Spoturno

Le Retour

photo: LT

The Coty story is so big and so full of action it deserves an epic movie. François Coty (a pseudonym—his surname was Spoturno, his mother’s family name Coti) was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, in 1874. In 1903 he was working as salesman for Antoine Chiris & Co., the firm that developed steam entrainment and established perfumery in Grasse. He started his own firm and launched La Rose Jacqueminot in 1903. Over the next thirty years he built Coty into the first beauty multinational, with factories all over the world producing makeup and perfume. His fragrances defined modern perfumery. L’Origan (1905), Chypre (1917), Emeraude (1921) and others created entire genres. Jacques Guerlain was inspired by many of them to create his own masterpieces, typically richer and softer than Coty’s originals.

Whether or not Coty was composing the fragrances himself is hotly debated among the afición. He never claimed to be a perfumer, and if indeed he “merely” art directed them, he is still the greatest perfume creator of the twentieth century. But who then composed them? Very likely perfumers at Chiris, who in those days were creating bases to make it easy to incorporate new synthetic raw materials into compositions. Coty became a press baron in later life, turned to extreme right-wing politics, and died at 60 in 1934, his vast fortune diminished by the crash of 1929. Among many other things, he had used his money to fund the work of my scientist hero Edouard Branly.

His company shrank, changed hands several times, and is now owned by the German company Benckiser, while those classic fragrances dwindled in number and quality, the most enduring one being Emeraude. The idea of reviving them has been in the air for decades. I encountered it twice.

The first time was the early ‘90s, when a nephew of his called Stéphane Coty started a brand under his own full name. French law says you cannot be deprived of the right to sell wares under your own surname, even if it overlaps with a known brand, so long as there’s no deliberate confusion. Stéphane Coty cut it close. His fragrances had bottles and typefaces identical to Coty’s. I met the man, a charming, handsome, chain-smoking rogue. He did his own production in a warehouse just outside Paris. His Ruban Noir is in my original 1994 guide. The fragrances were mediocre, what the French call fonds de cuve, supplied by a small Grasse firm specializing in knock-offs. I suspect he was hyposmic because of the heavy smoking. Nevertheless, because of the pull of the Coty name and his own bohemian charm, he got a lot of press. I remember him hand-delivering an order in his open-top sportscar to a person who had complained that the Bon Marché department store was out of stock. I do not know what happened to his firm, but I suspect the 16-inch gun turrets of Coty’s litigators must have swiveled in his direction and put an end to his dream.

The next time I encountered Coty’s classics was around 2007, when I somehow was sent small samples of essentially the entire collection, recreated by perfumer Daphné Bugey of Firmenich for a swank Coty party celebrating an anniversary. They were allegedly all IFRA compliant and smelled sensational, thereby confirming Dominique Ropion’s assertion that nothing stops reconstructions of the greats other than greed, since the formulas are not cheap. At the time I hoped that Coty would reissue the entire collection, but it seems they were distracted by celebrity fragrances (remember those?) and nothing of the sort happened.

That was then, this is now. Véronique Spoturno Coty, niece of the aforementioned Stéphane, has started a company and named it Spoturno. She has entrusted Chris Sheldrake, one of the greats, with the composition of her fragrances. Tania and I are planning a conversation with Chris Sheldrake in the near future. In the meantime, here are Spoturno’s four fragrances to date.

For paid subscribers: reviews of 1921, L’Âme du Phénix, Alphée and Barbicaja.