Follow Your Nose

The warm Mediterranean air around the little French town of Grasse was heavy with the fragrance of carnations, jasmine and roses. Working in quick-fingered teams, the white-bloused girls of Grasse filled wicker baskets with blossoms, carried them to the huge stills to have the odorous oils extracted. Combined and transmuted by chemists, they will be dabbed behind the ears of women throughout the world to multiply the risk of genteel seduction.

As the harvest continued at Grasse this week, the prospects of the French perfume trade were not as pretty as the blossoms. Of the many ingredients required to make men sniff with interest, the fields of Grasse produce only a few, and not enough of those. Citronella, civet, vetivert, santalol, ambergris, patchouli and a long list of other exotic products had to be imported from abroad, and they were still not arriving in France in anything like prewar quantities. Prices were staggering; a kilo (2.2 pounds) of musk is now 100,000 francs compared with 9,000 prewar.

As a result, in the past few months 600 of the 2,400 French perfume manufacturers have gone out of business. Another 600 are expected to close shop by the end of the year. Most were fly-by-nights who set up in business during the war and filled fancy flacons with any sweet, synthetic smell--or colored water--that chemists could brew. They cleaned up, selling to the unsophisticated Nazis and later to the G.I.s.

Synthetic Glamor. But not all perfumers made easy millions by debasing their wares. Most of the old-line houses were reduced to using synthetic scents, which do not "stay" as well. But such houses as Guerlain, which colleagues in the trade call the "perfume emperor," fiercely resent even a hint that they had adulterated their wares.

One day a woman stalked into Guerlain's shop on the Avenue des Champs-Elysees. She had a complaint to make to the proprietor in person: "Monsieur, your perfume doesn't smell as good as it used to." One of the dignified old gentlemen who now run the company snapped: "My perfume never changes. If anything doesn't smell as good as it used to, it must be you, Madame."

When war cut off materials needed for certain scents, the Guerlains, Pierre and Jacques, jealous of the house's 119-year-old reputation, stopped making them, rather than put out an inferior product. When bombers wiped out the Guerlain laboratory in the suburbs, they started mixing perfumes in the basement of their Champs-Elysees shop. No one but Pierre and Jacques and their four sons knows how the scents are blended. The Guerlains do the work themselves, use girls only to bottle perfume. For months the perfumes were rationed and G.I.s used to line up for a block to buy the 250 bottles a day put on sale.

But now materials are coming in again and the big copper tanks and brown bottles are filled with tens of millions of francs worth of extracts, which white-robed girls dribble carefully into flacons. The real secret is to use more natural than synthetic musk. As Jeanpierre Guerlain explains: "Go into a Montmartre bar around midnight--the air reeks with synthetic musk. It smells of tarts. It takes real musk to make a woman smell like a lady."

High-Priced Lure. And if French perfume is to do the job, the French know they have their work cut out for them. The older houses are back on their feet, albeit a bit groggy. Last year the industry exported perfume worth $18,286,357, already almost half the prewar figure. But the war gave the U.S. perfume industry a tremendous boost. It is now producing good scents to retail at $8 to $10 a bottle. The French perfumers know that they are going to have trouble getting back all of their U.S. market.

The famed houses are inclined to let the U.S. keep the cheaper trade. That would leave them free to concentrate on luxury products, selling for $15 a bottle and up.

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