Céline Barel

Céline loves everything about perfumes. Their scent, of course, but also their texture, the bottles, the colours, the evocations of femininity, masculinity, the ambiance, their strong impressions and echoes, and their power to manipulate our emotions. Céline loves perfume in her own way, striving to make its invisibility visible. She is passionate about each individual element that can translate it. For Céline, perfumes must be strong, not smell strong, but be strong and confident in their mission to bring out the best in us: "Perfume is a new horizon, an invitation It must awaken a hypersensuality, over-stimulate the senses. Perfumes are there to be listened to, touched, seen, heard and smelled. A perfume must provoke synaesthesia It's almost like casting a spell I love it when perfume transports us, tells us not one story, but several.
Céline has always been in tune with the power of perfume Her hometown is Grasse, and growing up, her life was marked by fragrances: "Grasse was full of scents. The city lived off the seasonal cycle of plants that were delivered for distillation. Those were the days of vetiver, ylang ylang or patchouli, when the whole city smelled the same. My nanny's husband worked at the Roure factory, and when he came home, his clothes were saturated with distilled scents. We couldn't escape them, because they were all around us. However, it was not the raw materials of perfumery that first won Céline's heart, but the visual design of the perfumes: "I was attracted to perfumes because of their bottles and their advertising. I admired those images so much that I thought Ungaro's Diva dress, that bottle with its amber tones, was simply beautiful. Yes, the ads took people into new realms of imagination, the mythological with Kouros by Yves Saint Laurent, Minotaure by Paloma Picasso and Antaeus by Chanel, or the exotic with Byzance by Rochas Ispahan by Yves Rocher Opium by Yves Saint Laurent. I have always thought of perfume in terms of fashion. For me, perfume was invisible, very mysterious, alluring, and I loved it when it was paired with a couture look. That played an important role in building my own identity Ivoire by Balmain, with that name, the mystery, the hat, that perfume and the image it created are the reason I wear hats today. I love perfume as it was in the 19th century. I love it as an invention that satisfies a need for both beauty and pleasure. How can you love an ugly perfume? Bottles you don't want to pick up, transparent fragrances that look more like household cleaners, Kleenex perfumes? They don't appeal to me in the slightest".