Jean-Claude Ellena is a French perfumer and writer whose wife’s name is a mystery to the public.
Wife
Jean-Claude Ellena’s wife’s name is a mystery. However, he has a daughter with his wife.
Life & career
Jean-Claude Ellena was born in 1947. He is 76 years old. At an early age, Ellena picked Jasmine with his grandmother in Grasse to sell to perfumers. Beginning with menial jobs, he became an apprentice at the factory of the essential oils maker Antoine Chiris in Grasse at the age of 16 working on the night shift. He has reminisced, “Among other essential oils, we made a lot of oakmoss, and after I’d put the distiller on, I’d lie down on a bed of it and sleep”.
In 1968, he became the first student at what was at the time the newly formed perfumery school of Givaudan, one of the oldest perfume factories, in Geneva, Switzerland. He left Givaudan in 1976 with two other perfumers for Lautier in Grasse. In 1983, he joined Givaudan Paris as chief perfumer and Roure-Givandan and then he worked at Haarmaan & Reimer in Paris (which merged in 2003 with Dragoco to form Symrise).
Jean-Claude Ellena became one of the founding members of the Osmothèque in 1990, an international scent archive based in Versailles. Ellena has been profoundly influenced by pioneering perfumer Edmond Roudnitska, particularly by his article, “Advice to a Young Perfumer”, in a magazine given to him by his father.
Ellena was Hermès’s exclusive in-house perfumer between 2004 and 2016, appointed by Jean-Louis Dumas and Véronique Gautier. He has created fragrances for several major perfume houses including The Different Company, which he founded before joining Hermès. His daughter Céline Ellena now creates for The Different Company.
In 2005, Ellena created Un Jardin sur le Nil for Hermès. The story behind the creation of this fragrance was the subject of the book The Perfect Scent: A Year in the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York by Chandler Burr. In addition, the story in a limited form and accounts of other scents as well as his autobiography has been published in Perfume: The Alchemy of Scent. He is also a writer of “The Diary of a Nose: A Year in the Life of a Parfumeur.”
Children
Jean-Claude Ellena’s children: Celine Ellena.
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