Germaine Monteil was a New York based French fashion designer and cosmetician who founded the cosmetics and perfume

Perfume

Perfume is a mixture of fragrant essential oils and/or aroma compounds, fixatives, and solvents used to give the human body, animals, objects, and living spaces "a pleasant scent"...

 company sharing her name.

Fashion

Born in France in 1898, Monteil moved to the United States in the early 1930s. A high end dressmaker as well as a cosmetician, she first established herself as a fashion designer. She made classic dresses with flaring circular or pleated skirts and slim silhouettes, and was renowned for her use of prints which appealed to the American market. In 1938 Monteil won a Neiman Marcus Fashion Award

Neiman Marcus Fashion Award

The Neiman Marcus Award for Distinguished Service in the Field of Fashion was a yearly award created in 1938 by Stanley Marcus. Unlike the Coty Award, it was not limited to American-based fashion designers...

in recognition of her influence upon the fashion industry. This was the first year in which the awards were presented. She died in 1987.

Cosmetics & perfumes

In 1936 Monteil founded with her husband, Guy Bjorkman, Germaine Monteil Cosmetiques Corp. as a sideline to her fashion business, offering skin treatments and creams. Her first perfume, Laughter (later renamed Rigolade), came out in 1941. The increasing success of this sideline led to Monteil abandoning fashion design in the late 1940s to focus on perfume and cosmetics. The company was acquired in 2006 by the German compay Wilde Cosmetics GmbH.

Monteil fragrances include:

• 1940s:
• Laughter
• New Love
• Nostalgia
• Frou Frou

• 1950s:
• Fleur Savage
• Gigolo
• Nouvel Amour
• Rigolade

• 1990s:
• L'Eau de Monteil (1996)