Une Nuit Nomade: From the Music Industry to Perfume, Two Founders Creating Stories of Travel

The place, the materials, and telling a story. All of these matter.

Philippe Solas

Une Nuit Nomade is a French perfume brand developed by two people who had worked in the music industry, growing out of their experiences in Bali. Flowers fragrant at night, musicians and artists who gathered in Montauk, Oman’s white dunes: they consider not only which destination to choose, but which scene from that place to turn into perfume, then pass it to a perfumer. Behind the name “Nomade” lies a journey in which the expression of scent changes along with the place.

Key Information
The Founders and the Brand’s Origins
What Defines the Brand
References

Key Information

Brand name: Une Nuit Nomade
Founders: Philippe Solas and Alexandra Cubizolles
Country of foundation: France. Initial place of inspiration: Bali, Indonesia
Timeline: predecessor Une Nuit à Bali presented products in 2013; renamed Une Nuit Nomade in 2017
Official website: Une Nuit Nomade

The Founders and the Brand’s Origins

Two People Who Met in the Music Industry

Solas worked as a marketing director at Universal Music, and Cubizolles as an artistic director. Cubizolles had studied biology and was interested in nature and how the body works, while her music-industry career involved A&R work with artists and their output. Solas studied marketing and communications and, after leaving Universal, also trained in shiatsu, taking an interest in Eastern medicine.

What the two sought was to explore another passion and create in their own way. Their interests in travel, nature, and relaxation of mind and body overlapped, and a plan for independence developed. For Cubizolles, entering the world of creating distinctive perfumes was also a creative choice continuing from her work in music.

The transition from music to perfume was itself a profoundly transformative journey.

Philippe Solas

Visiting Jovoy in Search of a Favorite Perfume

An encounter in a Paris perfume shop also played a part in the idea of creating a brand. Boucheron’s Jaipur, which Solas had worn, temporarily became difficult to obtain because of a formulation issue. The two read an article about Jovoy, a shop bringing together small independent brands, and visited its then-location on Rue Danielle Casanova.

There, Solas was drawn to Ambre Premier and bought it. As they left the shop, they wondered whether one needed to remain with a single perfume for life. A visit to find a favorite product became an opportunity to discover new fragrances and a world in which small brands could exist.

In 2013, Balinese Body Care and the First Perfume

The first destination was Bali. As they traveled through Asia, the two became interested in the richness of its plants and local traditions of caring for the body. Their predecessor brand, Une Nuit à Bali, was not exclusively a perfume brand from the outset. It also offered products for body care, including dry oils, a scrub using bamboo powder, and massage powder.

Oils and scrubs were introduced in the summer of 2013, with massage powder scheduled to launch in September and the fragrance Le Parfum in October. Perfume was intended as the finishing touch to the care ritual, but fragrance creation would eventually become the center of their activities. That first perfume led to what later became Fleur des Fleurs.

At Esxence in 2015, Fleur des Fleurs appeared alongside Mr Vetiver and Suma Oriental. Balinese flowers, Javanese vetiver, and old writings on Southeast Asia: even within a single destination, their subjects had expanded from floral aromas to people’s stories and history.

The 2017 Renaming and Expansion to Montauk

In 2017, the brand was renamed Une Nuit Nomade, retaining the Bali perfumes as one collection while adding Une Nuit à Montauk. The new destination was Montauk at the eastern tip of Long Island, New York. Memory Motel and Rose America were its introduction, both composed by Annick Menardo (in Japanese).

Menardo was a perfumer with whom Solas had long wanted to collaborate. Starting from stories of the artists who gathered in the seaside town, they moved into a fragrant world different from Bali’s plants. In 2019, they further developed works on Oman with Jérôme di Marino. As the brand name moved beyond a single island, it opened a path to welcoming different perspectives and creators in each place.

The Founders Decide the Story, the Perfumer Creates the Formula

The two founders do not compose the perfumes themselves. They choose a destination, consider the story the perfume will express, and give the perfumer a brief setting out their creative requirements. Their role is to evaluate proposals, work through revisions, and decide when the creation is finished.

We always decide on new fragrances, new concepts, and the brand’s artistic direction together.

Philippe Solas

Subjects that begin with reading or travel become perfumes through dialogue with a perfumer. Bridging that process is the founders’ work. In day-to-day operations, Cubizolles handles work involving numbers, while Solas handles work involving words. Their experience communicating the worlds of musicians and their works continues into an activity that composes not only scents but also their backgrounds.

What Defines the Brand

Fleur des Fleurs, Combining the Flowers of Bali

Fleur des Fleurs, created by Karine Chevallier, is an ode to ylang-ylang and jasmine. The subject of Balinese flowers includes jasmine, which waits for night to release its fragrance. The current official description presents a composition centered on the two flowers, with a powdery softness and a restrained woody expression.

Night is not merely a time at which to wear perfume. The hour when flowers become fragrant and time itself spent at a destination become subjects for creation. The first perfume from a brand that began with care products also retains this idea of connecting plants, the body, and the sensations of night.

Memory Motel: Music of the 1970s and a Seaside Town

The Montauk collection does not seek to depict the town solely through marine scents. What Memory Motel captures is the atmosphere of the 1970s associated with Andy Warhol and the Rolling Stones. The title layers a real motel with the Stones’ song of the same name.

Menardo combined tobacco, leather, carnation, moss, and patchouli to give form to the sensuality of that period that the two founders sought. The brand’s current description also presents the idea of tobacco enveloped in patchouli with a touch of vanilla coming through. Rather than merely attaching a place name to perfume, this creation translates the musical memories accumulated in the town into a combination of scents.

Bohemian Soul, also inspired by Montauk, draws on the 1966 surfing film The Endless Summer. It depicts a journey in pursuit of the ideal wave through a composition including iris, guaiacwood, and sandalwood. Even with the same town as the starting point, a musician’s stay and a surfer’s free movement lead a perfume to follow different stories.

Oman’s Gardens and White Dunes

Jardins de Misfah, from 2019, is an eau de parfum inspired by the Omani village of Misfah Al Abreyeen. Di Marino visited Oman and connected the experience to its creation. The official story features water flowing between terraces, flower-lined paths, and date palms. Expressions of rose are layered with accords suggesting creamy dates, honey, and water. An accord is a combination of several fragrance materials that creates a single impression.

Sugar Leather, announced in 2023, instead heads toward the white dunes of Al Khaluf. Its starting point is a scene in which the saddles of a camel caravan are heated by the sun and release a leathery smell. The whiteness of the dunes is likened to “sugar,” creating an image of leather coated in sand and seemingly caramelized by sunlight. The combination of cinnamon, leather, and caramel forms the elements of this story.

Water and flowers in the gardens; heat and leather in the dunes. The same destination, Oman, divides into different scenes from one work to another. Une Nuit Nomade’s journey lies in changing its creations according to what it sees there, rather than making a single scent represent a place.

Click Song: A Tribute to Miriam Makeba

Click Song, inspired by South Africa, is an homage to singer Miriam Makeba. Its title comes from the Xhosa song she introduced to the world. The fragrance was created by Serge de Oliveira of Robertet.

The brand depicts a rosebud wrapped in patchouli leaves, extending deep roots of amber and labdanum into the soil of its homeland. Labdanum is a resinous fragrance material obtained from cistus. Respect for Makeba, who continued singing in exile, is layered with the imagery of flowers and roots. In this creation, the destination of the journey expands beyond plants and landscapes to a person connected with the place.

Travel Packaging by Roxane Lagache

Artist Roxane Lagache is responsible for the perfumes’ visual expression. She has worked on the logo, watercolors depicting each destination, box design, and even bottle photography, evolving the logo along with the brand.

Fragrance composes a scene from a place, and pictures make that journey visible. Even after choosing a bottle, the imagery surrounding it provides a clue for recalling the creation’s background.

The brand currently states that it uses no animal-derived materials in any of its perfumes. The “leather” in Sugar Leather likewise does not mean that animal hide itself is used as a raw material; it is the impression of leather rendered through fragrance ingredients. Distinguishing a story’s subject from the materials actually used is also important to understanding this approach to perfume-making.