Matiere Premiere

Aurélien Guichard, a master perfumer in the seventh generation founded Matière Première, together with business partners. The name - literally “primary materials”– straightforward and programmatic, is realized with a consistently clear-cut approach: only the highest-quality raw materials find their way into the collection.

Each individual fragrance in the line is based thematically on a single such ingredient, always sourced in the best natural quality. Free of synthetic colorings and highly concentrated, each scent displays a compelling honesty.

Aurélien Guichard is convinced that this is the key to successfully honoring the quality and unique characteristics of an individual basic ingredient. Matière Première aims to avoid a common phenomenon, namely when the key ingredient of a scent gets lost in translation along the way. Here, the main substances are meant to be perceptible, and smellable, in the final product.

The entire collection has a pared-down, modern character that appeals both to the olfactory and visual senses. The flacons are inspired by the simple form and material quality of the vessels used in a perfumer’s laboratory. To simply buy-in the necessary “primary materials” would hardly have been radical and resolute enough for Matière Première. So, in 2016, Aurélien Guichard and his extended family – all of them big names in the perfume industry – bought their own rose farm near Grasse. The Rosa Centifolia cultivated there is the source of a rare, high quality rose oil, which is Ecocert® certified and used in the Matière Première creations. With this move master perfumer Aurélien Guichard became one of the first in the industry, and remains one of the very few, to farm his own botanicals.