FASHION Magazine

By Lesa Hannah

Photography by Carlo Mendoza

When most people travel to some warm and exotic place, all they return with are sunburns, sand in their bathing suits and hangovers. When perfumer Daphné Bugey takes a trip, she comes home with an olfactory “travelogue” of all the inspiring scents she encountered. So when she read the concept for Kenzo’s latest scent, KenzoAmour (from $62, at The Bay), it seemed tailor-made for her. Launching this month, the fragrance is based on a couple’s journey through Asia, and Bugey, who’d already travelled extensively there, had aromatic memories to draw on for the juice’s recipe. “The project description touched on my personal experience so closely that I immediately felt involved, inspired by the need to create,” she says. As is the case with every fragrance project, she had to compete with other perfumers—most of whom were more experienced than her—for the coveted role of the nose. But to hear Bugey describe her creative process of using her own journeys to select notes, it’s easy to see why she was the person for the job.

As a starting point, Kenzo provided Balinese offerings: religious gifts that are a combination of flowers, incense and rice. From there, Bugey was able to flesh out the specific notes on instinct. “I wanted to build up this perfume like a coloured patchwork of travel souvenirs.” Immediately, she knew that she wanted to combine the smell of steamed Thai rice with the frangipani flower, which she discovered in front of the Borobudur Temple on her first trip to Indonesia. “It’s an amazing smell because even though it’s a white flower, it’s more like sunny,” she describes over the phone from Paris. “It’s a little bit vanilla, almondy, very sensual. So it was of use in my head when I saw the project.”

It was the vanilla aspect of the flower that Bugey really wanted to draw out, to heighten what she felt was the sensuality of the bloom. To extend that facet, she recalled the vanilla husks drying in the sun on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion. “When the pods dry, it’s a very particular feeling that was all in the air. Ooh la la, it was beautiful.” To contrast with the vanilla, she selected thanaka wood, which she stumbled on in Burma. “The smell is very interesting. It’s a little bit sandalwood and a little bit powdery, and it combines very well with the frangipani flower and the vanilla, which gives kind of a depth to the perfume,” she explains. Other notes included subtle hints of white tea, incense and Japanese cherry blossoms, which she added only near the end, after she was shown the bottle, an abstract rendition of a bird in flight. “The idea was to give some kind of lightness, a delicacy, like a bird flying on the top of the fragrance,” she recalls, “but at the same time, to create a very rich and strong perfume.” To achieve that effect, Bugey sought the guidance of another nose, Olivier Cresp, who was able to provide more technical expertise in terms of formulations.

In the end, however, it is Bugey who feels the strongest connection to the KenzoAmour juice. “I was extremely touched by the project because I felt personally involved,” she says. Moreover, it seemed fated that she would create it. “I don’t know if I can say this because it can sound ridiculous, but when I first discovered the frangipani flowers, I picked them all and wrote ‘love’ in the grass in front of the temple. Which is amazing because now it’s called KenzoAmour.” When she recounted the story to Kenzo executives, they couldn’t believe it. “So I showed them the picture to prove it!”

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