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.
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.”