Caron

Contemporary history, perfume history, love story... The name Caron evokes so many good stories and is history. However, not in a figurative sense: the Caron perfume house continues to shine today as a brand of noble and significant fragrances on the market, continuing its more than one hundred years of history with success and current validity. In 1904, the Daltroff brothers bought the perfumery "La Maison Emilia '' from Anne-Marie Caron in Paris, because they found the name Caron so beautiful and wanted to make it the cornerstone of their own brand. The creative visionary who also conceived the new fragrances was Ernest Daltroff, a chemist by training, a globetrotter and a self-taught perfumer. However, the first two fragrances he created flopped. But then he met and fell in love with Félicie Wanpouille, and the pair made fragrance history together. She carved out her role in the fledgling company - at a time when the word didn't even exist - as head of marketing, while Ernest Daltroff continued to be the creative artisan in the fragrance workshop. She designed the flacons, conceived and drew the advertising, took charge of public relations with great talent, and came up with the appropriate names for the perfumes. This congenial work was enormously productive and profitable. Great fragrances came from the House of Caron, revolutionary and trend-setting in their time: "Narcisse Noir" (1911) was dedicated to the silent film diva Gloria Swanson, thus to a modern idea of femininity and sexiness (the corresponding bottle was shown by her and silently mentioned in the 1950 film "Sunset Boulevard", which triggered a new boom). "Tabac Blond" (1919) was a fragrant confession to the beautiful, emancipated and smoking woman (scandalous at the time), "En Avion" (1929) paid homage to the female pioneers of the air, who in Lindbergh's succession as pilots became the symbol of the woman no longer accepting limits and restriction. Many more legendary and extraordinarily successful fragrances marked Caron's path until Ernest Daltroff, who was of Jewish descent, fled to the United States in 1939 to escape German occupation and persecution. He died in exile two years later. His partner, muse and quasi-widow (they never married) Félicie Wanpouille ran the house until her death in 1967. Caron then bobbed along until the 1980s, when Romain Ales took over and led the great house back to success.