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Osmotheque, described as the world's first perfume archive, has opened a dedicated center in Versailles, bringing together historic fragrances such as Napoleon's exile cologne and a revived version of Chanel No. 5 in a single, carefully controlled collection.
The archive was set up in 1990 by a group of perfumers that included Jean Kerleo, Guy Robert and Jean-Claude Ellena, and it is regarded as the first institution in the world to focus entirely on preserving perfumes and their original formulas.
This non-profit body is financed by the French Society of Perfumers, the French Fragrance Committee, and the Paris Ile-de-France Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and it has now opened a growing center in Versailles to house its expanding collection.
Alongside the physical archive, Osmotheque also builds up knowledge about scent, as it organizes around 100 seminars and conferences every year on raw perfume ingredients, perfume composition and the history of perfume so that professional perfumers and students can look back at earlier creations while they work on new ones.
Osmotheque acts as a reference archive by recreating older perfumes and preserving their original formulas so that they remain accessible for generations of perfumers.
A team within the institution reproduces many of these fragrances by following the original formulas as closely as possible and by using the ingredients specified in those formulas with particular care.
The collection includes a recreated version of Chanel No. 5, which is kept together with around 6,000 other perfumes in a refrigerator held at a constant temperature of 12 degrees Celsius (53.6 Fahrenheit) so that the liquids can be stored in stable conditions.
The archive is normally open to the public only by appointment, yet at the reopening ceremony, visitors were invited to smell original-style recreations of classic perfumes, including about 1,000 scents that had been considered lost before they were brought back into the collection.
Chanel perfumer Olivier Polge underlines the role of the institution and says that “Osmotheque is the only institution that can recreate some of these ingredients and bring lost perfumes back to life.”
Among the archived bottles stands a reconstructed version of Eau de Cologne de Napoleon a Sainte-Hélène, the cologne used by Napoleon during the final days of his exile in the South Atlantic.
The scent is built from lemon, bergamot, and neroli, and it has been recreated from the original recipe recorded by Napoleon's valet Louis-Etienne Saint-Denis.
By gathering such historically significant formulas and by keeping them in conditions designed to protect them over time, Osmotheque serves as a growing reference archive and opens up the possibility for perfumers to study, compare and smell perfumes that once seemed destined to disappear.
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