Pascal Giraux

About

Pascal Giraux is a French perfumer who trained and composed at Haarmann & Reimer (now part of Symrise), the German fragrance and flavor house whose roster across the 1980s and 1990s included Vincent Marcello, Maurice Maurin and Andre Girodroux. He is listed in the standard reference The Perfumer's: An Index to the Aromatic Artists alongside his H&R peers, placing him squarely in the H&R Paris orbit during the period. Giraux's defining credited creation is Van Cleef (1993), the eponymous Eau de Parfum and Extrait that launched the Van Cleef & Arpels fragrance house's second-generation signature. He co-authored the composition with Andre Girodroux at Haarmann & Reimer for jeweler Van Cleef & Arpels in Paris, with bottle design by Serge Mansau. The fragrance is an ambre floral structured around top notes of raspberry, mandarin and bergamot, a heart of jasmine, rose, lily-of-the-valley and ylang-ylang, and a base of vanilla, amber, sandalwood and musk - a richly textured 1990s oriental-floral in the lineage of Coco Chanel and First. The composition has been continuously in production for over thirty years and remains the perfumer's most widely-circulated work.