Fragrance literacy is one of those things you only know you are missing once someone shows you how it works. I have spent years inside this industry and I still learned something new in my conversation with Ellen Malone. Ellen is a working makeup artist with a long second career as an opera singer, and a previous life selling perfume through a Sydney consultancy run by a woman who was, in her time, the perfumer to the stars. Ellen was trained properly. She knows what the brands know about how we choose perfume, and she will tell you with passion that fragrance is so much more than a finishing touch.
The part of the conversation I keep coming back to is what she taught me about reading a fragrance before you open the bottle. The colour of the box. The shape of the glass. The mood of the campaign. Every one of those things has already told you, in a coded language most consumers do not realise they are reading, exactly what is inside. I watched a reel she posted to Instagram on this topic and was hooked. Ellen and I often see eachother at industry events and she is a radiant beam of energy. Her aura is golden and her cult following and Tik Tok creator award cemented her reputation as a force of nature. I invited her to be a guest on the podcast for the special season dedicated to scent .
Why the question is never “what do you like”
The mentor who trained Ellen had an unerring ability to match a woman to her signature scent. Not what the customer thought she wanted, instead what the customer would fall in love with and keep coming back for. Ellen learned the method, used it for years, and now uses it on herself.
The opening question is never what do you like. It’s tell me about three fragrances you have loved in the past. What you are listening for is pattern: fragrance family matters, but Ellen told me, it’s not the whole picture. A woman who bought a gourmand last time will not necessarily want a gourmand in this chapter of her life. Mood and identity are fluid. What stays constant, more reliably than the family, is the visual postcode the woman keeps returning to.
“Fragrance companies spend huge amounts of money on the psychology, researching what imagery will draw the ideal customer to that perfume so that she picks it up and it is already in the right postcode for what she is looking for. It is not just a pretty bottle. – Ellen Malone
The colours and what they actually mean
Ellen walked me through her colour vocabulary and I’ve summarised it here because it is the most useful piece of practical fragrance literacy I have come across in a long time.
Gold and navy: The richness code.
Shalimar by Guerlain set the template in the 1920s. Dior Addict and Armani Code now live in the same family. These are dressed-up fragrances, beautifully feminine, glamorous, made for cold weather and grown-up occasions. Ellen calls them the grown-up girl fragrance.
Light blue: The aquatic code.
Aqua di Gioia, Dolce and Gabbana Light Blue, the whole genre of summer-water-fresh fragrances. Light font, water imagery in the campaign, sky tones on the box. You see one of these on the shelf and you already know it will be light and skin-close.
Red: The love-potion code.
Sensuality, magnetism, seduction. Dark red goes warm and wintery, vanilla underneath. Light red goes Italian, fruity, summery, sparkle. Ellen says red on a bottle is the most direct seduction signal a fragrance house can send.
Purple: The mysterious-chic code.
Mugler Alien, the spookier end of Moschino, the original Hypnose by Lancôme. These fragrances ask for a black leather skirt and slicked-back hair. Not for daytime. For an evening when you want to be a slightly unknowable version of yourself.
Yellow and orange and raspberry pinks: The party-girl code.
Sunflowers by Elizabeth Arden is the classic. Sweet, fruity, summery, exuberant. Pick up a bottle that looks like a piece of summer fruit and you will get something that smells like it nine times out of ten.
Black, silver and clear: The divorce-perfume code.
Yes, this one made me laugh out loud, because she is so on point! Ellen managed a business that saw a high proportion of recently divorced women, and almost without exception they reached for a black or silver or chrome bottle. Comme des Garçons Play in black was, in her words, a very strong divorce perfume. Crisp, modern, slightly androgynous, masculine-adjacent. A signal to herself and to the world that the woman opening the bottle is a different woman now.
“I’m taking my power back. I’m not that version anymore. No more Mrs Nice Guy. I’m a new version of myself. And that was almost always a black bottle or a silver or a clear bottle.” –Ellen Malone
The Guerlinade, and why house DNA is your shortcut through the noise
If colour is the postcode, house DNA is the street address. Ellen explains the famed Guerlinade with the kind of casual precision that comes only from someone who has handled the bottles for years. Guerlain has a defined set of ingredients, agreed internally and held in highest confidentiality, that constitute the structural DNA of the house. A fragrance must contain at least five of those ingredients to be allowed to carry the Guerlain name.
“The Guerlinade is the DNA of Guerlain fragrance. It is this unmissable structure that is invisible but unmissable.”
Ellen Malone
This is the reason you can wear Shalimar in your thirties, fall in love with Mitsouko in your forties, and be quietly tempted by Aqua Allegoria Pamplelune in your fifties. The bottles look different, the compositions are different and it’s the shared spine that the house insists on that makes them feel like cousins. Once you know the Guerlinade is there, you can walk through Guerlain blind and be reasonably confident you will respond to most of what you smell.
Ellen applies the same logic to noses rather than houses.
Find a perfumer whose work you respond to and you have a shortcut through every department store you ever walk into. She has accidentally bought six different Francis Kurkdjian fragrances over the years before realising they were all by him. The signature comes through. I have done the same with Olivier Polge and with Mathilde Laurent. If a woman loves three things by the same nose without knowing they are by the same nose, that nose is hers.
I’ve written before on about the great fragrance houses that treat perfumery as high art, including the Guerlain L’Art et la Matière collection that exemplifies what Ellen is describing here.
Insider shortcuts, and the limits of layering
Working insiders develop their own quiet tricks. Ellen has a fragrance from Eccentric Molecules called Molecule 01, featuring iso-e super, that she layers under whatever else she is wearing on a given day. She thinks of it as her secret weapon, picked up early in her career and worn quietly ever since.
On layering more generally, Ellen is sceptical of how it is usually practised. Two finished perfumes, designed by experienced perfumers as standalone compositions, sprayed on top of each other. I offered the operatic version of the same point. Imagine playing Mozart and Puccini through the same speakers at the same volume at the same time. Two extraordinary pieces of music. One incoherent listening experience. Ellen called it two different messages at the same time, which is the more elegant version of the same idea. We are not all skilled enough as fragrance DJs to do justice to either composition. I tend to agree and have ruined many a perfect fragrance with crude layering.
Learning Rituals at her Mother’s Dressing Table
Ellen’s earliest scent memory is her mother getting ready to sing and the alter of beauty she witnessed and was in awe of as a child. There was Houbigant powder, an Eau Hadrienne, and the original Chanel No.5 Eau de Toilette laid out on the dressing table. Those three smells, in combination, are wired permanently into what Ellen describes as her scent lizard brain. They are what a glamorous, beautiful woman smells like, and they have shaped almost every fragrance she has loved since. The aldehydes, the powder, the vintage code for femininity. They are still her postcode and as we discovered, so are mine.
Perhaps the fragrance you watched your mother apply is the language you are still writing your own scent identity in? The mood you reach for now is, in part, the mood she wore when you were watching her get ready. The Coco Chanel line about applying fragrance where you wish to be kissed is true, but the deeper truth is wiser. We often apply fragrance where we were first taught love smelled like.
This conversation felt like a homecoming with so many new insights and aha moments. We spoke the same language and loved the same foreign land.
Listen to the full conversation with Ellen Malone on the Ageless Radiance Club podcast.
