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'Shiloh': A Baby and a Perfume
Perfume creator Symine Salimpour, above, says she developed the fragrance she named "Shiloh" a couple of years before Angelina Jolie, below, who named her daughter Shiloh, sued her to block its trademark.
(By Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)
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It was in Paris that Salimpour met Arno Klarsfeld, son of renowned Nazi-hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld. Salimpour calls Arno Klarsfeld "my mentor." A lawyer and human rights advocate who, like Salimpour, has dual French-Israeli citizenship, Klarsfeld inspired her to make a pilgrimage to Israel.
Salimpour ended up living and working there, for the jeweler H. Stern, and loved the business so much that she decided to begin designing and selling her own jewelry.
Eventually, she realized that she would need to move to the United States if she were truly going to make her mark. She flew to Los Angeles in 2005, and that summer, Salimpour started her company, Hors La Monde. Enjoying some success selling her jewelry, she decided to expand her product line with a perfume called Lo -- which flopped.
Undeterred, she began development of a second fragrance. In early 2006, she was carrying several experimental samples when she flew back to the South of France for a party at her parents' house. There, she met renowned perfumer Michel Roudnitska, son of the late Edmond Roudnitska, who, during his prime in the 1940s and '50s, created such classics as Christian Dior's Eau Fraiche and Hermes's first signature fragrance, Eau d'Hermes.
"I was very, very impressed to meet Michel," Salimpour says, meaning she was intimidated. "He's recognized as one of the best noses in the world. We can compare his work to that of a painter or a composer. . . . It's like Beethoven, the Beethoven of perfume."
When the two met weeks later, at Roudnitska's lab in Cabris (near Grasse, the perfume center of France, thus the perfume center of the universe), Salimpour says, "I told him my story. I told him I was a lawyer with a special interest in human rights, that I design jewelry and had lived in Israel and Paris and the South of France. The scent I wanted would present the idea of fragility and strength. And that it would be called Shiloh."
It is a complex fragrance. The forward notes, the ones that hit your nose first, are cedar wood and patchouli. Rising above that earthy base are delicious whiffs of citrus (thanks to a dab of bergamot oil) and rose petals. There are probably about 30 other scents that an expert could identify. It's a really heady scent.
When word of Salimpour's legal battle with Jolie became public (in an article I wrote for Life & Style Weekly, where I'm executive editor), it created buzz on the Internet and in the rarefied and somewhat insular fine-fragrance industry.
"It was all over the place -- everyone was talking about it," says Marian Bendeth, a Toronto-based fragrance expert. "I was absolutely astounded by the fact that she put herself on the line like this. She went to Roudnitska, an uber-perfumer, and he agreed to work with her. It was a very expensive, very risky proposition."
The trademark battle "was just a huge misunderstanding," Salimpour says, magnanimous in victory. "And besides having a baby named Shiloh -- because this perfume, it is my baby -- we can say we have two other things in common: We believe in human rights, and we love Brad Pitt!"
