxan, a synthetic form of ambergris, a pungent substance regurgitated by whales, which has a ferric quality, like blood in the back of the throat. The resulting perfume did not smell edible or organic; it evoked something air-gapped and untouched by human sweat, like a new Porsche that happens to be filled with cotton candy. Kurkdjian had tried to sell the formula to several luxury fashion houses, but they’d all turned it down.
Before the Baccarat meeting, he recalled, “I smelled it, and said, ‘Why not? Let’s try again.’ ” In the fragrance business, scents tend to be publicly identified with their famous wearers, not with their creators; Chanel No. 5 brings to mind Marilyn Monroe, not Ernest Beaux, the Russian-born perfumer who invented it.
Even the legends of the industry are largely considered behind-the-scenes technicians—in industry parlance, a perfumer is “a nose.” Kurkdjian considers the label demeaning. “I am not just a nose walking around—I am also a brain ,” he told me.
“A great perfume is so much more than just a smell. It has to have an idea behind it. It has to have a story .
” At the meeting, he told Riccardi that his concoction was both dense and bright, like crystal itself. In the fall of 2014, Baccarat released the scent, then called Rouge 540, for the furnace temperature used to produce the company’s distinctive red crystal pieces. The limited run sold out almost immediately, mostly to longtime Baccarat collectors.
A few months later, Kurkdjian gifted a bottle to Kelly St. John, who was then the vice-president of beauty at Neiman Marcus. The next time the two spoke, St.
John told Kurkdjian that people were stopping her in the elevator; if he could make more, she would sell it at the department store. Kurkdjian struck a deal with Baccarat to produce all future runs under his own label, in his brand’s minimalist, glass vessels rather than in Baccarat’s ornate ones. In the time since, Baccarat Rouge 540, as it’s now known, has become one of the best-selling luxury fragrances in the world.
It developed a cult following in the twenty-tens but only truly exploded in popularity in 2021, through the corner of TikTok known as PerfumeTok, and the “fragheads” who gather there to gush about scents. The “quiet luxury” trend was peaking at the time—“Succession” was in its third season—and influencers began to label Baccarat Rouge 540, 2.4 ounces of which costs three hundred and thirty-five dollars, a “rich-girl perfume.
” The fragrance, nicknamed BR540, is divisive. Some reviewers consider it too pungent, or too pricey, or too ubiquitous at the gym. Others complain that it reminds them of Band-Aids, or the dentist’s office.
The scent is both revered and reviled for its powerful sillage—the trail a perfume leaves behind. A few people have claimed to be anosmic, or “noseblind,” to Baccarat’s synthetic components, and thus unable to smell it at all. But many have found its strange, sugar-simulacrum quality to be irresistible.
N.B.A.
and N.F.L.
players wear it, along with Olivia Rodrigo and Kacey Musgraves. It has been referred to in rap songs (Meek Mill: “Smell the venom like Baccarat”); it inspired a plotline in the recent season of “Emily in Paris.” Last year, when a Vogue reporter wore the perfume to a fashion show for Rihanna’s Fenty line, the pop star, a noted scent connoisseur, allegedly paused to tell her, “You smell good.
” On a weekend in June, I went with Kurkdjian to the South of France to visit the Château de la Colle Noire, the former country home of Christian Dior, which today functions as a private museum and a hub of the brand’s fragrance marketing. The house sits on a hilltop near the town of Fayence, overlooking acres of flower fields. The region’s rich soil and sunbaked climate provide the ideal growing conditions for tuberose, a tropical species that smells like ripe banana and marzipan; neroli, the florets of the bitter-orange tree; Jasminum grandiflorum , a white blossom that’s both feminine and funky, and even a bit fecal; and, most famously, Rosa centifolia , the pink, puffy blossoms better known as the cabbage rose or the May rose.
The nearby town of Grasse is known for processing this local harvest into some of the most sought-after raw perfumery materials in the world. Dior, who once called himself “as much a parfumier as a couturier,” hoped to retire to Colle Noire, in part to be near his younger sister, Catherine, who worked in the flower trade. Instead, he died suddenly, of a heart attack, in 1957, at the age of fifty-two, and the home was eventually sold.
In 2013, Parfums Christian Dior—the L.V.M.
H. company that produces all of Dior’s perfumes, cosmetics, and skin-care items—bought it back and restored it to Monsieur Dior’s specifications. To prepare for our visit, the head of the château had spritzed the rooms of the house with various Dior scents.
In the hexagonal entryway, the air smelled lightly of roses and musk, as if an elegant madame had passed through the space just before us. It was a fragrance called La Colle Noire, created in 2016 by Kurkdjian’s predecessor at Dior, François Demachy, to celebrate the château’s reopening. “ Alors , this is not one of mine,” Kurkdjian said, sniffing the air.
He was wearing Dior sneakers, slim Dior jeans, and a hoodie with an embossed “CD” monogram. Kurkdjian wears all black when he’s working for Dior; when working for his own company, all white. Like most perfumers, he never wears fragrance himself unless he is testing out a new creation.
Kurkdjian’s interest in perfumery grew out of an obsession with fashion which dates back to his childhood, in the middle-class Parisian suburb of Gournay-sur-Marne. His paternal grandfather was a furrier in Anatolia who later worked in the French silk trade. His maternal grandfather was a tailor from northern Turkey who fled after the Armenian genocide and established a high-end alterations business in Paris.
His mother, Sylvia Florette, was a skilled amateur sewer. “She was the most fashionable person,” Kurkdjian recalled. “She wore Madame Rochas perfume, and she would alter her own dresses every season to keep up with current styles.
” Sylvia’s best friend had worked as a modéliste , or pattern-maker, in the Dior atelier in the nineteen-fifties, and would regale Kurkdjian with stories of her time there. “Dior, in our house, was like a celebrity,” Kurkdjian said. “It was ‘Mr.
Dior opened the door of the elevator!’ ‘Mr. Dior sprayed Diorissimo in the salon!’ ” The family drove into central Paris every Sunday to attend services at the Armenian Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, around the corner from the posh shopping boulevard Avenue Montaigne.
“I memorized the name and location of every couturier on the street—Ungaro, Nina Ricci, Jean-Louis Scherrer, Christian Dior,” Kurkdjian recalled. “You have to understand that I was not into fashion, like things you could buy. I was into couturiers .
” Kurkdjian was a disciplined child who set lofty standards for himself. He studied both ballet and classical piano. At twelve, and again at thirteen, he auditioned for the Paris Opera Ballet’s training program, and when he failed to earn a spot he abandoned his goal of becoming a professional dancer.
He told me, “I remember reading a quote by Victor Hugo in literature class around this time. It said, ‘I will be Chateaubriand or nothing!’ That stuck in my mind.” Kurkdjian dreamed of becoming a fashion designer but knew that his drawing skills weren’t strong enough.
At fourteen, he read an article in the style magazine VSD about perfumers such as Jean-Louis Sieuzac, who’d co-created Yves St. Laurent’s signature fragrance Opium. Shortly afterward, he saw the film “Le Sauvage,” starring Yves Montand as a swashbuckling perfumer who seduces Catherine Deneuve.
“I realized that this was it,” he told me. “If I couldn’t be the couturier, I would work with the couturier as a perfumer.” He wrote two letters—one to Dior Parfums and one to Lancôme—inquiring how a person might get into the business.
An executive at Lancôme sent back a note with the address for the Institut Supérieur International du Parfum, de la Cosmétique et de l’Aromatique Alimentaire ( ISIPCA ), in Versailles, one of the few formal perfumery schools in Europe at the time. Link copied In his first year of the program, in 1990, Kurkdjian learned how to inhale like a perfumer—fast and soft, he told me, “taking in just the smallest amount of air so that you don’t saturate your brain.” Students were taught to identify thousands of ingredients only by scent, from natural essences to synthetic aromachemicals.
Kurkdjian recalled one exercise in which he was blindfolded and given a taste of strawberry yogurt sprinkled with salt. “For some reason, with that combination, your brain explodes,” he said. The students eventually began making their own fragrance blends, known in the business as accords.
“The day I made my first lily-of-the-valley accord, I thought I was a god,” Kurkdjian told me. “Because you have the power of creation. It is not possible to distill the lily of the valley into a natural essence, because the flower is too delicate.
But take four raw materials—one smelling of fresh-cut grass, one smelling almondy, one smelling like cheap lavender, and one like rotten teeth—and you can.” There is no way to experience the smell of, say, the original Miss Dior, the house’s first perfume, from 1947. Perfumes begin to oxidize and decay the moment a bottle is opened; through the decades, they become warped echoes of their former selves.
At the private Dior archives, in Paris, an archivist showed me several old bottles of Dior’s most prized perfumes—including Diorama, Dioressence, Diorella, and a bottle of Miss Dior that was shaped like Christian Dior’s beloved dog Bobby—but told me not to bother smelling what was inside. Re-creating old scents is similarly impossible. Many ingredients that were once commonly used in fragrances have been phased out by industry regulators.
Animal excretions such as deer musk; castoreum, from beavers; and civet, from the perineal glands of a mammal of the same name, are no longer considered humane. Other materials have been restricted because of health risks or allergies, among them hydroxycitronellal, a synthetic chemical that smells like lily of the valley and was a major component of the original Diorissimo, from 1956, which many experts consider the house’s masterpiece. Kurkdjian believes that there’s been a certain muddling of the stories behind Dior perfumes as they’ve been reformulated to keep up with regulatory changes—a game of olfactory telephone.
“There are too many gossips, too much marketing over the years,” he told me. When pitching himself for the job at Dior, he submitted a memo outlining his vision for making over the house’s major scents one by one, and quoted a line attributed to Christian Dior: “Respect tradition and dare to be insolent because one cannot go without the other.” Developing a new version of Miss Dior for release this past spring, Kurkdjian treated the original scent as a “cold case,” hiring outside researchers to find documents related to its creation and poring over archival letters between Dior and his sister, looking for clues to the designer’s original intentions.
Dior had written that he wanted the scent to evoke Provence evenings “where green jasmine serves as a counterpoint to the melody of the night and the earth.” But any jasmine notes in the original formula had fallen out over the years, so Kurkdjian worked for months to infuse the flower into the mix. The new scent, sprayed in La Colle Noire’s “grand salon,” smells to the lay nose a lot like the previous Miss Dior (sweet and fruity, like a cosmopolitan), but with subtle undercurrents of jasmine and tangerine.
At noon, we were served lunch under a portico, at a table set with Louis XIII-style goblets and plates marked with “the personal logo of Christian Dior,” a staff member told me. (In his French accent, the name sounded just like “Kissinger.”) It was raining and buggy out, so a server in formal wear presented an aerosol can of insect repellent over his arm, like a bottle of wine, and encouraged us to spritz our pulse points.
A fragrant menu—shaved truffles, lamb with “thyme juice,” fresh fruit with peach-verbena syrup—had to compete with the smell of the bug spray and with wafts of American Spirits, which Kurkdjian smoked one after the other without regard for his nasal passages. As we ate, he told me that he admired not only Dior’s artistry but also his brazen entrepreneurialism. “From Day One, he added perfumes, and licensed his name for stockings, and ties, and housewares.
It was such a modern vision,” he said. Perfumery is a business as much as it is an art form, Kurkdjian added: “I’m a merchant—a merchant of emotions, but a merchant all the same.” Fragrances are among the most important moneymakers for a designer brand: there are many more consumers who can spend a hundred dollars on a bottle of J’Adore than ones who can afford a Dior suit or handbag.
According to industry analysts, the global luxury-perfume market was worth $12.6 billion in 2023, and is expected to swell to more than twenty billion by 2032. Of some seventy luxury brands owned by L.
V.M.H.
—among them such juggernauts as Louis Vuitton, Sephora, and Tiffany—Parfums Christian Dior is, according to Bloomberg Businessweek , the fifth most valuable, having earned a reported $4.5 billion in revenue last year. Kurkdjian told me he was aware that he’d been charged with making “the best-selling perfumes in the world,” then knocked on his head as if knocking on wood and added, “You have to understand that anything less is considered, for us, a failure.
” After lunch, the head of the château walked us through the estate’s lush grounds, pointing out a pair of albino peacocks and a small historical chapel, for which Kurkdjian had recently created a special perfume redolent of incense and labdanum. At one point, Kurkdjian wandered off on his own. He returned a few minutes later with a floppy pink rose.
“I found the last one—a May rose in June!” he said, then sniffed the flower and shoved it carelessly into his front pocket. “Too green,” he declared. “Like a rotting cucumber.
” The French perfume business dates back to the Renaissance, when Grasse was France’s leading producer of fine leather goods. The town’s tanneries were notoriously foul-smelling, so leather-makers, to avoid offending the noses of aristocratic customers, began to infuse their wares with floral essences. Ever since, French perfumery has been a high-end service profession passed down from generation to generation.
The perfumer believed to have made scents for Marie Antoinette, Jean-Louis Fargeon, descended from a long line of apothecaries. The venerated French fragrance house Guerlain, one of the country’s oldest, remained a family business, serving both European and American royalty (Jacqueline Onassis allegedly wore the brand’s scent Jicky), until 1994, when it was subsumed into L.V.
M.H. Kurkdjian lacked the usual pedigree for a path in luxury fragrance.
“I am French, but also not. I do not come from Grasse, and I have a weird last name,” he said. Many graduates of perfume school go on to careers not in haute parfumerie but in “home care” or “personal care,” scenting laundry detergents or shampoos.
Kurkdjian’s best friend from school, Valérie Garnuch-Mentzel, a native of a tiny town in northeastern France who now works largely in personal care in Germany, told me that the two bonded over being the outsiders in their class, but added, “Francis always had l’amour du luxe , l’amour du beau .” She went on, “I am happy to see my stuff in Duane Reade. I knew he was there to be something special.
” Designer perfumes are typically not made in-house. Fashion companies license their names to beauty conglomerates that solicit scents from third-party fragrance firms. After school, Kurkdjian got a job working in the Paris offices of one such firm, Quest International—but only by agreeing to work in home care.
His first task as a trainee was to prove that he could reverse engineer popular scents on the market from scratch, without using chemical-analysis machines. He chose to copy Bulgari’s Thé Vert, a grassy green-tea perfume created in 1992 by the veteran fragrance-maker Jean-Claude Ellena, who later became the first in-house perfumer for Hermès. Kurkdjian’s knockoff was so accurate that his bosses let him start apprenticing in the fine-fragrance department.
But his first professional breakthrough came from outside the firm. His father, who worked in I.T.
consulting, had paid for him to take an evening course at the Sup de Luxe, a luxury-goods marketing school run by the jewelry company Cartier. At a graduation reception, Kurkdjian met Chantal Roos, who’d run Y.S.
L.’s perfumery program in the seventies and remained one of the most powerful figures in designer fragrances. Roos, by then an executive at the global corporation Beauté Prestige, gave Kurkdjian her card and told him to call her office.
A month later, at their first meeting, she said that she had just begun working with the designer Jean Paul Gaultier, who was looking for a new men’s cologne. She gave Kurkdjian the brief—a memo for fragrance firms describing the concept for a scent—and told him to come back in three weeks with samples. At the time, Gaultier was considered an enfant terrible of the fashion industry; his signatures included a “trash-bag dress” and the bondage-inspired cone bras worn by Madonna.
Kurkdjian, envisioning a shirtless man emerging from the ocean, softened the formula of a classic fougère —an herbaceous composition common to men’s colognes—with sultry hints of vanilla. He brought a sample to Roos, figuring that she might give him pointers and send him on his way. Instead, six months later, Beauté Prestige announced that Kurkdjian, a twenty-five-year-old junior perfumer, was the creator of a new Gaultier fragrance called Le Male.
Kurkdjian’s euphoria wore off a bit when he saw the bottle design: a male torso, complete with a kinky choker and a sculpted butt and bulge. The over-all effect was decapitated leather daddy. The bottle was held not in a box but in an oversized aluminum can.
“I was, like, ‘It’s not luxury,’ ” Kurkdjian recalled, with a sigh. “I wanted the big, crafted couture box, with embossed gold.” The scent itself, though, was appreciated for its subtlety.
The big colognes of the eighties—Davidoff’s Cool Water, Guy LaRoche’s Drakkar Noir—had been overpowering and astringent, full of macho bombast. Le Male seemed to speak to a more eclectic and perhaps more secure expression of masculinity; one critic dubbed it a “defining metrosexual fragrance.” Within a year, it became a top-selling men’s scent in Europe.
By then, Kurkdjian had been transferred to Quest’s newly opened satellite office in New York. The move was presented to him as a promotion, but he suspected that he was being punished for his success. “My colleagues were super jealous, so they sent me away,” he told me, with a flick of his hand.
Kurkdjian did not speak English when he arrived in New York, and he remembers feeling unmoored. He landed a few projects, including an Axe body spray, called Lynx (“I will say, I nailed that,” he said), and Elizabeth Arden’s Green Tea, inspired by the matcha ice cream at a Japanese restaurant across the street from the Quest offices where he would eat lunch. But he found the American market inhospitable to creativity.
“In France, perfumers are allowed to have what we call fulgurance , or lightning flashes of inspiration,” he told me. “But in the mid-nineties, in the U.S.
, you got a bunch of marketing briefs, where you were told something like ‘So, there is a high-income Wasp living in Baltimore, driving this type of car and playing tennis, and can you create the perfume of that?’ ” He threatened to quit Quest if he couldn’t transfer back to Paris. When he did return, in 2000, he went part time and started taking additional perfume clients on the side. A few years later, after a string of successes at Quest, including two scents for Dior’s smaller Privée line, he left for a more flexible job consulting for the Japanese firm Takasago.
In his private work, he developed a specialty in high-profile one-offs, including a re-creation of Marie Antoinette’s signature scent for the Palace of Versailles. (In Marie Antoinette’s time, Kurkdjian said, “Hygiene was not something very French”; the Dauphine, an Austrian, was a pioneer of smelling good.) He made “bespoke fragrances” for private clients—at a starting price of more than ten thousand dollars for two ounces—including Catherine Deneuve, who enlisted him to re-create the scent of a beloved but discontinued perfume.
He collaborated with the French artist Sophie Calle on a scent meant to evoke an old dollar bill. He also developed a knack for aromatic spectacle: in 2007, for the French Ministry of Culture’s holiday party, he decorated a giant Christmas tree with hundreds of glass baubles and infused the room with a scent of “frosty rose.” In the early two-thousands, designer fragrances had been in something of a rut.
Celebrity scents like Britney Spears’s Fantasy and Jennifer Lopez’s Glow dominated the market. Ann Gottlieb, a leading perfume consultant who helped launch such American scents as Obsession and CK1, told me that the industry as a whole had become “risk-averse and boring.” To fill the void, fragrance buyers began taking chances on independent, so-called niche perfume brands.
In 2000, the veteran fragrance executive Frédéric Malle (whose grandfather Serge Heftler-Louiche was the founder of Parfums Christian Dior) launched a small fragrance house called Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle—and, in an unusual move, printed the names of his perfumers directly on the bottles. The rise of other niche brands was closely tied to social media. In the twenty-tens, companies such as Le Labo, Byredo, and DS & Durga became cult sensations for their Instagram-friendly packaging and slightly off-kilter fragrances.
They were given a boost by the advent of Web sites like Fragrantica, where users could rank perfumes and leave reviews, and by “sampling” sites, like Luckyscent and Surrender to Chance, which sold vials of indie perfumes for a few dollars apiece. According to Michael Edwards, a perfume historian and the author of the reference book “Fragrances of the World,” more than twelve thousand niche scents were launched between 2000 and 2020. Kurkdjian saw an opportunity to create his own line.
He founded Maison Francis Kurkdjian (M.F.K.
) with his business partner, the Parisian financier Marc Chaya, in 2009, and contracted Takasago, for whom he still consulted, to manufacture the perfumes. Most niche brands were started by entrepreneurs, not perfumers, and they contracted out the creation of scents in much the same way that bigger fashion houses did. Chaya said that, in contrast, he and Kurkdjian wanted to model their company on Guerlain in its heyday, when perfumers were “in their own houses.
” Kurkdjian told me that his father, Mihran, who went by Pierre, advised him against giving the brand his own name: “He always dropped the second ‘k’ from our last name professionally, because he thought phonetically it was easier. But I said to him, ‘Papa, if Karl Lagerfeld can make it, I can.’ ” Among the brand’s first releases were a few challenging scents that divided fragrance bloggers—including the elevator-clearing Absolue Pour le Soir, which had notes of cumin and wet animal fur—but also crowd-pleasers such as Lumière Noire, a rose-and-patchouli-scented homage to Catherine Deneuve, and Aqua Universalis, a citrusy cologne that has been a best-seller ever since.
When L.V.M.
H. approached Kurkdjian to buy M.F.
K., in 2015, the line was still tiny but was growing fast; that year, according to Women’s Wear Daily , it brought in twenty-five million dollars, up forty per cent from the year before. Other niche fragrance companies were being bought up by conglomerates—Estée Lauder had bought Le Labo in 2014, and Frédéric Malle the following year—but Kurkdjian agonized for two years before selling.
Being part of L.V.M.
H. ultimately appealed to him, in part, because it meant proximity to other luxury brands under the company’s umbrella—including Dior. In the fall of 2020, amid rumors that François Demachy might be preparing to retire, Kurkdjian received a phone call from a senior executive at L.
V.M.H.
, asking to discuss Parfums Christian Dior. “I told myself, ‘This is it, Francis, Dior is going to hire you. This must be the call!’ ” he said.
Instead, the executive told Kurkdjian that Dior was about to hire another perfumer to replace Demachy, and asked what Kurkdjian, as a member of the “L.V.M.
H. family,” thought of the pick. (Of his disappointment in that moment, he told me, “I remember that call so clearly, the way I remember where I was when Princess Diana died.
”) But a few weeks later L.V.M.
H. tapped the designer in charge of Dior’s menswear line to run womenswear at Fendi, too. The next morning, Kurkdjian sent a four-line e-mail to the executive, proposing a similar dual arrangement, in which he would continue running M.
F.K. while also taking over as the creative director for Parfums Christian Dior.
He told me, “When I was a young perfumer, I had to push open all the doors myself. But here I was, expecting them to come ask me? I said, ‘Francis, you have to jump.’ I remembered my audacité .
” Compared with the rococo headquarters of Dior Couture, on Avenue Montaigne, the offices of Parfums Christian Dior, in a blocky glass tower in the suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, are blandly clinical. The lobby is white and lacquered, like the waiting room of a high-end Botox practice. Most of the building is given over to the company’s sprawling cosmetics operation—makeup, skin care, sunscreen.
The fragrance “creation studio”—Kurkdjian’s domain—occupies part of the second floor, and includes a small perfume laboratory. When I visited early one morning, four technicians in white lab coats were sitting in a diamond formation at individual fragrance-mixing stations, each outfitted with a scale, dozens of small glass vials, plastic pipettes, and squeeze bottles of high-proof perfumer’s alcohol. Kurkdjian’s policies as head of the department reflect both a persnickety attention to detail and an obsession with creative autonomy.
When he took over the job, he did away with the market testing of fragrances and banned the word “nose.” He designed custom mouillettes —the long white paper strips used for smelling perfume—embossed with the Dior logo, with tapered ends fitted to lab bottles; he prefers dipping to spraying. He writes formulas but doesn’t work in the laboratory—“I have chemists for that,” he told me.
Instead, he assesses samples once or twice a week, fanning mouillettes out in his hand, like the feathers of a peacock tail, and sniffing them one by one. One recent project was a spinoff of the Dior cologne Sauvage. Originally formulated by Demachy, in 2015, Sauvage—redolent of dried lavender, cedar, and Sichuan peppercorns—is based on “the American West,” or, at least, a French perfumer’s idea of it.
(Its ad campaigns typically feature Johnny Depp, the scent’s longtime celebrity spokesperson, standing in the wilderness wearing lots of chunky jewelry and playing an electric guitar.) For the past two years, the original Sauvage has been the top-selling fragrance in the world. Kurkdjian’s new version, Sauvage Eau Forte, released in August, is the fifth scent in the collection, which has also spawned a shower gel, an anti-aging serum, a deodorant, and a body mist called Sauvage Very Cool Spray.
Reduxes of existing fragrances are known in the business as “flankers.” Like sequels to blockbusters churned out by movie studios, they help to burnish the franchise and to keep its fans spending. The bigger and riskier undertaking is a “pillar,” a brand-new scent, which can take years to develop and millions of marketing dollars to launch.
Dior’s most recent pillar, Joy, was released in 2018, before Kurkdjian’s time, and was, as he frankly put it, “not the success that the house expected.” Kurkdjian said that he had no immediate plans to develop a pillar of his own, but Michael Edwards, the perfume expert, told me that he believes Dior is overdue. Of flankers, Edwards said, “You can only keep flogging a horse for so long.
” At 9 A.M ., Kurkdjian met in a conference room with Julie Legrand, the brand’s director of haute parfumerie, and Kevin Séchaud, the Dior Parfums marketing director, to smell samples of Sauvage Eau Forte.
Kurkdjian said, by way of introducing Séchaud, “He takes care of Natalie Portman and Rihanna.” The former has been the face of Miss Dior for more than a decade; the latter is the newly appointed face of J’Adore. Link copied Legrand extended her hand to me and said, deadpan, “I only take care of flowers.
” Sauvage Eau Forte, based around an accord of “bleached lavender,” is a bit softer and less spicy than the original, but the bigger difference is the consistency of the “juice.” The liquid inside the bottles, on a conference table in front of us, looked opaque and white, like skim milk. Perfumes are typically made of essences suspended in an alcohol solution.
This one used a “proprietary Dior technology” to emulsify the aromachemicals in water, “like a vinaigrette,” Kurkdjian explained. Instead of evaporating immediately, as alcohol does, the perfume clings to the skin like the mist on heads of lettuce at the grocery store. (When the scent was released, some TikTokers noted that its lactic hue and sticky residue brought another substance to mind.
) Kurkdjian has focussed his more experimental efforts on Dior’s Privée collection, which was launched, in 2004, as the house’s answer to the niche boom. At the end of the meeting, he pulled out a vial of a Privée scent he’d been working on, dipped a mouillette , and handed it to me. It smelled of honey and bonfire, cut through with a bright note of snap-pea green.
“There’s something dirty at the beginning, and quite sexy, like cold tobacco,” Legrand said, sniffing from her own mouillette . “It’s like you’re picking up someone else’s leather jacket.” Kurkdjian nodded his head gently, but he later told me that he wasn’t yet happy with the formula.
He brought up his admiration for Edmond Roudnitska, the late perfumer who made many of Dior’s classics, including Diorissimo and Diorella. Roudnitska, who died in 1996, was notoriously uncompromising; throughout a six-decade career, he signed his name to a total of twenty-two perfumes, according to Fragrantica. Kurkdjian, in a far more accelerated industry, has already made two hundred and forty-eight.
“I have deadlines,” he told me. But, he added, “for me, a perfume is never done.” Trends on TikTok tend to erupt suddenly and dissipate just as fast.
“Rich-girl perfume” is now on the way out, having been supplanted by a mania for kitschy gourmands. In the past two years, the pop star Sabrina Carpenter has released fragrances, under a line called Sweet Tooth, that mimic the aromas of cotton candy, caramel gelato, and cherry pie. (She has yet to put out an espresso-themed scent, but one has to assume that it is forthcoming.
) Last month, the fast-food chain Auntie Anne’s released a salted-pretzel-scented perfume that sold out in ten minutes. The same week, the Tennessee Titans quarterback Will Levis announced that he was partnering with Hellman’s to create Parfum de Mayonnaise. Baccarat Rouge 540 is still popular on the platform, but fragheads now debate whether it’s worth the price tag and discuss the many “dupes” available on the lower-end market—including one released by Target earlier this year called, somewhat shamelessly, the New Rouge ($36.
99 for two ounces). Amateur olfactory sleuths have identified dozens of less obviously derivative scents that smell suspiciously similar to Baccarat, including Ariana Grande’s 2018 perfume Cloud (forty-eight dollars per ounce at Sephora). Legally, a scent is considered an “application of technical knowledge” rather than an original creation, and thus can’t be copyrighted.
Kurkdjian lamented that the industry has “few ethics” around intellectual property but added, “My obsession is not being copied. My obsession is to think about the next Rouge.” Edwards, the perfume expert, told me that Baccarat will ultimately prove noteworthy less for its unusual scent profile than for its viral path to fame.
“It’s a woody amber with a gourmand twist—Angel pioneered that,” he said, referring to the hit Mugler fragrance from 1992. Of Baccarat’s success, he noted, “It’s a very good fragrance, but at the end of the day it was out of Francis’s hands.” Maison Francis Kurkdjian recently released a new scent, APOM —for A Part of Me—a clean-smelling yellow floral that seems unlikely to polarize fragrance fans.
With a pragmatism that Monsieur Dior might have appreciated, M.F.K.
has also branched out into laundry detergent, fabric softener, and scented candles with fragrances reminiscent of things from Kurkdjian’s childhood, such as his grandmother’s rose-petal jam. (In general, he finds autobiographical scents to be “vulgar,” he told me, but he makes an exception for home goods.) The day after visiting the Dior lab, I met Kurkdjian at an outdoor brasserie in the Tuileries Garden.
It was a gray, muggy day, and just as I arrived it began to pour. Sitting down at a corner table, Kurkdjian popped open a large umbrella and suggested that we wait it out; Paris showers never last too long. In a smooth, dancerly sequence, he lit a cigarette with one hand and gestured at a waiter with another.
He ordered a bottle of mineral water and a white-truffle pizza for us to share. It was our first conversation alone, and Kurkdjian seemed more relaxed. He now lives in Montmartre with a long-term partner, but he explained that he hadn’t come out to his family until the age of thirty-five.
“I was totally disoriented, because you find out your sexuality, but no one talks about it in a Middle Eastern family,” he said. “The first time I kissed a guy, I thought I was going to get H.I.
V.!” Kurkdjian was wearing another head-to-toe Dior outfit in dark colors, but his mind was on his own company. In two days, M.
F.K. would have the soft opening of its third and largest retail location in Paris, catty-corner from the Dior store on Avenue Montaigne.
We’d hoped to visit the new outpost during the opening, but Dior executives had insisted that we tour La Galerie Dior, the brand’s archival museum, instead. The fashion house seemed glad to spotlight its head perfumer, so long as the focus remained on Dior. The pushback reminded me of something Kurkdjian had said to me in an earlier conversation, about the “myth that the perfumer is free.
” At Dior, as at Quest, he was beholden to the priorities of a big company, though this time he was frank about the fact that he didn’t exactly need the job. At La Colle Noire, he’d told me, with a hint of the insolence that Christian Dior endorsed, “You know, I’m very happy—I’m fine, but my life goes before Dior, and maybe after.” M.
F.K.’s flagship shop was a few blocks away, just off Rue Saint-Honoré, so we decided to make an impromptu stop there after lunch.
When we arrived, we found a short queue of people waiting outside. We squeezed our way past an American woman in a T-shirt and black leggings. “Hey!” she said.
“We’re all in line here!” Kurkdjian just shook his head and laughed politely. Inside the shop, a jumbo bottle of Baccarat Rouge 540, as big and blocky as a French bulldog, sat on a tall pedestal. A trio of women stood in front of glass display shelves, dousing themselves in Baccarat hair mist.
Kurkdjian asked the employee working the till how things had been going that day. She said that an N.F.
L. player had come in and purchased a large bottle of Rouge extrait , a more concentrated and expensive version of the scent. Kurkdjian had to run to another appointment, so he soon gave me two air kisses and left.
A few minutes later, I noticed the same American woman waiting in the store’s checkout line, clutching a bottle of Baccarat. As she approached the counter, she looked above the register, where a large portrait photograph of Kurkdjian hung on the wall. Even with his name on the bottle, a perfumer has to work to make his presence known.
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