- silence

- Have your nose wide open, it is now during spring that the great groups of cosmetics launch their new fragrances, in general retailed fragrances to sell like hot cakes,

- but some famous houses resist. They hire noses,

- those creators who only work for them. Sabine Gorny and Olivier Palomino met one of the most famous,

- even though very discreet, he hides on the hills of Grasse.

- A small village of Provence hung on a hill, it is there in the middle of the pine trees, olive trees, mimosas fields,

- Jean-Claude Ellena’s location. The man from Grasse, inured to the secrets of stills since childhood,

- his father was a perfumer, a hundred of juices to his credit, formulas, equations, well a poet in his own way.

- Each perfume is a story. I will be very quick for some stories, some stories are very long, so I will build them little by little, thus it is writing,

- there is even a syntax of the building of perfume, a way to make perfume

- and I also look for breathings like in literature.

- Here is his last creation: a male juice, total freedom, only one basic premise, the name: Earth.

- So for this mineral and vegetable perfume, he read Jean Giono again a lot, the writer form Provence, and he even invented a smell that does not exist.

- You know, when you are a child, you rub flintstones like that together and a smell comes out of this rubbing and this smell, I have it in mind,

- I released this memory as obviously you cannot extract anything from flintstones,

- you cannot do anything with flint stones. But on the contrary I can create the illusion of flintstones.

- That is good, look; maybe I should reduce a bit the proportion of vanilla, as it is a bit too tasteful.

- Is it bergamot that I can smell behind?

- Yes, it is.

- In his perfume console, there are only 200 notes against 2, 000 at other perfumers’.

- The evocative names of flowers, synthetic and poetical materials. 200 scents, endlessly combined, taking the time to. Here, the preparation of a perfume can last for 2 years.

- Jean-Claude is very different from other perfumers with whom I’ve worked. He only trusts himself,

- the explanation of his vision that is totally different for the other perfumers’,

- at least in other societies that would want to make at any cost a product that looks like what’s on market to be sure to sell it.

- A free creator, a dreamer, Jean-Claude Ellena, but also a demanding nose able to bent nature to his overflowing imagination.

- It happened lately that I did not have the type of oranges I wanted for the new male perfume.

- And so I saw a small company that makes natural raw materials. We talked for them to develop the orange I wanted for that perfume.

- And my occupation is all that. It is the choosing of appropriate products that will tell the story I want.

- An intoxicating story, an olfactory trip to the Mediterranean shores, in the shade of geraniums, cedars and cypresses.