The 12 months is 1953. A 27-year-old Queen Elizabeth II is crowned. The Oscars are broadcast on television for the primary time. And a shower oil called Youth-Dew is dropped at market by a budding beauty entrepreneur named Estée Lauder.

The remaining of the story goes somewhat something like this: While most ladies only wore perfume on special occasions, they began going through bottles and bottles of the jasmine- and patchouli-spiked bath oil because they loved its lingering scent. This sparked a shift in consumer behavior, and shortly enough, a spritz of perfume was considered a part of a lady’s on a regular basis beauty routine. Following the success of Youth-Dew (which eventually spawned a fragrance spray by the identical name), Lauder went on to create 11 more scents during her lifetime, catapulting her namesake cosmetics business to multimillion-dollar success.

Lauder, who passed away in 2004, was not a “nose” — that’s to say, she didn’t study the art of fragrance in Grasse — but she was really good at putting her finger on what women want in a perfume. The identical could be said of Frédéric Malle, the self-proclaimed fragrance “publisher” who has worked hand-in-hand with perfumers to create among the most highly-regarded scents of the past twenty years, including Carnal Flower (a Better of Beauty winner filled with tuberose) and Portrait of a Lady (with rose and sandalwood).

Serendipitously, in 2015, Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle was acquired by the Estée Lauder Corporations. “The minute I sold my company to Estée Lauder, I said that I wanted to do that,” says Malle. The “this” he’s referring to is the reinvention of 5 of the scents originally developed by the lady herself — and the rationale why I recently found myself inside Estée’s meticulously-preserved office at company headquarters in Recent York City.

“That is where she tortured perfumers,” Malle says with amusing, gesturing across the ornately-decorated, jewel box-like space. (The view of Central Park is so breathtaking, one has to wonder if visitors ever found it distracting during meetings.) Malle is, in fact, not being literal, but referring to Lauder’s famously high standards for fragrance. For instance, Beautifula mix of orange flower, mandarin, and rose that launched in 1985 and went on to change into certainly one of the brand’s bestsellers, was the results of “many, many months” of Lauder mixing iterations at the exact same desk that sits within the corner of her office today, says Malle.