Hermès head perfumer Christine Nagel wants men to smell intense

AS THE CREATIVE director of olfactory creation at Hermès, Christine Nagel has one of the world’s most enchanting jobs. Today, she’s speaking to me from her office, which she describes as a “little shrine” on the top floor of the Hermès headquarters in Paris near the Élysée Palace. With her lab atypically set up right in the middle of the space – a Benihana-like level of showmanship – it’s here that Nagel oversees the creation of the brand’s fragrances for men and women; a special form of alchemy that sees her bottling the essence of a legacy house known for its highly covetable handbags and equestrian heritage. It’s 9 am (she likes to work early, when her nose is most powerful), and Nagel is wearing a detailed black jacket with black leather pants, thick circular black specs frame her eyes. She’s game to talk about her latest creation: Terre d’Hermès Eau de Parfum Intense.  

“What you have to understand is that Terre d’Hermès is a monument for me,” she says, speaking French, through an interpreter, “and that requires a degree of courage.”

The Terre d’Hermès range is considered the defining creation of Nagel’s predecessor and Hermès’ first in-house nose, Jean-Claude Ellena. Premised as bottling man’s connection with the earth, the first fragrance debuted in 2006, boasting citrus top notes with a patchouli and cedar base – a grounded reprieve from the decade’s obsession with thalassic and fruity musks. Nagel’s Eau de Parfum Intense will be her third interpretation of the ‘monument’ since succeeding Ellena in 2016.

To achieve this, she needed “to have a very powerful idea.” 

Nagel has synaesthesia, a neurological condition that causes people to experience one sense through another – musicians and visual artists are the most documented possessors. From Charli XCX to Wassily Kandinsky, people with synaesthesia may say that they see colours when listening to music. For perfumers like Nagel, she sees and feels scents. “When I think about scents, I will think about either colours or textures,” she says. “It’s something that has become stronger over the years.” 

Continuing Ellena’s exploration between man and the earth (hence, ‘Terre’), and with her intention to make something powerful, Nagel had some misgivings about the current state of masculine scents. “There’s a race to getting the most potent, the most powerful perfume possible, and that’s often done by increasing concentrations,” she says, “and that intensity is a bit of a shame. If you go to a very good restaurant and you are served dishes that are too hot or too spicy, you will no longer feel the delicacy of the dishes, its finesse . . . There comes a time when you can no longer perceive the creative work of the perfume – it is just like a massive bomb.” Personality in ingredients, and not power (because in 2025, do men need more power?), she believes, is what’s missing. 

She explains that instead of looking at earthly delights, like how a perfume can bring a time and place to mind, she was drawn to something more primordial. “The idea of a volcano came about very early on,” Nagel says. “[It] ejects something very warm; [it] is about getting into the intimacy of the earth. And I think that to wear this fragrance is also about the intimacy of a man.” 

On her usual beat of visualising the fragrance first, Nagel met with a regular supplier who showed her a natural extract of liquorice, an ingredient she stresses is a rarity. “I was really surprised because throughout my career as a perfume designer, you tend to reconstitute it, you create the sensation of liquorice,” she says. 

Nagel has a degree in organic chemistry, another rarity in the fragrance business. While her peers (mostly men) trained in Grasse, a medieval town just north of Cannes, where rich soil and a warm climate help cultivate fields of jasmine, tuberose and lavender, Nagel spent her early career researching and developing raw materials in a lab for a fragrance and flavour manufacturer. “My technical background was something that I didn’t talk about for a very long time because I didn’t have the same kind of baggage as other perfume designers who’d been trained by great masters,” she says. She also isn’t French; Nagel is Swiss.  

She continues, “What it does provide me with is a greater freedom because I’m not afraid of anything. Mixing materials, evaporation of materials. It’s something that I have mastered quite well.” 

Liquorice isn’t easy to extract; naturally occurring ingredients generally give inconsistent results in potency and quantity, so a synthetic version with anise is used more widely. Presented in its raw form, derived from the root of the glycyrrhiza glabra plant found across southern Europe, Nagel had the “strong personality” she needed for this new ‘earth’. 

Eau de Parfum Intense marks two firsts for Nagel. The second came when another supplier brought her roasted coffee beans. “I’ve always been fascinated with coffee, but coffee is always really difficult to use.” She explains how leaving the beans roasting a moment longer can lose the warmed rose aroma when drawing out the extract. On the other hand, coffee beans have been misconstrued as a palate neutraliser. (“There’s no scientific proof [to that]. If you’re tired because you’ve smelled too many things, the best way to cleanse your nose is to smell your own scent,” she says, tucking her nose into her shirt.) But the beans Nagel received had a stabilised strength. “I thought, wonderful, I can finally work with coffee at last . . . I used coffee to have something more assertive underpinning the liquorice, [but] I wanted a composition that didn’t smell of coffee.” 

Gourmands, the industry term for a perfume that smells like food, are often cloyingly literal. For Nagel, finding natural liquorice and coffee bean extracts was important to not create something impressionistic of her new earth. The resulting perfume did not smell edible; it evoked something air-gapped and untouched by human sweat, like cracking open a tennis ball canister that happens to be filled with liquorice.  

When the fragrance is done, Nagel would present it to Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Hermès’ artistic director (“in charge of creation,” his bio reads), and the other creative directors, including menswear designer Véronique Nichanian. Designing the scent for a powerful luxury brand, and, in effect, its menswear universe, is an interesting spot to be. “My designs are always very close to Véronique’s sensibility,” Nagel says. “The way she designs cashmere, wool, leather, even very technical raw materials, is incredible. Véronique’s opinion is always very important to me.” 

Nichanian, who celebrated her 37th year at the brand this past autumn/winter 2025 season, also shares a nuanced approach to the senses. The colour blue, for instance, isn’t just that, but something like petrol blue. And considering the heritage of the brand’s famed Birkin and Kelly bags, where aspirant customers delight in the idiosyncratic names of its colour catalogue, Nichanian treats naming shades like a botanist might flowers. 

To be given this sort of space and time to create is something Nagel has found liberating since joining Hermès in 2014. In the perfume world, where market testing has long been a contentious issue in homogenising scents skewed by what’s familiar and trendy, Nagel’s perfumes are only given their bottle, name, and packaging once Dumas has decreed that “this is Hermès”.

“I am really doing what a perfumer should be doing,” says Nagel, “[I design with my] choice of raw materials, [with] no price constraints, no time constraints . . . I’m doing the job that all perfumers would dream of doing. I have complete and utter freedom.” 

Terre d’Hermès Eau de Parfum Intense is available from March 1.

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