Every great perfume house has a style, but few can name its parts. Guerlain can. Since 1828 its fragrances have been built around the Guerlinade, an accord of six raw materials: bergamot, rose, jasmine, iris, vanilla and tonka bean. It is the thread running from Jicky through Shalimar to La Petite Robe Noire, and the reason a Guerlain tends to smell like a Guerlain.
This year the Maison has taken those six materials out of the bottle. L’Art & La Matière: The Art of Living translates each into candles, soaps and a car diffuser, composed by Delphine Jelk, Guerlain’s Perfume Creation Director. The candles are the centrepiece, poured in beeswax and housed in refillable two-tone jars pairing brushed gold with a colour drawn from the material itself. There is pink for rose petals, yellow for sun-warmed bergamot zest, and a leopard print for the veining of a tonka bean.
The car diffuser is the quiet surprise. When clipped to an air vent, it borrows the collection’s octagonal geometry and a lattice body that lets light through to the coloured fragrance beads inside. Diffusion strength is adjustable, and the six scents interchange, making it an unusually considered object for a category not known for them.
Alongside sits Les Extraits Signature, the same six materials at their most concentrated, at 30 percent, each assigned what Guerlain calls a golden number. The names carry the story. Rose Centifolia Extrait 1, for the single day permitted between picking the May roses at daybreak in Grasse and transforming them. Iris Pallida Extrait 6, for the six years the rhizome needs to grow and dry. Vanille Planifolia Extrait 21, for the days the pods are cold-soaked by hand. Tonka Sarrapia Extrait 75, for the bean’s coumarin content.
Both collections take the octagonal silhouette of the Square Bottle Guerlain has used since 1870, made by Pochet du Courval, glassmakers to the Maison since 1853. There is a certain logic to meeting the collection at Range Rover House Muskoka this August: a house that has spent two centuries perfecting how a room smells has lately turned its attention to how a car does.
