Twenty years composing for fashion houses she's contractually unable to name. Trained at ISIPCA in Versailles, four years at Robertet, eight at a maison in Paris, then a quiet move home to Grasse.
The seven-fragrance archive is the body of work she made for herself, in the eight years between the maison and now.
I have been making perfume for twenty years. The first ten were for other people, the second ten were mostly for myself, and the seven in this archive are the only ones I still wear when no one is watching.
Composition is not, as the marketing language insists, a process of creation. It is a process of removal. You start with twenty-eight raw materials, and over four years you take twenty-one of them out, until what is left is so unembellished that it sounds, on the skin, like a single thought clearly held.
Cuir Gris started as a leather-tobacco-vanilla composition for a French house in 2014. The brief was "masculine but reassuring." I delivered the brief. The project was eventually shelved.
What I kept, in my own notebook, was a draft I had cut from the third revision — leather, vetiver, iris pallida, a single stripe of birch tar, and almost nothing else. It smelled, to me, like the saddle of a horse I rode in Camargue when I was twenty-three. I refused to send it to the house. I refused to revise it.
Eight years later, after I had moved home to Grasse and bought a small distillation set-up, I came back to that draft. I changed three materials. That is what is in your bottle.
Most of the seven specimens have a story like that — drafts that were rejected by a house, or never shown, that I have been carrying around in a binder for a decade. The reason they are an archive, and not a collection, is that I believe each one is finished, in a way that work for clients almost never is.
I hope you wear them quietly. I hope, when you do, you remember something specific.
Five years studying olfactory chemistry, raw materials, and IFRA compliance. Graduating thesis on iris pallida concentrations in vintage Guerlain.
Four years on natural extracts. The training that shaped how I think about hay, oakmoss, and benzoin Siam.
Eight years composing for a Paris fashion house. The work I cannot name — but most of the drafts I carry into the archive started here.
Move back to Grasse, set up a small distillation studio, begin composing under my own name for the first time.
The first three specimens — Cuir Gris, Figue Noire, Foin Coupé — are bottled and shown to twelve people. All twelve buy a bottle.
Seven specimens, fully composed, fully disclosed, available in editions of 1,200 numbered bottles.
Three-year aged rhizome. The single most expensive material in the archive.
Wild-harvested aquilaria, six years cured. Used in No. vii at 0.4%.
Distilled in Karelia. Half the leather note in Cuir Gris is here.
From the Saudi highlands. Steam-distilled the same morning it's picked.
Cold-pressed peel, October harvest. The brightness in five of seven openings.
Two-year aged. Drier and dustier than Java, less smoky than Reunion.
Beach-found, ethically sourced. The base of Sel d'Hiver.
Resinoid from Laos. The warmth at the base of nearly everything I make.