• Jump to fragrance 101 with Christine Nagel.

TWENTY YEARS IS a long time. But for Hermès’ in-house perfumer Christine Nagel, it’s like no time has passed since she took a trip to Greece’s Peloponnese peninsula, from which one vivid memory on the island of Kythira stands out. In her own words, she remembers: “An image of fields of sun-drenched olive trees surrounded by wild grasses, sloping down to a deep-blue sea steeped in history, under the intense blue of a clear sky in the blinding light of a blazing sun.” Two decades of percolating later, and Hermès’ new Jardin à Cythère fragrance capturing olive wood, pistachio, the salty air whipping off the blue sea, and wild grass burned by the blazing sun has been released.

For Nagel, this delayed creation process isn’t unusual. “I need to feel this emotional connection so that this thing will be inscribed in my memory,” she says. She has an internal lockbox of travel-based memories creatively incubating, awaiting the right moment. The Swiss-born, Paris-based fragrancer has been with Hermès since 2016, and in that short time, she has established herself as a perfume individualist, creating scents wholly based on her interests and memories, remaining decidedly indifferent to trends. “At Hermès, I am given complete leeway. I’m free to do what I want,” she says. “I remember that [Hermès CEO] Axel Dumas told me one day, ‘Be audacious, be bold, and it’s with boldness that you will express yourself.’ He also said to me: ‘You are allowed to make mistakes, to be wrong — but please do it boldly, and do not do it while following others,’” she adds. “That’s why I can actually move away from the usual paths and have my own. I’ve never been told what to do, and I’ve had a long life and career as a perfumer, so I will use this freedom given and run with it.”

Sometimes she tries to recreate scents from an element that has no established scent at all. Take Cythère and the fragrance’s notes of pistachio. “This pistachio note is a pure piece of perfumery work, a poetic task,” she says. “There is no extract of fresh pistachio any more than there are extracts of olive wood or grasses on which I could base my work. Everything is composed from my memory. I needed to bring the composition to life, to flesh it out, and that’s when I discovered fresh pistachio,” she adds. “It was a real revelation, almost a shock. I had always loved pistachio nuts, but I had never tasted fresh pistachio. It has a shell-like pink color and is nothing like the pistachios we are used to eating. Its texture is different: full of water, but a little oily and very gentle. I love its tenderness.”

Scent has always been an anchor in Nagel’s life. Some of her happiest and most distinct memories are linked to olfactory notes from her childhood, so much so that those scents find their way into her fragrances. “We had a baby crib that we used for me, then my sister, and then my young brother,” explains Nagel. “And the mattress was filled with dried grasses, and it was a very specific smell, very soothing, very enveloping, and very reassuring to me.” Elements of this reassuring note of dried grasses can be found in Cythère — proof that her creative percolation period can extend well beyond 20 years.