Matière Première: Farm to Bottle with Aurélien Guichard
One perfumer, one obsession with raw material
Matière Première is a French natural fragrance house founded in 2019 by Aurélien Guichard, a master perfumer who grew up in a Grasse perfumery family and has spent more than twenty years composing scent. The name means raw material, and it tells you everything about the intention. Guichard's idea is to take a single natural ingredient, understand it more deeply than anyone else and give it the whole stage rather than burying it in a crowded composition.
Farm to bottle
What sets the house apart is that it grows what it uses. Near Grasse, the historic heart of French perfumery, Matière Première tends its own Ecocert certified fields planted with twelve thousand centifolia rose trees, alongside tuberose and lavender. The raw materials are cultivated, harvested and turned into fragrance with a level of control that almost no house attempts. This is farm to bottle in the truest sense, and it is rare because it is difficult, slow and expensive.
That radical naturality is not a marketing line. It is the reason the fragrances wear so beautifully. Natural materials are more complex than their synthetic shortcuts, and they move on the skin in a way that feels alive rather than fixed. A Matière Première scent changes with your warmth and the hours of the day, which is exactly what you want from something you choose to live in.
Owning the fields also gives Guichard something most perfumers never have, which is control over the material itself. When a house buys its ingredients on the open market it inherits whatever quality and character the harvest happened to deliver. When it grows its own roses it decides when to pick, how to extract and what to keep. That authorship runs all the way from the soil to the bottle, and you can sense it in the depth and honesty of the finished fragrance.
The collection
The house offers a considered range rather than an endless catalogue. Radical Rose is the signature, drawn straight from those centifolia fields. Parisian Musc, Neroli Oranger, Santal Austral, Bois d'Ebene, Encens Suave, French Flower and Vanilla Powder complete a wardrobe that runs from luminous and floral to warm and resinous. Each is available as a full bottle, and there are travel sprays and a discovery set for anyone who wants to explore before committing.
Why I love it
Matière Première is a personal favourite of mine. I am drawn to houses that make honestly, and this is one of the clearest examples of that principle I have found in fragrance. You can feel the fields in it. Given that Amelie & Frank's belongs to the Polperro world, our own family vineyard, the idea of growing your own raw material and letting the land speak is one I understand in my bones.
Explore the house here: Matière Première at Amelie & Frank's, or browse our wider perfumery edit.
The most alive fragrances are the ones grown, not merely formulated.
Questions we are often asked
Who is Matière Première? Matière Première is a French natural fragrance house founded in 2019 by master perfumer Aurélien Guichard, known for a farm to bottle approach that grows its own raw materials near Grasse.
Are the fragrances natural? Yes. The house is built on radical naturality, cultivating its own Ecocert fields of centifolia rose, tuberose and lavender and placing natural raw materials at the centre of every composition.
How do I choose one? Begin with the discovery set or a travel spray, live with a scent across a full day and notice how it evolves on your skin. Radical Rose is a beautiful starting point.
Where can I buy Matière Première in Australia? Matière Première is available at Amelie & Frank's in Red Hill on the Mornington Peninsula and online across Australia.