For a decade, perfumer Christine Nagel had a secret: a fragrance she just couldn’t get out of her mind. As the in-house perfumer for Hermès, Nagel often has scents on the brain, but there’s never been one that has lingered as long, nor occupied as much mental brain space as her newest creation, Barénia. “I had an addiction to it. I always wanted to come back and re-smell it,” she says.
The perfume, named after a rare, supple calf leather (“Artisans often say, ‘Barénia, it gives you back the caress,’” Nagel says), wasn’t an officially assigned project. “It was not something that somebody had asked me [to do]; it was just a personal desire,” she tells me, speaking over Zoom in her trademark round bottle-cap glasses, and with softly curled hair that’s just about the exact shade as Hermès’ Togo leather. One of the brand’s best-known traditionally masculine scents is the legendary Terre d’Hermès, which regularly tops lists as one of the best perfumes of all time. Nagel wanted to make a feminine counterpoint with that same aura.
The perfume would be an Hermès first. Of the 84 scents in its library, Barénia is the only chypre, an enigmatic category of fragrance the brand had never offered before. Chypres aren’t just one thing—they’re mossy, floral, and woody. Nagel describes them as having “a fragrant structure, with multiple entry points. You can enter through the fresh side, but you can also come in through the more sensual, patchouli, mysterious side.” Because it’s so multidimensional, she considers it uniquely timeless and elegant, fitting in with Hermès’ other iconic objects, like its Birkin and Kelly bags. The sheer timelessness makes chypres a reference point even in dystopian and classic literature. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, for example, the main female character chooses a chypre from among a selection of fragrances after emerging from the bath. Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’âge De Raison mentions a bank note scented like chypre.
In formulating Barénia, Nagel was inspired by iconic women who trusted their instincts to blaze their own trail in life, such as Isabella Bird, who became the first woman to be elected as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and Nancy Cunard, an heiress and author who wrote about combating fascism and racism. To honor their trailblazing spirit, she created a unique chypre, picking a green bergamot, a roasted oaky wood that was reminiscent of rum; two types of patchouli; butterfly lily; and miracle berry (native to Africa, the berry causes sour or bitter food to taste sweet). It took her years to source and perfect the mix of notes until she had the feeling “I know that it’s good now.” When Nagel finally unveiled the perfume to Hermès artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas, she told him, “If I were to make one single fragrance for Hermès, I want it to be this one.” It wasn’t a question, but Dumas said yes anyway.
A version of this story appears in the September 2024 issue of ELLE.
Kathleen Hou is ELLE”s Beauty Director. Previously, she held the same title at New York Magazine’s The Cut. She’s appeared in publications such as New York, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue India, Forbes, and Allure. She was also a co-founder of Donate Beauty, a grassroots beauty donation project started during the COVID-19 crisis, which donated over 500,000 products to over 30,000 healthcare workers across 500+ hospitals.