Word: guerlain
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Synthetic Glamor. But not all perfumers made easy millions by debasing their wares. Most of the old-line houses were reduced to using synthetic scents, which do not "stay" as well. But such houses as Guerlain, which colleagues in the trade call the "perfume emperor," fiercely resent even a hint that they had adulterated their wares...
...woman stalked into Guerlain's shop on the Avenue des Champs-Elyseés. She had a complaint to make to the proprietor in person: "Monsieur, your perfume doesn't smell as good as it used to." One of the dignified old gentlemen who now run the company snapped: "My perfume never changes. If anything doesn't smell as good as it used to, it must be you, Madame...
When war cut off materials needed for certain scents, the Guerlains, Pierre and Jacques, jealous of the house's 119-year-old reputation, stopped making them, rather than put out an inferior product. When bombers wiped out the Guerlain laboratory in the suburbs, they started mixing perfumes in the basement of their Champs-Elyseés shop. No one but Pierre and Jacques and their four sons knows how the scents are blended. The Guerlains do the work themselves, use girls only to bottle perfume. For months the perfumes were rationed and G.I.s used to line...
...materials are coming in again and the big copper tanks and brown bottles are filled with tens of millions of francs worth of extracts, which white-robed girls dribble carefully into flacons. The real secret is to use more natural than synthetic musk. As Jeanpierre Guerlain explains: "Go into a Montmartre bar around midnight-the air reeks with synthetic musk. It smells of tarts. It takes real musk to make a woman smell like a lady...
...idea was not new. Yardley of London, Inc. (now made in New Jersey), Roger & Gallet, and Guerlain, Inc. had, in a limited way, gone into the lotion-and-lavender field for men 30 years ago, had then been followed, timidly and on a small scale, by other talc and cosmetic makers. Altogether in 1939 they grossed only about $12,000,000 a year, small change compared to the half-billion-a-year business in women's cosmetics...