Hermès perfumer Christine Nagel’s first time designing a scent with oud, one of the most luxurious fragrance ingredients on the planet, wasn’t for an official Hermès fragrance. She was tinkering with a one-of-a-kind creation just for herself, a perfume that combined the earthy, sensual scent of oud with rose water and rose oxide. Before long, Nagel found that her fragrance experiment made people around her stop in their tracks.
"One day, I wore it in a meeting—an important meeting of Hermès with the CEO of Hermès perfumes," she tells Marie Claire. "She came close to me saying, 'What can I smell on you?' And I said, 'Oh, it's a thing I did for me, for myself.' She said, 'Oh, it's incredible.'"
