Жермена Селье (1909-1976)
Первая женщина-парфюмер – это как первая женщина-космонавт. Во времена Жермены женщины должны были носить духи, а не создавать их. Но смелость вообще была ее вторым именем, и Селье постоянно опережала свое время.
Она родилась в 1909 году в Бордо и приехала в Париж за дипломом химика через 21 год. В то время все парфюмерные дома (Guerlain, Coty, Caron, Houbigant) имели в своем штате собственного парфюмера, или «нос». Парфюмеры-художники были главными действующими лицами. Поставщики парфюмерного сырья и первых синтетических ингредиентов (кумарина, альдегидов, ванилина) помогали в работе, обеспечивая их парфюмерные «оргАны» всем необходимым и соблазняя новыми нотами. Здесь трудились парфюмеры – «рабочие пчелы»: их работу никто не замечал, они создавали готовые аккорды или парфюмерные базы, чтобы продать парфюмерным домам. В одну из таких компаний-поставщиков, Roure Bertrand Dupont, и попала Жермена Селье. Она бы занималась описанием новых ароматов, но тут случилось событие, которое через 50 лет изменило лицо всей парфюмерии.
В 40-х годах началось вавилонское брендотворение XX века, когда ароматы начали выпускать все: от модельеров и ювелиров, от селебрити и политиков до сырных, алкогольных и автомобильных брендов. Тут Луи Амик все рассчитал правильно – парфюм льстил самолюбию тех, чье имя появлялось на флаконах.
В 1944 году Жермена Селье создает аромат Bandit, который немедленно выходит под маркой модельера одежды Robert Piguet. Первый кожаный шипр, угловатый и резкий, типично мужской, по её воле сначала появляется среди женских ароматов. Только через 20 лет парфюмеры поймут, что к чему, и начнется десятилетие мужских кожаных шипров. Через год она создает первый зеленый аромат Vent Vert для Pierre Balmain, сделав смолу гальбана с её зеленой яркой горечью одной из самых популярных нот.
Практически все ее ароматы непохожи друг на друга – она словно торопилась показать свои идеи первой. Это яркая и наглая тубероза Fracas Robert Piguet (1948), спелая фруктовая кожа Jolie Madame Balmain (1953), свежий вербеновый Monsieur Balmain (1964). Все эти ароматы стали иконами своего времени и выпускаются до сих пор!!! При этом тотальная неусидчивость и желание свободной жизни Жермены часто приводили к тому, что она приезжала на работу в 10 утра на такси, чтобы в 11.15 уехать – рабочий день окончен! Жермена Селье стала той счастливой женщиной, которая доказала, что главное – свобода творчества парфюмера, а не его принадлежность парфюмерному клану Guerlain или Caron.

Working life has never been gentle to women, specially for the most technical positions. It's the case of perfumery employment where, aside a mysterious Madame Zede who created the first Lanvin perfumes and Jacqueline Fraysse, André Fraysse sister who worked for the fur makers Weil, there are almost no traces of women who imposed themselves before WWII. "Architecture is a job for men, but I always pretended that wasn't true" used to say one of my favorite designers, Gae Aulenti. Sagaciously applied to perfumery, the same motto perfectly fits to the greatest woman perfumer of the past century: Germaine Cellier.


Childhood and studies

Catherine and Germaine
Germaine was born in Bordeaux on January 26 1909. Her father George is a penniless bohemièn and her mother Jeanne, ethereal beauty with a strong temper, doesn't think twice at 40 to get back to work to make good the wasteful expenses of her husband. Maybe a capricious father and the resolute attitude of her mother shaped the temper of the little Germaine.
Afted attending a catholic school in Créon, in 1930 she moves to Paris together with the extravagant Catherine Mangelle, her cousine and childhood friend who soon became the mistress of the art dealer Irène Champigny. Their friendship will be surely significant to her camp approach to genders.


Germaine and colleagues in Roure
She attends the faculty of Chemistry but cannot resist to che charm of smells. Memories from the bordolese country with the smells of hay and the spicy flowers from the marseillese coast will be such a strong evocation that her thesis degree will focus on the classification of fractional distillation of synthesis products, a work that will immediately bring her to Argenteuil by the Roure Bertrand Dupont (now Givaudan) lab in the team of Monsieur Jean Sfiras.

The character and the cultured connections

Blonde, lean, blue-eyed with peculiar features à la Cate Blanchett, Germaine Cellier immediately moves to Montparnasse. She loves the area and the life in the village populated by the artists of the time. Her undiluted verve, the cheeky humor without being vulgar and her fredom of thought made her a unique woman for the time. Thanks to this artistic attitude she becomes friend of the painter André Derain who will portray her, with Chas Laborde whose wife also worked at Roure and with Jean Oberlé who will introduce her to the tennis champion Christian Boussus, later her life partner (they never married though).
The people surrounding her will be a constant source of inspiration, friends like the writer Jean Cocteau and the actors Jean Marchat and François Périer. Moreover a deep friendship will bind Germaine to Yolande Lafon, the wife of Le Figaro director Pierre Brisson.
Later she moved to rue Boccador, at the heart of the fashion district where it was impossible not to notice her: Cléopâtre, Félix and Valentin, her three long haired teckel on a leash, she walked flawless in her beige Balmain suit or wearing a hat from her friend Rose Valois.


Germaine hated to fly, so she never visited USA
Sharp-tongued, between a puff of a cigarette and the next she didn't hesitate to judge relentlessly the creations of some colleagues to the point some meetings in Roure were memorable. Germaine was also a generous woman though, unable to be indiffenent to her close friends and collaborators. She liked to get lost downtown in Paris for the whole day while looking for an original present showing so her affection to a friend. She loved to walk barefoot in a nightgown at home, challenge Christian with crosswords and collect Delly novels. She didn't cook so often she had a chef at her orders. But she was also down to earth: she always knew how to pull her beans out of the fire and even during the tough years of the war she did her best to welcome her guests at best in the livingroom, entertained by her parrot singing "Ëtoile des neiges".
Working in Neuilly, she used to buy groceries at the local market: walking along the main road always before her assistants carrying some bags, the merchants nicknamed her the Grande Dame from the market of Neuilly.

If you enjoyed the first part of this portrait of Germaine Cellier, surely her first years as a perfumer will thrill you, specially the years spent in Roure Bertrand Dupont, that ain't always easy. After a brief period in functional perfumery at Colgate-Palmolive, in 1943 Germaine Cellier gets back to Roure.
Till the end of the 1920s perfumery was ruled by names like Houbigant, Guerlain, Coty and Caron. It was only since a decade that fashion houses ventured in the olfactory realm and designers like Poiret, Patou, Lanvin and Chanel directly collaborated with perfumers in a special, almost exclusive relationship. So Roure and other producers, essentially confined themselves to provide them with natural and synthetic raw materials, innovative bases and specialties for the time. But the wind was changing.


Shocking ad
by Marcel Verte (1937)
During the 1930s, Louis Amic steered the Roure company in the daring direction of creating fine perfumes directly dealing with the big dressmakers of the time. Having understood perfume had become an essential part of the feminine elegance, their reply to the call won't be late.
The first customer will be Elsa Schiaparelli for whom Jean Carles will create Shocking in 1937. Many others will follow so that in 1939 Roure was one of the major European producers of raw materials for perfumery and toiletries. Such moment of great freedom for perfumers will be crucial also for Germaine and her revolutionary ideas.


The green line - Henri Matisse (1905)
Germaine Cellier was a chemist first of all. The rigorous training allowed her to approach perfume composition without constraints and stylistic prejudices just like abstract and fauvist painters, taking a break from academic tradition and giving way to a more emotional elevation of color. Her palette is made or raw materials and her creations are daring, sometimes even brutal. Rhythmic, tonal and dissonant like the music from Igor Stravinskij, her composing style favors short formulas for the time forecasting the next decades and greatly innovating the public taste. "One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles" once said Stravisnkij. Also Germaine Cellier conceived perfumery as a talent, the sense of formula is an intuition where there are no made-up rules and one can hardly learn it.
This belief, together with the feeling that chemistry will more and more impact perfumery in the future, sets her opposed to Jean Carles, who those years founded his method and the first perfumery school in Roure.
So in 1946 Louis Amic thought too many cooks in the kitchen spoiled the broth. He founded then Exarome and put Germaine Cellier as lab chief. The first head office was in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a shabby old hôtel particulier at the corner between rue de Rouvray and boulevard Victor Hugo.
Germaine concocted there her first successes, followed by a patient assistant and a handyman she nicknamed "Foujita" for his oriental-like features.
Given the precarious building, Exarome will eventually move to avenue de Neuilly (nowadays Charles de Gaulle), not far from where today are many companies in the industry.

The genius of Germaine Cellier can only be measured within the frame of her larger-than-life, remarkable creations.
The crucial event was meeting Robert Piguet, an ex-modelist trained at Paul Poiret's atelier who after WWII enstablished his own fashion house. His style is lively, full of drive and desire for reward after the dark years of the war.

In 1944 he debuted with a mythical collection inspired by buccaneers and their adventures by faraway seas that was paired by the launch of Bandit, a leathery chypre bearing a brutal sensuality. To evoke the dangerous smell of leather and forays Germaine dares to use 1% of iso-butyl-quinoleine, a molecule doused till then with fear for its violence.


Vent Vert ad by René Gruau (1947)
In 1945 her friend Pierre Balmain asks her to translate his elegantl, joyful style. That's how Vent Vert was born, the first green floral again built around a powerful raw material, galbanum. Its herbaceous, metallic sparkle bearing moist, earthy floral reflections was far from being a crowd-pleaser, but in the decades will become a reference for many creators. The perfume beautifully illustrated by René Gruau will be sold in a green felt pocket as wanted by Germaine herself.
In 1947, again for Balmain, Germaine creates Elysées 63.84 from the fashion house telephone number. The same year she composes for Nina Ricci Cœur Joie, an aldehydic floral presented in a Lalique crystal flacon designed by Christian Bérard.
In 1948 another hit for Robert Piguet was Fracas, the unapologetic Diva of all the soliflores that since then seduced men and women, from Walter Albini to Mark Jacobs, from Marilyn to Sofia Coppola including Brigitte Bardot, Courtney Love and Madonna. Nowadays, though reformulated more than once, it still represents the prototype for tuberose in perfumery.


Marie-Thérèse in a
Balmain Jolie Madame flannel suit
Pic by Tom Kublin (1956)
In 1949 Balenciaga launches La Fuite des Heures, later renamed with the less lyrical Fleeting Moment: the come back of aldehydic florals leads Germaine to find here an original interpretation thanks to a bunch of jasmine and wild thyme.
The success of Bandit drew attention to Mademoiselle Cellier and in 1952 she collaborated with Balmain on another leathery perfume: Jolie Madame. This time it's a soft, floral leather with a sly touch. Pierre Balmain will define it "the perfume of adventure for the evenings of passion and enchantment".
In 1964 she created Monsieur Balmain focusing on the brisk freshness of verveine and lemongrass. Pierre Balmain himself will ask her for a bespoke Eau de geranium.
For Hermès she composed the long lost Eau d’herbes aiming to suggest the outdoors freshness of fresh cut grass.


Germaine Cellier (right) with her hiece Martine
and Christian Boussus
The last years
Later she will compose cosmetic fragrances for Elizabeth Arden and the US market but there's almost no evidence of this. During the 1970s her health became failing, maybe because of inhaling too many vials in the lab or more likely for too much Johnny Walker and too many cigarettes.
Christian Boussus will take care of her till the death by pulmonary edema on June 1976. To her heart's desired, she's been buried close to her parents in Pau, far from the Parisian highlights.
Germaine Cellier has surely been the most influent women in perfumery from the last century, forerunner and inspiration in the business to many other women like Josephine Catapano and Sophia Grojsman. Her genius, as great as her exuberance were immediately understood by Roure Bertrand Dupont who then granted her carte blanche to compose such modern masterpieces.
Fortunately we're faraway from the flattening market consolidating in the last decades. Impossible to imagine her creations passing right through any test panel!

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