Meeting Christine Nagel: at Hermès, true luxury is time

What if true luxury was having time? The time to search, to make mistakes, to start over. At 24 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, I met a woman who has that rare privilege: Christine Nagel, perfumer at Hermès for more than ten years. A meeting where each perfume hides a true story, and often an anecdote you would never guess from smelling the bottle.

A profession rarer than that of an astronaut

People often say there are fewer perfumers in the world than astronauts. The role of an in-house perfumer is even rarer. Christine Nagel herself pointed this out: in France only a handful of major houses employ their own noses, among them Dior, Louis Vuitton, Guerlain, Cartier, Chanel and Hermès.

Her path was not predetermined. Born in Geneva in 1959, to an Italian mother and a Swiss father, she wanted to become a midwife. Her first olfactory memories? The Italian talc her mother bought for her little brother, and the smell of trousers freshly ironed by her grandmother, a seamstress. Chemistry ultimately won out at the University of Geneva, where she specialized in chromatography, the technique that allows the molecules of a scent to be identified one by one. She then joined Firmenich.

Before Hermès, she had already signed successes everyone knows: Narciso Rodriguez for Her in 2003, with Francis Kurkdjian, awarded at the FiFi Awards, Miss Dior Chérie in 2005, Sì d'Armani, and no fewer than 47 fragrances for Jo Malone, including the famous Wood Sage & Sea Salt.

In 2014 she became the first female in-house perfumer at Hermès, alongside Jean-Claude Ellena, then took sole leadership of olfactory creation on January 1, 2016. At her first meeting, Axel Dumas, the house manager, stood up and announced that he wanted to leave her free. He then told her a sentence she never forgot: he preferred to see her make mistakes by trying something, rather than make mistakes by following others. No deadline, no market study. Everything that followed stems from that freedom.

The secret garden at 24 Faubourg

The meeting took place in a place outside of time. 24 Faubourg Saint-Honoré is Hermès's historic address since 1880, when Charles-Émile Hermès, son of the founder, set up the family harness workshop founded in 1837. At the very top of the building, above the rooftops of Paris, is a garden reserved for the family and the creative teams.

There you find an apple tree, a pear tree, a magnolia, roses, sage, rosemary, hawthorn, lilies and wild herbs. A gardener, Yasmine, has taken care of it for more than twenty years. In spring, the bees of Paris come to forage there.

It is this garden that inspired Un Jardin sur le Toit, signed by Jean-Claude Ellena in 2011. The crisp apple, the juicy pear, the fresh grass. That day I didn't need the bottle: I was inside the perfume, for real, all around me.

For Christine Nagel, Hermès is a small elegant insolence. She has an image to describe it: a slightly rock'n'roll grandmother. A legacy, an absolute luxury, and always a sidestep. She admits that before joining she had imagined a very classical and serious house, only to discover it was audacious. Her first perfume for Hermès, Galop, in 2016, was born from her discovery of the house's leather reserves, and of a particular leather, the Doblis, a velvety calfskin of great softness.

Paddock, the smell of the stables in a bottle

The horse is Hermès's DNA. Since 2010, the house has organized each year the Saut Hermès, an international show jumping competition at the Grand Palais. It is in its stables that Christine Nagel went to capture the scent of horses by headspace, a technique that records the molecules present in the air around an object or a living being.

She captured everything: the straw, the hay, barley, oats, the leather of the harnesses, and even the products applied to the hooves, such as cade oil and pine tar. Not forgetting the manure, whose smell she finds delightful. The result is called Paddock, named after the space where horses and riders prepare: a honeyed hay and an ambery carrot seed.

The first edition, in 2024, was produced in only about 500 bottles, sold over six weeks in three Parisian boutiques. Since then Paddock returns at each Saut Hermès, the formula remaining identical but the bottle changing illustrators: Tong Ren in 2025, Gianpaolo Pagni in 2026.