As Parisian fragrance house Matiere Premiere launches its new fragrance, we speak to co-founder, nose and seventh-generation perfumer Aurélien Guichard about the scent and his multi-sensory approach to perfumery
Today, Matiere Premiere launches its new eau de parfum, Metal Lavender. A modern take on an ancient classic, the scent is built around the contrast of two lavenders: a lavandin oil with a vibrant, metallic edge, and a softer, more floral lavender absolute – amplified by musks and Cashmeran.
For thousands of years, lavender has been expressed through aromatic codes. Matiere Premiere co-founder and master perfumer Aurélien Guichard re-imagines the scent into something luminous and urban, inspired by the metallic, almost clinical atmosphere of a typical Provence distillation factory. “This almost brutalist environment left its mark on me – the scent, the heat, the sounds and the light,” says Guichard.
When Guichard co-founded Matiere Premiere with Cédric Meiffret and Caius von Knorring in 2019, it was with an alternative philosophy for perfume making. Each fragrance would be an overdose of one central, highly concentrated raw material – hence the brand name, which translates to just that. Each material would be cultivated for strength and reinterpreted with a novel edge. Organic ingredients, many of them homegrown in Grasse on eco-certified land that has been passed down through the Guichard family for generations, would be sourced from the soil with a farm-to-bottle approach. And packaging would be minimalist and simple, with no gratuitous or superfluous artifice. The mission at Matiere Premiere was to value all the work that goes into obtaining these absolutes, and to reconnect the material with the final creation. “What was perhaps missing in the industry, and what we try to show with Matiere Premiere, is what happens behind the scenes, the raw beauty of the ingredients,” Guichard tells AnOther.
As the brand grew, it established a unique yet demanding sourcing approach, utilising much of its own agricultural activity (Guichard re-established his organic Rose Centifolia farm back in 2016 exclusively for Matiere Premiere; in February 2023, he planted 10,000 lavandin grosso plants, nurtured without pesticides). The brand has since established itself on the olfactory map with several instant favourites including Parisian Musc, Encens Suave, Radical Rose and its current top-selling scent Vanilla Powder, with concessions in department stores across the globe, and flagship stores in the fragrance districts of Paris, Berlin and, as of earlier this year, London. Located on Covent Garden’s King Street, the London store opening was celebrated with a party co-hosted by this magazine.
As a seventh-generation perfumer, Guichard began growing, cultivating, harvesting, layering ingredients and curating scents when he was just a boy. “There are things in life that cannot be replaced, things that no amount of training can teach,” he says. “Carrying bags of roses, seeing the delicate hands of jasmine pickers, spending time in small huts filled with the scent of verbena or flowers – these are lived experiences.” Informed by moments like these, he approaches his work as an art. “Inspiration comes from the moments, the ingredients and the people around you.”
Blending is never uni-sensory. Instead, Guichard uses a melange of senses, thinking about how he can imbue and preserve colour, sound and texture in each fragrance. “When I create a perfume for Matiere Premiere, it’s a balance between preserving the unique beauty of a material and bringing it into a different olfactory territory to create a surprise,” says Guichard. Subsequently, Metal Lavender is as blue as it is soft to the touch. “Emotions and colors are things that I feel when I create. And I just hope they can be understood when the fragrance is worn by someone else, somewhere on the other side of the planet. When that happens, it becomes even more beautiful.”
At the centre of Metal Lavender is lavandin oil extracted from plants grown in Guichard’s fields. Continuous manual care preserves the aromatic purity of the lavandin grosso. The result is a raw material of rare quality, fresh and vibrant. To extend the lavender signature throughout the fragrance, Guichard shaped an accord with an organic maillette lavender absolute sourced from higher altitude domains in Haute-Provence.
“Can you smell that? It’s velvety,” he says, holding a sample bottle of Cashmeran to my nose. It’s subtle but complex, warm and powdery and likely smells different to me as it does to him. While certain scents bring back memories of moments and places he and many before him have lived and been, Guichard avoids nostalgia when creating a perfume. “For me, nostalgia is something that is linked to the past. What I try to do is create perfumes with universal materials – something so beautiful, so simple and so magical, a material given by nature – expressed in a modern and contemporary way.”
Metal Lavendar by Matiere Premiere is available to buy online and in-store from today.
