Jacques Villiger

About

Jacques Villiger was a Swiss-trained perfumer at Firmenich, the Geneva-based fragrance and flavor house, who composed the original 1979 release of Natura Sr. N - Brazil's first masculine fragrance line aimed at men's care, and one of the most culturally important perfumes in Brazilian history. He is identified in Brazilian fragrance press as a Firmenich perfumista and is referenced posthumously by the Brazilian fragrance community. Villiger's signature work, Sr. N (initially the desodorante line in 1979, with the first perfume of the collection launching in 1981), was a robust chypre-aromatic masculine built on bergamot, cassis, green leaves, galbanum, grapefruit, lime and lemon at the top; artemisia, cardamom, orange blossom, mint and lavender in the heart; and a deep base of woods, musk, patchouli, vetiver, cedar and vanilla. Brazilian reviewers credit the fragrance as the local market's confident answer to imported masculines of the era like Polo and Bogart - old-school, projection-heavy, defining the cheiro de homem archetype for a generation. The fragrance was reformulated in 2007 (by Maria Tereza Belotti and Eurico Mazzini) but the original Villiger composition remains the reference DNA for every Sr. N flanker - Citrus, Couro, Ambar, Cedro, Sandalo and Vetiver - that Natura has released since.