Matiere Premiere

Essential Information

Founded: 2019
Founder: Aurélien Guichard (in Japanese)
Official website: English

The Founding of the House

Matiere Premiere, which made its Japanese debut alongside Salon de Parfum in late October 2021, was founded by Aurélien Guichard (in Japanese), an eighth-generation perfumer in a long line of perfumers.
After graduating from perfumery school in 2003, Aurélien had always dreamed of becoming something the world had yet to see: a perfumer who owned a farm of fragrance plants and used them in his own perfumes. To realize that dream, he collaborated with many great perfumers at leading international companies, including Givaudan and Firmenich. Finally, in 2016, he established a farm of Centifolia roses (in Japanese) and tuberose (in Japanese) in his hometown of Grasse, the capital of perfume. He reportedly devotes a quarter of his time to the farm. The flowers harvested from these fields are also Ecocert certified.

I grew up on my grandparents’ farm in Grasse, where they cultivated roses, jasmine, verbena, and other plants. Around 2014, however, my grandparents were getting older, and my grandfather could no longer work on the farm. I felt that if I did not create a farm myself, the local know-how passed down through generations of my family would disappear. At that time, my dream was to become the only perfumer in the world to grow his own fragrance materials and use them in his perfumes. So I decided to establish an organic farm, beginning by planting 12,000 rose bushes and making it the largest farm in the south of France. Then I planted tuberose.

Aurélien Guichard

This experience gave Aurélien a great deal of inspiration when composing fragrances, while strengthening his desire to create a perfume brand of his own. With the understanding and support of Takasago, where he had worked since 2018, he launched his own brand, Matiere Premiere, in October 2019. It appears that Aurélien’s parents, his father being the great Jean Guichard (in Japanese), along with Cedric Meiffret, who had worked as a manager at IFF, Mane, and Givaudan, and Caius Von Knorring, who had worked in perfume-brand marketing at LVMH and Puig, shared his vision and became business partners in the launch.

Many perfumes created in the 1960s and 1970s were very complex. But I wanted to create perfumes in which experts and non-experts alike could appreciate the beauty of the raw materials. It is all very well to say that perfumes are made from beautiful ingredients, but can you actually feel that? Can the person wearing the perfume sense the beauty of the raw materials?

The challenge was to create something with a wealth of texture. So I used an individual natural fragrance material (in Japanese) in overdose (in Japanese) and combined it with modernity. How do you create a long-lasting perfume whose first impression is not too intense? How do you combine high quality with modernity? This is the core of our creations.

Aurélien Guichard

We believe that beauty lies in simplicity. Just as it does in other arts, such as architecture.

Caius Von Knorring

The Creations

We want to be one of the highest-quality brands on the market. What we promise our customers is an unforgettable sillage and an emotional impression that never fades.

Aurélien Guichard

The Collection

In creating Matiere Premiere perfumes, Aurélien aims to make them as genderless as possible, rather than unisex. With rose, for example, he adds more masculine elements to create a genderless fragrance with an ambiguous character. Matiere Premiere means “raw material” in French, and creations that focus on one raw material used in overdose are at the heart of the brand.

Aurélien introduced six fragrances when the brand launched. Among them, the ones he is proudest of are Radical Rose, which uses Centifolia roses grown on his own farm, and French Flower, which uses his own tuberose. The perfumes currently available and their central ingredients are listed below.

• Bois D’Ebene: guaiac wood from Paraguay
• Cologne Cedrat: citron from Italy
• Encens Suave: incense from Somalia
• Neroli Oranger: orange blossom from Tunisia
• Parisian Musc: ambrette seed from Peru
• Santal Austral: sandalwood from Australia
• Crystal Saffron: saffron from Greece
• French Flower: absolute and enfleurage of the house’s own tuberose
• Radical Rose: absolute of the house’s own Centifolia roses
• Falcon Leather: birch tar from Finland
• Oud Seven: Assam oud from Bangladesh

Packaging

Matiere Premiere’s beauty lies in its clean, minimal character. Functionality that connects everyday life with the accoutrements of a perfumer also expresses the brand’s aesthetic. For example, the 6 ml bottle is an actual bottle used by perfumers every day to evaluate perfume compositions (in Japanese). It was this bottle that inspired the 100 ml design.

The perfumes take their color solely from the natural fragrance materials; no synthetic colorants are used to color the perfume itself. Natural fragrance materials account for 85% to 92% of the perfumes, which are also suitable for vegans and phthalate-free.