Straw, stables and a bit of s**t: The fragrant story behind one of Hermès most exclusive perfumes

I’m on a Zoom call with Christine Nagel and she is trying to show me a photograph, through the screen, of her crouching low over a pile of horse dung clutching at what looks like a length of rubber tubing attached to a goldfish bowl. ‘This is me in the stable,’ she explains, ‘to capture and analyse the scent of manure. When I say we really used it as an ingredient, I’m telling the truth.’

Christine joined Hermès in 2014, before which there would have been very little chance of the Swiss-born nose ever getting up close and personal with a horse — let alone using its poo in a perfume. ‘I didn’t grow up with horses and used to be very scared of them. Even now, I sometimes still feel a little bit of trepidation,’ she says. ‘After more than 10 years, however, I’ve had to overcome that fear because we talk about horses all the time at Hermès.’ Indeed, the animal is an inextricable part of Hermès’ legacy; the house was founded in 1837 as a maker of equestrian harnesses and saddles, and it still produces luxurious leather tack at its Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré atelier.

Part of Christine’s role includes creating a limited-edition scent for the annual Saut Hermès — a prestigious showjumping event that takes place under the glass roof of Paris’s magnificent Grand Palais. It was here, shortly after joining the company, that Christine found a way to conquer her equinophobia. ‘I asked if I could visit the horses and as I walked down the line of stables, not one of them took any notice of me. Some even moved to the back of their boxes to avoid me,’ she recalls. ‘But there was one, a chestnut mare called Scheherazade, who stuck her head out and put her cheek against mine. When I went into her stall and smelled her neck, I felt such emotion. I thought, “one day, I’m going to have to do something with this”.’ Several years down the line, she found a scent strip that smelled of a Bangladesh-grown variety of oud and transported her back to Scheherazade’s stable — and immediately got to work on what would become the Hermessence Oud Alezan eau de parfum.

In 2022, with Oud Alezan in the works — although it didn’t go on sale until 2024 — Christine was back at Saut Hermès: ‘Once again, every horse ignored me except one. It was a horse called Hermès Ryan, a champion. What was fascinating was that this time, it wasn’t just the scent of the horse that struck me, it was his entire setting. The straw, the wood, the hay, the smell of the leathers and the beeswax used on them. It was incredible.’

‘There was something else,’ she continues. ‘The manure. Horse droppings don’t actually smell bad. It’s just cellulose. I thought, riders love the trail of scent, the sillage, that they bring home at the end of the day. It’s a blend of all those distinct stable smells and it’s intoxicating. That piqued my curiosity.’

Disclaimer: I am a keen equestrian and a fragrance fanatic, but not every scent I bring home from the yard or the arena is worth savouring. The pungent odour of mud, sweat and musty gloves after a rainy day’s ride never does much to endear me to my fellow bus passengers. However, there’s also plenty to savour. The soft smell of my horse’s mane; the sweet, almost floral, tang of freshly conditioned saddle and stirrup leather; the sunny freshness of hay bales. These smells have a visceral effect on me — a direct line to my brain and to my heart. It’s no coincidence that so many of my favourite perfumes have a musky or leathery undertone: Prada’s Iris has a base of blonde woods and powdery, skin-like orris root; Matière Première’s Parisian Musc blends soft woods with amber and plant-based musk.

In similar style to a forensic scientist, Christine borrowed a headspace capture machine in order to collect and profile the aromatic molecules emanating from an object, and the goldfish bowl in her photograph. The device allows technicians to take molecules from, say, a flower, and reconstruct its scent in a laboratory. In the manure, she found ‘complex chemicals such as para cresol, which has an intense, animalistic depth’ and work well with the recreations of pine tar used on a horse’s hooves, floury breakfast oats, woody bed shavings and herbal-smelling carrot seeds that it was ultimately mixed with.

‘The first time I wore it outside my office,’ reveals Christine, ‘I went to a conference and a colleague behind me remarked that I smelled nice. He was glued to my side all day.’ Pierre-Alexis Duman, a member of Hermès’s founding family and the artistic director also gave it the green light.

Paddock was initially given the codename Crottin Délicieux, or ‘Delicious Manure’ and debuted shortly after Oud Alezan, bottled in a lantern-shaped flacon and topped with a saddle-stitch leather cap — though it is only available at a handful of elite equestrian events, including Saut Hermès. For me, it’s a championship winner. It opens with a cloud of honeyed hay and beeswax, bolstered by herbal and amber notes, then dissolves into nutty, earthy leather. With it, Christine has crafted an aromatic elegy to everything I love about spending time in a stable — one that is refined, and never rough or cloying. It is hugely wearable, eliciting positive reactions from both my horsey and non-horsey friends whenever I spritz it.

Christine now recognises that just like a fragrance, horses can unleash precious memories. ‘There is something so special — almost magical — about them. Humans and horses have always been so connected,’ she notes. ‘My fear is certainly diminishing now, but Sheherazade and Hermès Ryan have both retired, so I’m impatient to see which horse will be the next to seduce me.’