“I’ve lived the civil war in Lebanon with everything that it brings in terms of being scared, terrorised, traumatised, but also in terms of building resilience, that in the face of darkness, you can be sunshine,” explains Marc Chaya, co-founder and president of perfume house Maison Francis Kurkdjian. “In the face of atrocity, you can build things that are harmonious and beautiful.”
Years after the war and working at Ernst & Young in Paris, feeling restless, he had a chance encounter with a man named Francis Kurkdjian at a dinner party. He had no idea what it meant when Kurkdjian explained he was a perfumer. “Like most customers, no one knows what a perfumer is. He told me he created Jean Paul Gaultier Le Male. My mum gave me that perfume when I was 18.”
When he discovered Kurkdjian also created scents such as Armani Mania, which he owned, it was a revelation. But he couldn’t help but wonder why this man’s name wasn’t known to him, even though he wore the product of his work.
Perfumers, Kurkdjian explained, were hidden away, working to briefs with little knowledge of the wider picture. Importantly, they were unable to put their name on their work. Chaya was astounded. “What is this injustice?” he says. “How come anyone can take your belongings and say that they created it? How is this possible?”
He soon discovered the reason – the fragrance industry itself has taught customers that perfumers were little more than workers in a lab. The respect once afforded to the profession and its practitioners completely vanished. “Guerlain was a great perfumer and Jean-Louis Fargeon was Marie Antoinette’s perfumer for a reason. But perfume got killed by fashion because fashion houses, who could not sell their couture to the masses, were looking for ways to take that aura and give it to a maximum number of people by using fragrance as a fashion accessory,” explains Chaya.
“I knew that we could change dramatically the way we interact with scent, the way we talk about it. The creative in me was like, ‘Oh my God, if this guy is such a powerful creator, what would happen if he could express his vision freely?’” The answer came in 2008, when the pair launched Maison Francis Kurkdjian. The creator’s name is now front and centre “to re-establish the legitimacy of the perfumer,” Chaya explains.
Since then, the house has created much-lauded scents. The fragrances include the genre-shifting Baccarat Rouge 540. Created in 2015 initially to mark the 250th anniversary of the crystal house Baccarat, it is named after the process of heating gold to 540 degrees until it turns red. As the jewel in the company’s crown, Chaya believes its enduring popularity is down to its sublime beauty. “I took a taxi and the driver stopped and said ‘what are you wearing? It’s the most beautiful scent that I have ever smelt.’”
For Chaya, this is the only kind of validation that matters. He explains how it went on to become a bestselling scent without marketing, without celebrity endorsement, without anything but “the genius of creativity”. The skill of perfumers is widely misunderstood, he explains. “Perfume is here to help you express the uniqueness and diversity of your personality. It’s an impulse of life,” he says.
For example, take the rich vanilla amber, oud and absolute of Damascena rose that help create the drama of Oud Satin Mood or the Grandiflorum jasmine, bitter almond, ambergris and hint of fire that give Baccarat Rouge its undeniably sensual edge. “We’re not the same person every day, and fragrance is this invisible accessory that can work with you,” explains Chaya.
With every scent a true labour of love, Chaya is protective of Kurkdjian’s time, shielding him from an industry that needs constant newness to survive. Part of this destructive pattern is what he calls “launch fever”. “We were in Germany at a press launch talking about a new fragrance, 724, and one editor raised her hand and said, ‘What’s coming next?’ How toxic is that? No one wants to live today. Everyone is looking at tomorrow,” he laments.
Despite trying to work to a relentless schedule, Chaya finally pushed back, halting new releases. “We were exhausted. We decided with Francis to stop. Because he is not a machine.”
Freed from the endless cycle of promoting only new products, the team was able to focus on existing scents that had been lost in the melee. Warned that stopping new releases would kill the company, instead “we took 25 per cent growth introducing smells that were part of the portfolio to customers who did not know about them. Grand Soir has been there for nine years and it’s still growing 140 per cent,” reveals Chaya.
The next fight he has in his sights is the thorny matter of the lack of intellectual property rights across perfumery. “It’s horrific that today a perfumer is unable to protect their creation, and why you have the phenomenon of dupes. I’m talking about beyond theft,” Chaya tells me. “It is the fundamental right of a category of creators that is being taken away from them.”
Despite such challenges, Chaya’s admiration for his co-founder’s talent remains unwavering. “My job is to make sure that there’s the right ecosystem around Francis for him to be free.
“He is one of the greatest, I think, perfumers of his generation, and has changed the way we look at the fragrance world.”
