Cherigan Paris 1929 is the fragrance brand Luc Gabriel discovered in 2016, 87 years after its launch and more than a half century following its demise.
He found the name interesting — cheri, French for darling, and gant, meaning glove. Cherigan was part of the Art Deco period, which Gabriel adores.
The executive learned the brand had created iconic perfumes such as Chance, Parisienne, Bleu Impérial and Fleurs de Tabac. It owned a store on Paris’ Champs-Élysées.
Gabriel snapped up some vintage Cherigan bottles in the U.S., Australia and France, and sampled their scents.
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“I was amazed by the creativity of the brand,” and that it was entirely Art Deco, he said. “It was completely in sync with its time.”
Cherigan was prized by jetsetters and popular in far-flung locales like Cuba and the U.S. But the label went under in the 1960s, so Gabriel purchased the rights to it from various people before a relaunch in 2022.
A passion project? Not today. Old is the new cool for fragrance. As with music and fashion, perfume consumers are increasingly syncing with past creations.
“There is a shift,” said Lucie Greene, founder and chief executive officer of trend forecasting consultancy Light Years, who noted numerous drivers. “In hospitality, you’re seeing very much a return to the grande dame hotels, the revival of these sumptuous historic hotels with Belle Époque and 1930s references.”
That’s radiating into other domains. She’s seeing beauty brands with a real sense of place and history becoming sought out. Ditto for make-believe heritage brands emitting a true identity.
The trend has not been lost on investors. Take, for instance, the 3.5 billion euros Kering reportedly paid in late June to acquire Creed, the British fragrance maker that’s the oldest surviving fragrance label, dating from 1760.
Niche fragrance brands are a sweet spot in the perfume industry, as consumers today are on a quest for olfactive individuality. It is tricky for strategics to build brands from scratch, and so they acquire them.
Private equity is also game. Advent International in June paid an estimated $700 million-plus to purchase Parfums de Marly — while not a true vintage brand, it nods to 18th-century France — alongside Initio Parfums Privés.
Fragrance has become a robust business again, driven by the category’s high end and emerging markets, especially in Asia. That compares to pre-coronavirus pandemic, when perfume sales were flat to down in even mature geographies. Between 2022 and 2023, premium fragrance sales rose 7.9 percent, according to Euromonitor International.
Heritage perfume brands have hit a particularly high note. “We strongly believe from all the studies we’ve done that the young generation is living a vintage mania,” said Arnaud Guggenbuhl, head of global marketing, insight and image, fine fragrances at Givaudan. “They’re really into this idea that old is new again.”
The fragrance and flavors supplier recently polled Gen Zers in France and the U.S. Ninety-eight percent said that in all categories — fashion, film, music and fragrance included — some classics will never go out of style. Ninety percent shared they had already purchased secondhand products and love shopping vintage.
“They’re all super interested in what happened before their birth,” said Guggenbuhl, adding with heritage fragrances that’s especially true if there are at least two generations separating the decline of a perfume and its revival.
Other sleeping beauty heritage fragrance brands being awoken in France today include Bienaimé 1935, Violet Parfums and Parfums d’Orsay. Unearthing their roots is helping catapult them into the present.
Cécilia Mergui, also with a longstanding fascination with the Art Deco movement, chanced upon a powder box from Bienaimé she found beautiful.
Google searches showed the brand had no current commercial existence, and that its trademark was owned by a perfumer. She tracked him down and shared her desire to bring back beauty objects from the ’30s. He liked the idea and sold her Bienaimé’s trademark in June 2019.
Bienaimé was created in 1935 by Robert Bienaimé, a chemist, who headed up the fragrance maker Houbigant, then a competitor to Guerlain. He conceived perfumes such as Quelques Fleurs, the first synthetic floral bouquet scent, which became an international success.
Bienaimé was groundbreaking, as well, in skin care and makeup. The executive promoted French savoir-faire around the world. He operated his own eponymous brand for years until his death in 1960, after which it became dormant.
Mergui was further drawn to the sustainability aspect of Bienaimé packaging, wishing to revive beauty consumption of yesteryear.
She launched the Bienaimé website in mid-November 2021 with solid soaps, liquid soaps, body balms, lip balm and accessories, alongside three perfumes. They bear names of past Bienaimé scents. She possesses its book of formulas from which independent perfumers glean inspiration.
“They modernized them,” said Mergui.
For the 75-ml. Art Deco-like fragrance bottles retailing for 150 euros each, she commissioned a specific mold enabling refills. The brand opened a freestanding store on Paris’ Rue Saint-Roch in mid-November 2022.
“It’s super important to continue the legacy of Robert Bienaimé,” said Mergui, who remains in contact with one of his stepdaughters, aged 89. “She’s my living legacy.”
A 90-plus-year-old descendent of Aaron Marc Rehns, who ran Violet Parfums starting in 1885, listed it on the French stock exchange and launched fine fragrances, helps fill in the gaps about the company that disappeared in the late 1950s for entrepreneurs Anthony Toulemonde, Paul Richardot and Victorien Sirot.
The trio was long fascinated by vintage perfumery, which led them to discover Violet, officially founded by François-Étienne Violet in 1827.
The French house — which reached its apex in the 1900s — was first reputed for its soaps and other cosmetics products. It globetrotted, making perfumes for the likes of the royal courts of Empress Eugénie and Queen Isabella II of Spain. Violet had a boutique on Paris’ Boulevard des Capucines and became so famous that — to stave off counterfeiters — created a bee stamp for its packaging.
Toulemonde, Richardot and Sirot sleuthed to find archival information about Violet.
“Through this work, we completely fell in love with the house,” said Toulemonde.
They bought the rights to it from an investment fund in 2016, then reintroduced the brand in October 2017 with three unisex Violet scents, traces of which they found in old bottles. The Pourpre d’Automne, Apogée and Sketch juices were modernized with Firmenich perfumer Nathalie Lorson. A 75-ml. fragrance goes for 155 euros.
“The idea was to try and get a general feeling of what these fragrances were smelling like, but obviously were making them more modern for today’s time,” said Toulemonde. “We like the term ‘retro-modern.’”
That historical scent portfolio has since been expanded and paired with other ranges with more futuristic olfactive compositions. The first was a limited-edition with unlimited refills, called Cycle, which will be followed with Cycle 002 in October.
The executives searched for a classic yet contemporary shape for the streamlined bottle, giving it a vintage touch with the bee stamp.
“We don’t want to seem old and past,” said Toulemonde. Instead, the idea is to envisage how Violet would be today had it never disappeared.
“It is a difficult challenge,” he said.
At Parfums d’Orsay, no formulas for past scents remain, but descriptions of notes they contain do. The contents of its extensive archives have helped fashion the design of the brand’s current bottles and stores, in Paris and Tokyo, too.
The French fragrance house dates back almost 200 years and today perpetually mines aesthetic and storytelling inspirations from its founder, the colorful dandy and talented portraitist Count Alfred d’Orsay. (He’s the guy whose monocled self-portrait graces the cover of The New Yorker each February.) Those then are parleyed into the present day.
In 1821, d’Orsay met Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, who was married and 12 years his elder. Their sentimental feelings bloomed, and the two had an affair. It was for her in 1830 that he conceived a fragrance representing their love and relationship. The perfume was gender-neutral to keep their liaison secret.
D’Orsay’s family commercialized his fragrances in 1860. Their heyday was the 1920s and ’30s, when the brand had a boutique on Paris’ Rue de la Paix and in New York, but never totally faded away.
D’Orsay was acquired in 2015 and rebooted in 2019 by Amélie Huynh, now its chief executive officer, who had been searching for an existing label with an exciting story.
“It’s a big challenge, because you have to live up to the story,” said Chloé Prigent, D’Orsay’s director of branding and operations. “You can’t betray it.”
Love stories continue inspiring D’Orsay’s fragrances, among which a 50-ml. eau de toilette runs 110 euros.
For all heritage fragrance makers, a major hurdle is recreating or riffing on past scents for modern times.
“The fragrances were so complicated,” said Prigent.
In March, to help celebrate its 85 years of high fragrance know-how, Givaudan held an exhibition in its Parisian headquarters. Within that were seven revived iconic scents — including Shocking from Schiaparelli, Carven’s Ma Griffe, Balenciaga’s Le Dix and Fracas from Piguet — formulas for which are in the company’s archives.
“We had no constraints,” said Roseline Poignon Martel, senior perfumer at Givaudan. That’s since the fragrances were not for commercial use.
“We reconstituted as close as possible to the original formula,” she said.
Today, that sort of fealty isn’t possible for a brand wanting to relaunch a product from the past — legislation has changed, raw materials have evolved and extraction methods are different. “The qualities are not the same, and the world and standards have evolved,” explained Agathe Beauchesne, junior technical perfumer at Givaudan. So, too, have extraction methods, among other factors.
But the importance — and relevance — of the story hasn’t changed. “There is an opportunity to look at the past to better build the future,” said Guggenbuhl.