Welcome to CREED’s official blog for the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico, an experimental project for CREED’s 250th anniversary year.  Thank you very much for visiting.  We look forward to using this space to provide information on a range of topics our clients inquire about as well as posting other CREED news and information you will find useful.

CREED flacons get a final inspection by Erwin CREED before shipping to the US from France.

Today we thought we would start with the question, “What is a Millesime”?  It’s a great question we hear frequently.

The word “millesime”, of course, appears on many CREED fragrance bottles, such as Royal Water, Tabarome or Imperial Millesime.  The “millesime” designation means that the best crops from a particular year’s harvest — be it bergamot from Sicily or lemon from Calabria — were used in the creation of that particular bottle of CREED fragrance.  It is a mark of quality.

This raises a related question: Does CREED use 100% natural ingredients in its fragrances?  This is a great query as the CREED family, based in France, takes enormous pride in each year selecting the best natural ingredients for their creations.  Sixth-generation master perfumer Olivier CREED and his son, Erwin, travel to Bulgaria to meet rose growers, Parma to meet cultivators of violets, India to meet sandalwood foresters — indeed, they travel the globe — to personally inspect annual crops and choose the most fragrant for shipment to the CREED workshop in the French countryside. 

In some locales, CREED’s relationships with growers date back generations.  These strong ties help CREED obtain ingredients to which other perfume houses simply would not have access, such as responsibly harvested sandalwood from Mysore, India, the world’s best and most expensive, obtained only by following complex local rules and located in a place inaccessible by air.

Proudly, CREED is the strongest advocate for natural ingredients in fragrance.  Natural elements such as oils derived from floral blooms, leaves and stems, juices from fruit and their rinds, natural spices and woods are the main components of CREED.  Still, even CREED must use a synthetic ingredient or two.  Why?

Creating a 100% natural CREED perfume is preferable, of course.  But a natural composition would not survive the months-long journey that begins with hand bottling at the CREED workshop in France, sea shipping to the United States, clearance at the U.S. port and transportation by ground to CREED’s authorized retailers coast to coast — Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, select Saks Fifth Avenue stores, select Nordstrom’s, select Bloomingdale’s and the new CREED boutique at 794 Madison Avenue in New York — if there were not a synthetic to prevent natural ingredients from spoiling along the way in the wide temperature variations that occur from, say, Boston to San Diego.

Nevertheless, CREED has been a friend of the environment for 250 years.  And of course, all CREED products, including room sprays, are in recyclable glass bottles (with natural spray pumps).

Tags: creed millesime, environmentally friendly, erwin creed, imperial millesime, natural ingredients, olivier creed, royal water, tabarome

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Ask CREED. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.