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Aramis

Aramis is the men’s brand of Estée Lauder. The American house created it in the early sixties to sell a masculine fragrance without housing it under its own name, already wholly associated with women. Bernard Chant signed the formula, a leathery chypre that a New York department store put on shelves before London. The name has since covered an entire line of shaving and grooming products.

Aramis perfumes

A men’s fragrance at Estée Lauder

Estée Lauder observed at the end of the fifties the American success of Canoe, which Dana had just imported. The men’s market existed, then, limited to eaux de toilette and aftershave lotions. The house decided to enter it.

Its brand carried a woman’s name and women’s products. Rather than add a men’s line to it, it created an entire brand that lived on its own. The first bottle appeared in New York and reached Harrods the following year.

Two dates for one birth

The Estée Lauder group dates the creation to 1963 on its own brand page. Some outlets, including the current Aramis page, write 1964. The gap reads as it stands: neither date can be ruled out by the other.

The formula, for its part, does not move. Bernard Chant composed it after Cabochard, created for Grès in 1958. Michael Edwards links the smoky leather of Bandit, Cabochard and Aramis to the same molecule, isobutyl quinoline.

A brand apart

Aramis did not remain a fragrance. The name covers shaving and grooming, and the group long kept it as its beachhead in prestige menswear fragrance. Estée Lauder waited until 1985 to launch a men’s fragrance under its own name, Lauder for Men.

Trudi Loren, who directed the group’s fragrance development, describes it as a pioneer of men’s fragrance, able to outlast trends. Other names have followed under the brand, Devin, Havana and Tuscany.