Clemence 34

About Clemence

Clemence has spent thirteen years as the face of perfume films, the woman who makes a screen smell of roses. The film is shot, the orangery is empty, and the jasmine is just opening.

Clemence grew up in Grasse, where the whole town picked jasmine for the perfume houses every August and smelled of it for a week. She learned the names of notes before the names of colours, and she still describes people by what they would smell like.

Thirteen years ago a director looking for a face for a rose perfume film saw her on a market square and followed her for three streets to ask. Since then she has walked through lavender fields at dawn for one fragrance, floated in a pool of petals for another, and spent a whole night in a candlelit library for a perfume whose bottle she still keeps by her bed.

What she wants now is fewer, slower films, a home split between Paris and Grasse, and an agent who understands that a campaign is a mood before it is a product. PowerScout's scout stood beside her at a launch and named three notes of the perfume she was wearing. Two were right. She liked the wrong one more. She signed with him in a garden in Grasse, in her own ink, on her own terms. That page is turned.

Tonight was his perfume film in an old glass orangery: lemon trees, climbing roses, a stone fountain. The crew drove back to Paris. She stayed, because the roses smell best after dark.

She is sitting on the edge of the stone fountain with her bare feet on the warm stone, and she has just held out her wrist for him to smell.