Her Nose Sees and Feels Scents

Christine Nagel, the head perfumer at Hermès, works from an office on the ninth floor of the luxury brand’s headquarters near the Élysée Palace in Paris. Occupying part of the space is a laboratory with a scale, along with refrigerators where ingredients are stored.

Ms. Nagel has a background in organic chemistry and has confected dozens of perfumes for multiple brands. Her favorites fall into a category known as chypre, fragrances that traditionally have citrus top notes, floral centers and base notes of patchouli and oak moss.

She has created some 20 chypre perfumes; her most recent, for Hermès, was in development for about a decade. Most other fragrances that Ms. Nagel has made, by contrast, have taken a couple of years to complete.

“For this one, I really took my time,” Ms. Nagel said, while sitting in her office on an afternoon in July. She spoke in French through an interpreter.

Ms. Nagel, who is in her 60s and lives in Paris, began developing the perfume not long after she started working at Hermès in 2014. It is the first chypre perfume to be released by the brand since it started selling fragrances in 1951.

“When I arrived, I told myself, ‘One day, you’ll make them a chypre,” Ms. Nagel said.

Bergamot oranges from the Calabria region of southwest Italy — plucked when the fruits were still green — were a source of the perfume’s citrus notes, and its floral elements included components derived from lilies native to forests in Madagascar.