Hermès’ New Perfume Took 10 Years to Make

For a decade, perfumer Christine Nagel had a secret: a fragrance she just couldn’t get out of her mind. As the in-house perfumer for Hermès, Nagel often has scents on the brain, but there’s never been one that has lingered as long, nor occupied as much mental brain space as her newest creation, Barénia. “I had an addiction to it. I always wanted to come back and re-smell it,” she says.

The perfume, named after a rare, supple calf leather (“Artisans often say, ‘Barénia, it gives you back the caress,’” Nagel says), wasn’t an officially assigned project. “It was not something that somebody had asked me [to do]; it was just a personal desire,” she tells me, speaking over Zoom in her trademark round bottle-cap glasses, and with softly curled hair that’s just about the exact shade as Hermès’ Togo leather. One of the brand’s best-known traditionally masculine scents is the legendary Terre d’Hermès, which regularly tops lists as one of the best perfumes of all time. Nagel wanted to make a feminine counterpoint with that same aura.