Les Eaux Primordiales: Giving Memories of Northern France a Structure in Scent

“The idea behind Les Eaux Primordiales was to put technology at the service of beautiful perfumes.”

— Arnaud Poulain (founder)

Freshly washed linen, a grandfather shaving, mimosa flowering at the end of winter. Alongside them are mechanical engineering, factory silos, space, and the depths of the sea. Les Eaux Primordiales is a perfume brand born in northern France, where these personal memories intersect with an interest in science.

Founder Arnaud Poulain has sought to give form to the scents in his mind through combinations of materials and the processes of making. Following his path reveals the story of a young factory worker who discovered perfume, collaborated with a perfumer, and eventually turned a mansion he had gazed at as a child into his own manufacturing base.

Essential Information

Founded: 2015
Founder: Arnaud Poulain
Place of origin: Near Arras, northern France
Official website: Les Eaux Primordiales

The brand name comes from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It means “primordial waters”: the waters from which life originates. For Poulain, the name came to connect a return to the traditions and materials of perfumery with a journey toward unknown forms of expression.

The Founder and the Brand’s Beginnings

A Science-Loving Boy from a Family of Craftspeople

Poulain was born in Arras, northern France, in 1986. His father worked in metalworking, his uncle was a cabinetmaker, and his grandparents were farmers. All around him were people touching materials, working with their hands, and steadily building on their efforts. The respect for work and craftsmanship he inherited from his family flows through the later brand.

As a teenager, he was drawn to science and studied mechanical engineering. His encounter with perfume came in 2007, when he was working in production at a Häagen-Dazs factory and spoke to the factory manager about his hopes for his future.

The manager introduced his son, who had moved into the world of perfume. He saw in Poulain a young man with great ambitions, like his son. For Poulain, the encounter meant more than simply adding another career option.

“He showed me a world I had known absolutely nothing about.”

— Arnaud Poulain

Fascinated by the richness of perfumery, Poulain wanted to learn more. Jean-Claude Ellena (in Japanese)’s book Le parfum also helped deepen his understanding. The young man raised in a family of farmers and metalworkers was now beginning to turn toward the techniques of working with invisible scent.

Meeting Amélie Bourgeois in Evening Classes

Poulain studied the basics of perfumery at SIADEP in Lens, and through olfactory classes began to recognize the acuity of his own nose. Teaching evening classes there was the perfumer Amélie Bourgeois (Amélie Bourgeois (in Japanese)).

Bourgeois recognized his potential and began mentoring him outside class as well. In time, this teacher-student relationship developed into one of creating the brand’s fragrances together. Poulain compares their collaboration to the work of a designer and an architect.

“I bring an artistic vision and explain it to Amélie, so that she can build its foundations.”

— Arnaud Poulain

Bourgeois translates the images Poulain envisions into a structure of scent. Reaching the finished perfume involves exploring possibilities, making trials, and repeated exchanges. Refining a formula can, he says, take around 24 months. The brand’s fragrances emerge through this back-and-forth between the founder’s ideas and the craft of perfumery.

Beginning in 2015 with Six Fragrances That Set the Classics in Motion

After gaining experience working with independent perfume brands, Poulain founded Les Eaux Primordiales in 2015. The initial lineup that year consisted of six fragrances. Its starting point was to introduce contemporary changes to the classical frameworks of French perfumery.

Champ d’Influence was dedicated to his grandfather’s shaving ritual. A fougère composition combining lavender, geranium, vetiver, and other materials was overlaid with family memories. In Mémoire du Futur, he worked with rose, iris, carnation, and aldehydes with the perfumes of the 1920s through the 1940s in mind.

Names such as “Memory of the Future” and “Unpredictable Particle” also express an interest in time and science. Rather than preserving familiar fragrance forms just as they were, he changed their combinations of materials to set them in motion again. This thinking led to the later Superclassique collection.

Changing Sunday Evenings with a Clean Scent

Couleur Primaire, which went on to become a signature scent of the brand, takes as its themes freshly laundered linen drying outdoors and a pear sorbet from childhood. It was created to be a fragrance that would dispel the Sunday-night blues.

“I wanted to create an anti-perfume. Just a clean scent made beautiful.”

— Arnaud Poulain

The aim was not merely to reproduce the smell of laundry, but to fashion it into a perfume containing flowers and fruit. It was a process of using a familiar smell to explore the kind of perfume he wanted to make.

Keeping His Mother’s Flower within a Fragrance

Some of the memories the brand explores are things Poulain learned about only later. Mimosa Supercritique is dedicated to his mother, who died when he was young. In conversations with relatives on his mother’s side, he discovered that she had loved mimosa and had even carried a bouquet made only of mimosa at her wedding.

The flower is also connected to a late-winter holiday on the Estérel coast: traces of snow and a valley filled with the scent of mimosa. The theme of the fragrance lies not only in the shape and color of the flower, but also where family stories and his own memories overlap.

Creating a Manufacturing Base across the Road from Where He Sold Vegetables with His Grandfather

As the business grew, Poulain also put his ideas into practice in the places where things were made. With support from investors, he rented a small space in an industrial area and hired his first three employees. Subsequent funding led to a larger home.

In 2021, he acquired Le Domaine Primordial, a few kilometers from Arras. On its 14-hectare, tree-filled grounds stands a mansion that once belonged to a mining company. It is now the brand’s home and the location of its perfume manufacture, or production workshop.

As a child, Poulain had sold vegetables with his grandfather, a farmer, on the opposite side of the road. His grandfather loved history and told him stories of the site’s mining years and the war. Poulain dreamed of entering the mansion, but never ventured through the gates.

Years later, on learning that it was for sale, he began cycling there almost every day. The place he had once looked at from outside eventually became their workplace. Choosing to locate production in northern France was, for him, also a return to family memories and the industrial history of the region.

What Matters to the Brand

Finding the Balance of Materials for an Imagined Scent

Poulain regards materials such as aldehydes, saffron, and vanilla as the gears of a beautiful machine. Rather than using a single material in large quantities, he values finding the balance between components to achieve the scent he has already imagined.

He finds depth and texture in natural materials, and precision and clarity in synthetics, choosing what the fragrance’s structure requires.

“I choose between them according to what the structure needs, as an architect chooses stone and steel.”

— Arnaud Poulain

Couleur Primaire makes this approach particularly clear. To the simple theme of freshly laundered linen it brings aldehydes, pear, jasmine and rose, white musk, and Ambroxan. Starting from a clean smell, it is shaped into a perfume that includes fruit and flowers.

Poulain also names this as one of the fragrances he found difficult to develop. According to him, its simplicity is only apparent: the formula, which sought to combine freshness and longevity, is among the brand’s most complex. Cleanliness here is not achieved with a single fragrance material. Behind the clean linen lies the detailed work of constructing an everyday memory as a perfume.

From His Mother’s Flower to the Flower He Imagines

When working with flowers, Poulain does not seek only to copy the smell of the plant. He creates the flower as he imagines it. The name of the floral Supercritique collection comes from supercritical extraction using carbon dioxide, also revealing his interest in the technology used to obtain materials.

In Mimosa Supercritique, dedicated to his mother, he imagines a Mediterranean wedding at the end of winter. The last snow falling on the flowers is likened to icing sugar; jasmine, orange blossom, and white musk are layered in to create a scene broader than a bouquet of mimosa alone.

The starting point of his mother’s favorite flower is joined by the boundary between snow and spring and the scene of a wedding. The fragrance’s personal meaning lies not simply in attaching a family story to its name, but in considering the world in which to place the flower.

From an Interior by the Fire to Visions of Sea and Space

The themes of the fragrances extend from flowers to indoor scenes. For Ambre Superfluide in the Superfluide collection, which focuses on woods, resins, and spices, Poulain imagined a velvet armchair beside the fireplace and a freshly baked apple and cinnamon pie.

He brings apple, cinnamon, and honey to this scene, layering them with rum, tobacco, and the resin benzoin. Rather than taking only confectionery as its subject, the fragrance composes a warm interior that includes time spent beside the fire.

Supermassive, meanwhile, turns toward the worlds of the deep sea and distant galaxies, inspired by cosmology and oceanography. In its red bottle, Ambre Supermassive starts from an image of red amber and seeks to express its depth and warmth through fruit, spices, black vanilla, and tobacco. The interest in science extends beyond methods of making to the worlds imagined through fragrance.

Preserving the Human Hand in Maturation and Bottling

At the Domaine’s manufacture, fragrance concentrates, the concentrated aromatic mixtures, are received and then matured under controlled conditions before bottling. The large stainless-steel tanks in the Atmos 432 Resonance Room stand in a space kept dark, with stable temperature and humidity. Playing classical music tuned to 432 Hz is also incorporated into the process there.

The bottles are finished by hand and accompanied by a handwritten note from the person responsible for bottling. For Poulain, having their own production process means being able to determine the details all the way to completion. The brand’s craftsmanship includes not only the perfume formula but also the time and human work involved before it reaches the wearer.

Turning Industrial Architecture into a Way to Experience Fragrance

The cylindrical bottle and large square cap have an industrial clarity. Behind them is the work of German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, who photographed industrial facilities such as mines and silos. The photographic duo Tania & Vincent have also shaped the brand’s graphics and world of color.

This interest in industrial architecture also developed into spaces in which to experience scent. Experiences Immobiles, created with DWA Design Studio for Milan Design Week in 2023, featured two towers recalling the factory chimneys of northern France. One presented the materials composing Cèdre Superfluide; the other invited visitors into the workings of fragrance through glass spheres, ventilation devices, and scented ceramic forms.

It was an installation in which perfume could be experienced physically through its materials and mechanisms, rather than seen only as a finished bottle. The project was chosen for the Fuorisalone jury award for best interactive installation.

The home-fragrance candles Les Expériences Immobiles also retain the form of factory chimneys. Their octagonal ceramic columns can be detached from their bases and rearranged, and they are handmade with soy-derived wax in the Domaine’s workshop. Le Studio Primordial, also on the estate, designs and makes furniture for the mansion and retail displays. At Poulain’s headquarters, perfume, furniture, and exhibitions are extensions of the same craftsmanship that surrounded him in his father’s and uncle’s work as he grew up.

Following the themes of the fragrances, the use of materials, and the forms of objects together reveals the land where Poulain grew up and the world of imagination that extends from it.

An Aside…

Asked which perfume he wished he had created, Poulain paid tribute to the innovation Chanel N°5 represented at its launch. He then named the next fragrance he would create for Les Eaux Primordiales. Answering a question about past masterpieces with a bottle that has yet to take shape offers a glimpse of his creative attitude.

References

1. Amaris, “5 Questions With Arnaud Poulain, Founder of Les Eaux Primordiales” (December 5, 2021) — His approach to technology, the balance of materials, Couleur Primaire, and his attitude to the next perfume — https://amarisbeauty.com/blogs/magazine/5-questions-with-arnaud-poulain
2. Les Eaux Primordiales, “Our Story” — Founding, upbringing, and the origin of the brand name — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/pages/notre-histoire
3. The Fragrance Foundation France, “Nez à Nez avec Arnaud Poulain, fondateur et parfumeur des Eaux Primordiales” (September 26, 2022) — The encounter at the factory, childhood scents, and the Domaine — https://www.fragrancefoundation.fr/2022/09/nez-a-nez-avec-arnaud-poulain-fondateur-et-parfumeur-des-eaux-primordiales/
4. Duft-Tagebuch, “Interview with Les Eaux Primordiales’ founder Arnaud Poulain” (February 28, 2024) — Collaboration with Bourgeois, development time, his mother and mimosa, and floral expression — https://www.alzd.de/en/2024/02/28/interview-with-les-eaux-primordiales-founder-arnaud-poulain/
5. Auparfum, “Les Eaux Primordiales, eaux intemporelles” (November 17, 2015) — The first six fragrances, reinterpreting classics, and the bottle’s inspiration — https://auparfum.bynez.com/les-eaux-primordiales-eaux-intemporelles,2656
6. Les Eaux Primordiales, “Collection Couleur Primaire” — The founder’s comments, the inspiration of linen, and body care — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/pages/collection-couleur-primaire
7. Les Eaux Primordiales, “Couleur Primaire” — Memories of clean linen and pear, and the fragrance composition — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/products/couleur-primaire
8. Elevated Classics, “Inside Les Eaux Primordiales: A Conversation with Founder Arnaud Poulain” (December 18, 2025) — The early workshop, funding, his view of materials, and handwritten notes — https://elevated-classics.com/les-eaux-primordiales-founder-interview-arnaud-poulain/
9. Les Eaux Primordiales, “Our Heritage” — The 2021 acquisition, the road where he sold vegetables with his grandfather, and memories of the mansion — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/pages/le-patrimoine
10. Les Eaux Primordiales, “Supercritique” — The floral collection’s inspiration and current fragrances — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/collections/supercritique
11. Les Eaux Primordiales, “Mimosa Supercritique” — The wedding scene and fragrance composition — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/products/mimosa
12. Les Eaux Primordiales, “Superfluide” — The collection centered on materials — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/collections/superfluide
13. Les Eaux Primordiales, “Ambre Superfluide” — The inspiration of a winter interior and the fragrance composition — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/products/ambresuperfluide
14. Les Eaux Primordiales, “Supermassive” — Inspiration from cosmology and oceanography, and current fragrances — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/collections/supermassive
15. Les Eaux Primordiales, “Ambre Supermassive” — Amber inspiration, notes, and official bottle images — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/products/ambre-supermassive
16. Les Eaux Primordiales, “Savoir Faire” — Maturation, the Resonance Room, and the making of furniture and displays — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/pages/savoir-faire
17. Les Eaux Primordiales, “La Genèse” — The Bechers, Tania & Vincent, and visual expression — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/blogs/les-eaux-primordiales/la-genese
18. Les Eaux Primordiales, “Art & Design” — The 2023 Milan installation and its award — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/pages/art-design
19. Les Eaux Primordiales, “Scented Candles / Les Expériences Immobiles” — Ceramic containers, scents, wax, and production — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/collections/experiences-immobiles