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Dianne Bernhard. Credit Andrew
Sullivan for The New York Times
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As part of a trip to France in 1984
to study floral painting, Dianne Bernhard spent time in Monet’s gardens at
Giverny. It was there, among the flowers that inspired him, that she heard
Cartier was creating a new perfume in Paris made with jasmine, roses and
vanilla.
“I said, ‘I’m going to go straight
to Cartier as soon as I get out of class,’ ” said Mrs. Bernhard, a painter
and former president of the National Arts Club in New York. “I loved the
smell.”
The fragrance she found there was a
musk, but she didn’t like how it smelled on her skin. But instead of giving up,
she had a chemist begin mixing, and he ended up creating the scent that Mrs.
Bernhard — and only Mrs. Bernhard — has worn for the last three decades.
“It was just something that became
me,” she said. “If the scent of this woman changed, my grandchildren, my family
and many of my close friends would be sad.”
When most people think of bespoke
goods, they think shirts, suits, wedding gowns, maybe an haute couture dress.
But bespoke perfume takes the world of personalization to an entirely new
level.
For starters, it costs a lot to find
the right mix of flowers and oils to create a smell particular to you.
Thomas Fontaine, a perfumer at Jean
Patou who helped revive Joy, a perfume that has been around for eight decades,
and create Joy Forever, said it could cost someone $30,000 to $50,000 to create
a personal scent.
“The most expensive thing is the
development,” he said. “To create a fragrance for only one person or one
million people, the cost is the same.”
In contrast, Joy is a comparative
bargain at $800 an ounce.
But taste is tough to price. Mrs.
Bernhard said her perfume had certainly not been cheap over the years. She said
it cost several thousand dollars for the scent to be created, back in 1984, and
over the years, it has cost the equivalent of several hundred dollars a bottle.
Typically, it takes six months to a
year to create a scent and at least half a dozen meetings.
“I’m happy that in the decade of excess, the
perfume I chose was not that expensive,” Mrs. Bernhard said of her bespoke
Cartier scent, “but it was the most fabulous thing for me.”
by Paul Sullivan
