Where perfume begins
Each May, the centifolia roses around Grasse are picked by hand before the sun reaches them, while the oil is still held in the petal. It takes nine hundred kilos of flowers to make one kilo of absolute. We buy from three families whose fields we have walked for over a decade.
Capturing the scent
Within hours of the harvest the petals go into copper. Steam lifts the oil out of the flower, then it condenses, separates and is drawn off a drop at a time. For the most fragile materials, jasmine and tuberose, we still press them into cold fat, the way it was done here two centuries ago.
Built in three movements
A fragrance unfolds in time. What you smell first is gone within the hour, and what is left at dusk was there all along, waiting underneath.
The method · composition at the organ
Time, the final ingredient
Once composed, every blend rests for eight weeks in a cool cellar beneath the atelier while the materials settle into one another. Then it is macerated, filtered cold and poured by hand, never more than three hundred bottles at a time.
