Remember when you were a teenager and your boyfriend wore Abercrombie & Fitch cologne? Or, to take it back a bit further, maybe he wore Curve or CK One. Whatever his scent-of-the-day, you loved it and if you caught a whiff of it now, it would instantly take you back to the good old days. But, these days we’re more selective with what we want our men to smell like. Not too spicy, but still woody with notes of musk, right?
Just ask Hermès’s in-house perfumers, Jean-Claude Ellena and Christine Nagel who were in New York to celebrate the new Hermès Parfumerie opening at Brookfield Place. They revealed to The Cut that fragrance is inherently selfish and if you don’t like someone’s fragrance it will never work out between the two of you.
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“If you have a perfume you don’t like you’re not going to wear it,” says Nagel. “The relation to the perfume is somebody that’s very human. When you don’t love a man anymore you don’t love his smell anymore. Every time I wasn’t in love with someone anymore I realized that I didn’t like the smell anymore. It’s very important.” Later the reporter asked, ‘what if you meet someone and you don’t like their smell?’
“ You will never be with that person, it’s impossible,” says Nagel.
“No way,” says Ellena. “You have to like their smell.”
Be honest with yourself: How important is a man’s fragrance to you? And, do you agree with Nagel and Ellena—can a relationship work if you hate his favorite fragrance?