Matière Première French Flower 100ml

Petals laid on a bed of fat or wax give up their perfume to it. Enfleurage is one of the oldest ways of taking scent from a flower, slow and expensive.

Matière Première uses it for French Flower, on tuberose grown organically on the house's own land at Grasse. Robertet extracts the flowers two ways, as absolute and as enfleurage on plant waxes. Together they render a field, not a bouquet. Organic absolute from those fields was reported at around 250,000 euros a kilo, against about 11,000 for tuberose absolute from India.

Nigerian ginger sharpens the whiteness of the petals. Chinese tea leaf and a green pear accord bring back the green of the plant the flower grew on.

Guichard pictures a tuberose field on a cool late-summer night. The closest thing to it down here is the end of a wedding, the lawn gone cold under the lights and the shoes left under a table.

Spec

• Eau de parfum, 100ml
• Tuberose absolute and enfleurage, grown organically by the house, Grasse, France
• Ginger, Nigeria
• Tea leaf essence, China
• Green pear accord
• Perfumer: Aurélien Guichard
• 85 to 92% naturally derived ingredients