Céline Ellena

“Don’t try to please your own ego, try to please the formula”

Céline, tell us a little bit about yourself, about the fragrances you’ve created. Especially about your unusual collaboration with The Different Company.

Before I began designing fragrances for Charabot and The Different Company, I didn’t have a lot of what is generally known as “fine fragrances” in my portfolio. I had signed a number of scents for cosmetics, as well as some ‘eaux fraîches’, like Aqua Relax for Biotherm, Spa Tonific and Eau Prodigieuse for Nuxe. I also worked on By Terry’s face care range… and even on a nourishing shampoo for Lancôme. Some companies have their perfumers specialize in specific domains.
My collaboration with The Different Company is the fruit of a lot of communication. There are real meetings of minds, ideas are batted about, and some of them are concretized. There’s a lot of freedom, with all the pleasure and responsibility that that implies.

What are your influences as a designer?

I would say there’s a bit of a joyful mess that I dip into depending on my mood! I don’t have one particular reference, nor school of thought. On the other hand, I profess boundless love for human beings. I’m quite curious, and probably a bit of a voyeur, too. I love hanging out in cafés in my neighborhood, listening to other people’s conversations. I like observing other people: how they walk, how they wave their arms, how they move in an un-self-conscious way sometimes. So I make up all sorts of stories about them, stories that I can’t express in words, so I make them in smells. I’m very aware of the texture of people’s skin, of the shades of color in the earth and the sky, the smell of the wind… In a nut-shell, I love life!

How can we recognize one of your fragrances? What are, in your opinion, their characteristic features?

I’m still too new at this to imagine having a ‘signature’, or a standard ‘formulation technique’. Everyday I discover the extent of my ignorance a little more: there are still plenty of technical aspects that escape me completely, or that slip from my grasp just when I thought I’d finally got them!
Yesterday, I was trying to come up with a fragrance based on all the different facets of a single ingredient. Today, I’m looking for a kind of harmony and balance. Tomorrow I’d like to understand light and shade, the weakness that makes a fragrance fragile.
And every day I try to remember a comment my father made one day, as he was glancing at my notes, “Don’t try to please your own ego, try to please the formula.”

What other designer’s fragrance(s) do you wish you had created? And why?

None at all. I’m happy that other people created them. I adore being surprised and amazed. I like to concentrate on the future. The past is a source of inspiration, to help us go further, not a source of nostalgia

How do you envisage the future of fragrances and fragrance brands?

I see two types of perfumery. First of all, the jeans-and-a-T-shirt kind. Easy to wear, no worries or headaches. Reassuring and familiar.
And then there’ll be the more occasional – sophisticated or not, that’s not the point – but very, very personal kind. A fragrance that was chosen very consciously, like an acquired taste that takes time to warm to and to adopt.
Consumers want to have more and more different fragrances, the way you have a wardrobe. We need to trust consumers more. Brands should be both humbler and bolder.

Do you have a wish for the future?

The three C’s… like Cartier’s “Trois Or” (Three Golds”) ring, interwoven and inseparable: Confidence, Communication, Creativity.