Fragrantica.com – 26th March, 2014

Exclusive Interview As He Prepares To Launch JACK Perfume

by: Suzy Nightingale

Richard E. Grant has ever been the maverick, an extraordinarily talented actor whose career has seen him rack up roles others would have killed for yet made them utterly his own, and soon to be starring in the latest series of the ITV historical drama series, Downton Abbey. News of this casting caused much swooning with delight on chaise longues around the world, but the nature of his character remains shrouded in secrecy, with Richard joking to the press that the ITV would “remove his kneecaps” if he dared utter a word before it aired. Amidst the frantic filming and general chaos that goes hand in glove with a busy actor’s life, launching a brand new business and completely self-funded fragrance would seem to be sheer madness, and yet that is exactly what Richard is doing. No mere vanity project or yet another case of a celebrity slapping their image on a box and calling it “their” perfume, it turns out that fragrance is one of his many lifelong obsessions, and he has worked tirelessly to create his signature in scent.

The second I heard about his perfume project, and especially that Richard was a fellow fragrance fanatic, I knew I had to find out more, and Richard very kindly offered to answer some of my questions. Lord alone knows how he managed to find time to even think about, let alone respond to them. I was so touched by his profuse apology for the slight delay in replying “… because I’m doing Downton Abbey at the moment alongside all the organization leading up to my JACK launch on April 2nd”—as though I’d imagined him idly filing his nails while flipping through a magazine and sipping tea.

JACK is described thusly on the eponymous website:

Top notes of lime, marijuana and mandarin.
Heart notes of clove, pepper and nutmeg.
Base notes of oud, vetiver, white musk, tobacco absolute and olibanum resin.

An intriguingly original blend, I am sure you will agree, and so with senses buzzing and yearning to learn more, I began by asking Richard how exactly he came to be addicted to scent and when this passion truly began …

Suzy Nightingale: The fact that you are launching your own perfume seems to have come as a surprise to many people, but as you say, you have been led by your nose all your life. When did you first consciously begin to take an interest in fragrance?

Richard E Grant: I have missiled my nose at everything in sight ever since I can remember—food, flowers, fabric, necks, car bonnets, leather furniture, warm brick walls, soil, you name it, I’ve put my nose to it. Especially food. I’m just amazed everyone doesn’t! When I was nine, growing up in Swaziland, I picked all the gardenia and rose petals in the garden, stuffed them into jam jars filled with boiling sugar water, sealed them up and buried them in the vegetable garden in the hope that by osmosis, they would transform into perfume. Unfortunately, it made for potent stink bombs instead, so my dream of creating a fragrance has been lifelong.

Suzy: Were your friends and family as surprised that you wanted to launch your own fragrance, or are they well used to your smell obsessions?

Richard: Anyone who knows me, is not at all surprised that I have finally created a fragrance as I have been led by my nose all my life. Haha!

Suzy: Being obsessed with fragrance is one thing, but going on to launch your own is quite another—how did the idea form and take shape from the initial idea to the reality of this actually happening for you?

Richard: The catalyst came from Anya Hindmarch who was a fellow house guest on Mustique two years ago when she saw me with my head in a gardenia bush and asked:

“Are you going to do something about that?”
“Do you mean psychiatrically?”
“No, make a perfume”

I told her it had been a secret lifelong dream to do so. Prompting her to send me a list of contacts from her iPhone which led me to meet Lyn Harris, Marigay McKee at Harrods, Roja Dove who mentored me then with a “do-re-mi” put me in contact with Catherine Mitchell at IFF who revealed that Liberty were looking to launch a bespoke unisex, quintessentially British fragrance and mine might fit the bill. A meeting with Gina Ritchie and Sarah Coonan resulted in an exclusive year deal to sell at Liberty, after which I then had to find a “Nose” to make my dream into a reality.

Suzy: What is the most comforting smell you can imagine? Do you instinctively reach for scents that are comforting to you or those that bring back happy memories?

Richard: My favorite smell is a gardenia as it is evocative of my childhood, adolescence, falling in love, heat, sex, the whole shebang! Apparently Frank Sinatra had over 2000 gardenia flowers at his funeral. It is also the one white flower that so far has never been successfully “harvested” and has defied extraction, so every gardenia perfume is a synthetic attempt to capture its mystery which makes it all the more exotic and romantic to me. Smell is the shortest synaptic leap in the brain to our memory, so everything for me has some association and is mor instant and powerfully evocative than any photograph could ever hope to be.

Scent empowers and “protects” you. Makes you feel confident when you’re not. It’s invisible magic to me. I would love to be able to “bottle” the smell of my daughter’s neck which has always reminded me of freshly baked almond biscuits.

Suzy: Did you have a strong idea of what the finished fragrance should smell like, or did you do a lot of experimentation until it gradually formed? How many stages were there in formulating the final perfume, and how long did this take?

Richard: Catherine Mitchell at IFF paired me with “Nose” Alienor Massenet whom I met at Cafe Colbert in Sloane Square. I un-pocketed my favorite ingredients onto the table which included gardenia petals, marijuana leaves, mandarin, lime, pepper, nutmeg and vetiver grass and asked if she could conjure these ingredients into a fragrance. It was an amazing feeling to be taken seriously and be able to talk about perfume so passionately. Alienor subsequently sent me various testers that I tried out on the incredibly knowledgable perfume selling team at Liberty, to make sure more than anything, that the direction we were heading in, wasn’t like another fragrance already on the shelves. Also I have had dinners and “nose-tested” my friends for their responses. This back and forth process went on for some months, until it was whittled down to two “almost but not quite” favorites, which late one night, I mixed together and had a “Eureka” moment. I emailed Alienor in the middle of the night and asked if she could work on combining them, which she did.

The “result” or final edit was a decision that I had to make alone, albeit hugely informed by the Liberty team and my friends, and that felt quite risky, but I knew from having written and directed an autobiographical film a decade ago, that the final decision has to be entirely personal. Which is precisely what JACK is. It’s my “signature” in scent, which is what is quoted in miniature writing on the back of the packaging.

Suzy: Gardenia is a bold choice of note for a unisex fragrance—niche perfume houses have been leading the way in the quest to get more men venturing into the world of florals, do you think men are becoming braver in their fragrance choices, or just that the industry is catching up with needs?

Richard: In nature, there is no delineation whether a flower or ingredient is male or female and having grown up in the late 60s and 70s when Unisex was de rigeur, I have been struck by how the generation of 20-somethings don’t have these divisions and when I’ve asked, have been told that the notion seems “Jurassic” to them. Also I discovered that women in their 30s have taken to wearing male-orientated scents to feel more empowered.

Before creating my own brand, I’ve been wearing Kai, which is a perfume oil made in Malibu and sold in very few UK outlets, which is the closest scent that approximates that elusive gardenia, and even though it has a long list of female celebrity clients in the USA, when I wore it, no one ever derided me for wearing this powerful floral scent. Quite the reverse, I was always asked what it was and where they could get it.

The current generation of people half my age are so brand-savvy compared to mine and along with the legalization of gay marriage, the old divisions between what’s masculine or feminine have blurred and my sense is that men and women have become much more relaxed and bold about what scent they will wear. The wonderful thing about fragrance is that the impact is so immediate, as it beguiles and seduces or repulses you, before you’ve even had time to think about it, which for me, makes it unequivocally honest.

Suzy: For such an intensely personal project, it must be incredibly difficult to reach out and ask for advice—who, if anyone, helped you along with the whole process?

Richard: I have always asked for advice throughout my life, how else do you learn anything? So asking people has been my way into starting up a business and creating a brand. I owe this list of people everything—Anya Hindmarch, Lyn Harris, Marigay McKee, Roja Dove, Catherine Mitchell, Alienor Massenet, Kenneth Green, Gina Ritchie, Sarah Coonan, Ed Burstell, Linda Key, Lorna McKay, John Robinson, Victoria Pilkington, Jamie Bachelor, Jane Fletcher, Sarah Wright, Lisa Turrell, Vicky Sawdon, Jemima Herbert, Perry Haydn-Taylor, Dylan Jones, Ben Mooneapillay, Hugh Devlin, Annalise Quest, Gianluca Longo, Matt Blease, Alasdair McDonald, Mark Haylock, Alan Pryce, Sandro Sodano, Rob Miller, Ruth Kennedy-Dundas, Sarah Miller, my friends and most of all my wife, who for the past thirty years has accommodated my sniffing my food in private and public as well as licking my plate clean.

Suzy: Did you have a lot of input into the product design and packaging or was your main concern the juice inside the bottle?

RIchard: I have been hands on throughout the entire process and can claim to being a One Man Brand. Matt Blease, graphic designer at Liberty came up with the ‘J’ logo in a circle and after months of unsuccessfully trying to get the Union Jack flag design for the packaging to “fly” without looking like tourist tat, I had a revelation whilst filming in Japan, standing in a wall-to-wall red lacquered elevator, and knew then and there that the packaging had to be pillar-box gloss red, with a black border and Matt’s circular label.

Have collected flags and bunting since I was a boy and got my Union Jack “fix” by “sleeving” the bottle, inside a faded vintage-style Union Jack calico bag with a riveted luggage label attached so that once opened, you can personalize your gift with a message. I met a multi-millionaire whilst filming in Las Vegas who advised me that my brand should be recognizable from two meters away, prompting me to photograph every duty free in every airport I went through and as there are very few red packaged perfumes, I opted for this quintessentially British branding. I’m really hoping that it looks simultaneously brand new and yet also as if it’s always been there.

Suzy: I am always fascinated to hear about personal timelines in fragrance—what you have chosen to wear throughout your life and how they have changed (if they have!)? Did you spray yourself head to toe as a teenager? Have your tastes matured in step with your personality and life changing moments?

Richard: The first fragrance I bought as a teenager was Christian Dior’s Eau Sauvage. When I emigrated to London in 1982 and worked as an out-of-work actor waitering at Tuttons in Covent Garden, I bought Penhaligon’s Blenheim with the first bonus I earned, at the shop was around the corner. Wore that for almost three decades until smelling Kai on a woman I was dancing with at a party in Tuscany that was so overwhelming I almost lost my marriage vows!

Since creating JACK, that is what I now exclusively wear. For me, it’s addictive, lickable and utterly hypnotic.

Suzy: Which perfumers and fragrance houses do you most admire, and why?

Richard: Oh, I admire Penhaligon’s, Lyn Harris, Jo Malone, Jo Loves, because they are quintessentially British and unique.

Suzy: What have you learned about the fragrance industry throughout this project? Do you feel you have been taken seriously, or did people initially assume this was going to be a “celebrity fragrance” that you were just lending your name and face to?

Richard: Understandably, people in the perfume industry had every right to be skeptical of a complete novice trying to do what I’ve done. Both Marigay Mckee and Catherine Mitchell declared that if I had turned up wanting to create or front a “celebrity” fragrance I would have been given very short shrift. They quickly understood that this has been a lifelong passion and as it’s entirely self financed, I was putting my money where my nose was. As Anya advised, at worst, my initial minimum order of 3000 bottles from Swallowfield in Somerset, where it is bottled, labeled, packaged and cellophane sealed, might end up in an unsold pile till my days are done.

The statistic of 1000 new perfumes launched every year is incredibly daunting and having accepted the high risk factor of “losing my shirt,” I’ve relentlessly worked on making my dream a reality over the past two years. Despite the cut-throat competitiveness of business, the support and generosity of people along the way has been overwhelming.

Suzy: Have you caught the perfume-making bug and are inspired to create more, or was this always going to be a one-shot deal to find and make your one signature fragrance?

Richard: In the way that cooks dream of combining ingredients all day long, I think about scent and combinations and have already made plans with Alienor Massenet for future collaborations if JACK proves to have commercial “legs.” So for me, this is only the start!

I am thrilled to say that Richard has given me a much sought-after invitation to the official launch of JACK at London’s Liberty store on the 2nd of April. There I shall be reporting for Fragrantica and finally getting to try the perfume for myself. To say I am excited is something of an understatement—the buzz among those who have tried it so far suggests it will be more than worth the wait.

JACK will retail for £95 for 100 ml and is available for pre-order online now and exclusively at Liberty from April 2nd.