Roos & Roos: An Unconventional Perfume House Created by a Legendary Mother and Her Musical Daughter

“Perfume is the person themselves, a second gender, a second skin.”
— The brand manifesto

Basic Information

Founded: 2014
Founders: Chantal Roos and Alexandra Roos
Based in: Paris, France
Official website: roosandroos.fr

The Founders and the Brand’s Origins

Chantal Roos: A Living Legend of the Perfume Industry

To understand Roos & Roos, one must first trace the career of the mother, Chantal Roos. Active in the Paris perfume industry for decades, she is described as a “legend” by many of its insiders.​

Chantal began engaging seriously with perfume during her time working as a marketing assistant at Coty.

“When I worked at Coty, I did not yet think perfume was particularly important. But I could not forget the Courrèges perfume on my boss’s desk, and I secretly sprayed some on myself.”

Then, in 1976, an invitation to join the Yves Saint Laurent (in Japanese) team as international product manager changed the course of her life.

In 1977, just 18 months after joining the company, Chantal launched the legendary Opium with Yves Saint Laurent himself. “If I had to choose one favorite perfume, it would be Opium, because it was my first. Back then we were always out of stock, and everyone was angry with me because I could not get it into the stores,” she recalls.
There is also a story that its American launch was delayed for a year because permission was withheld on the grounds that its name “made women think of drugs.” After Opium, she also helped develop such celebrated Yves Saint Laurent fragrances as Kouros, Paris, and Jazz.

Chantal subsequently became CEO of Beauté Prestige International (BPI), the French Shiseido subsidiary responsible for fragrances by Issey Miyake (in Japanese) and Jean Paul Gaultier. During her time at BPI, she achieved another landmark with the creation of Issey Miyake’s L’Eau d’Issey.

“When I first met Mr. Miyake, he said, ‘I hate perfume.’ It felt like having the wind taken out of my sails. But as we continued talking, he told me that an olfactory aesthetic for women meant ‘the purity of water flowing over the skin.’ That finally gave us a starting point.”

It was also Chantal who discovered the young perfumer Francis Kurkdjian and guided him toward creating Jean Paul Gaultier’s celebrated Le Male (1995). After leaving BPI, she returned to Yves Saint Laurent Beauté in 2000 and worked to rebuild the brand as CEO. Chantal Roos is thus one of the relatively few women who have continued to lead the perfume industry from its very center.

Alexandra Roos: A Sensibility Nurtured by Music

Born in Saint-Cloud in 1970, Alexandra Roos grew up surrounded by fragrance from the moment she was born.

“It was almost as if I had been born inside a bottle of Opium. As a child, I grew up smelling all the laboratory samples my mother brought home.”

By her teenage years, however, Alexandra’s passion was not perfume but music.

Making her debut with the album A7 in 1997, Alexandra pursued a career as a rock and folk singer-songwriter and released four albums in total.
In 2004, she traveled to Tucson, Arizona, to record Fanfare with Calexico’s sound engineer, Craig Schumacher.
At the Printemps de Bourges music festival in 2005, she opened for Nancy Sinatra. In 2007, she released Huit de pique on Naïve Records, the label whose roster includes Carla Bruni and Pink Martini.

As a songwriter, she has also written for numerous artists and performed a duet on an album by Juliette Gréco.

The Brand’s Birth: A Daughter’s Suggestion Set Things in Motion

The turning point came when Chantal had stepped down from Yves Saint Laurent Beauté and was beginning to consider independence. Alexandra, who had been following a musical path, suggested to her mother: “Let’s start a brand together.”

“I could feel the current of the times, when people such as Frédéric Malle (in Japanese) were establishing independent brands. So I approached my mother. Before that, we had never even thought of having a brand of our own.”

The rising wave of the niche-fragrance market made this mother-and-daughter project possible.​

And so, in 2014, the brand was born under the name Dear Rose. It was renamed Roos & Roos in 2017, but its underlying spirit has remained unchanged: a story of women spanning two generations, and a fusion of music and scent. Today, it operates with a clear division of roles. Chantal handles perfume development and marketing, while Alexandra is responsible for fragrance ideas, stories, names, and design.

The official website neatly encapsulates their respective personalities: Chantal is “Not so classic,” an unconventional classicist, while Alexandra is “Not so rebel,” not especially rebellious, yet free.​

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The Brand’s Commitments

The Philosophy of Scent as Musical Composition

The central thread running through the world of Roos & Roos is the inseparable relationship between music and scent. The repetition of “Roos” in the brand’s name is not merely the duplication of a surname; it also symbolizes the resonance between these two elements.

“The brand name came from the resemblance between music and perfume. Both are invisible, yet both can change the atmosphere. Both are made up of notes and harmonies.”
— Alexandra Roos​

Asked what niche fragrance means, Alexandra answers: “It is an auteur’s perfume. In cinema, it would be like an art film. You concentrate on storytelling and emotion rather than marketing or celebrities. You speak one-to-one with a perfumer, communicate a story or a feeling, and have that person express it. Rather like a film director.”​

Chantal likewise compares creating niche fragrances to haute couture. “Starting a niche-fragrance brand is like creating haute couture in the sense that you can freely experiment with your own creativity. You also have the freedom to use raw materials that had once been forgotten,” she says.​

A Commitment to Ingredients and Relationships with Perfumers

Roos & Roos takes the generous use of expensive, rare natural fragrance materials as a fundamental principle. Perfumers are given considerable freedom in creating scents. The official website describes “the freedom for perfumers to imagine beautiful perfumes without making any compromise in olfactory form or the choice of materials.”

The principal perfumer since the brand’s beginnings has been Fabrice Pellegrin, a native of Grasse. His outstanding creations span niche and major brands, from Thierry Mugler’s Womanity to work for Jo Malone, Diptyque, and Parfums de Marly. In 2021, he received the 14th Prix François Coty, a prestigious award in the French perfume industry.

The later Les Simples collection also brought in leading perfumers such as Dominique Ropion (in Japanese) and Nicolas Bonneville, broadening the brand’s expressive range.

Bottle and Packaging Design

Another characteristic of Roos & Roos is its differing approach to bottle design from one collection to another. Les Exclusifs is built around the concept of placing exceptional fragrances in artist-designed bottles.

The Les Simples collection, discussed below, puts ecodesign at the forefront instead. Lightweight glass bottles, fully compostable caps made with cork and wood, and packaging using recycled paper express a consistent commitment to harmony with nature throughout the packaging.​

Solidarity with Women and Social Commitment

Roos & Roos also officially supports the women’s rights organization La Fondation des Femmes. Since March 8, 2019, International Women’s Day, it has continued donating 10% of its online perfume sales to the foundation. Meeting the foundation’s chair, Anne-Cécile Mailfert, reportedly led Chantal and Alexandra to resolve to “take action through the brand.”

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The Fragrance Lineup

The Roos & Roos collections can broadly be divided into three groups: the Original Collection, Les Exclusifs, and Les Simples.

Original Collection

This was the first collection, introduced when the brand launched in 2014. Initially offered under the name Dear Rose, all five fragrances were composed by Grasse-based perfumer Fabrice Pellegrin. Centered on three elements, roses, music, and women, each fragrance was designed to hold a story of its own.

Representative creations include the following.

• A Capella: Composed of rosebud absolute, ivy, and white woods. Its concept is “a scent expressing a dew-covered rose field in the morning, like a pure, unaccompanied voice,” and it has been a bestseller from the beginning.
• Nymphessence: A floral-fruity-woody fragrance inspired by “a fairy by the river.” Opening notes of bergamot, pear, and mandarin lead to a heart of freesia, magnolia, and orange blossom, followed by a base of ambergris and white musk. This, too, is one of the brand’s signature bestsellers.
• Bloody Rose: Composed of ylang-ylang, orange blossom, incense, and patchouli. It evokes “a sensual woman who enters a room wearing white roses and makes everyone turn to look.”
• Sympathy for the Sun: Inspired by memories of summers on the Côte d’Azur and a southern French landscape that Chantal describes as “the scent of Hesperian flowers, salty wood, wind, and sails.”​
• Mentha Religiosa: Top notes of peppermint and bergamot are followed by a heart of incense and iris, then a base of cedarwood and white musk. It evokes “a mysterious woman in a place of religious prayer,” and its name is also a play on mante religieuse, the French for praying mantis. Alexandra names it among the creations to which she is most attached. It has won a FiFi Award, as discussed below.

Les Exclusifs

A more avant-garde collection characterized by artist-designed bottles. These fragrances express the finest raw materials through avant-garde accords, and five creations are currently listed on the official website.​

Les Simples

Introduced in 2022, this collection puts environmental responsibility at its heart. Simples refers to the aromatic plants cultivated by monks in medieval monasteries for medicinal and therapeutic purposes. In homage to this tradition, its four creations place absinthe (wormwood), eucalyptus, angelica, and nettle in starring roles. All use 100% vegan formulas. The three participating perfumers are Fabrice Pellegrin, Dominique Ropion, and Nicolas Bonneville.

Among them, Malamata is a creation by Dominique Ropion. Its composition begins with the lush green of nettle and leads into rose, lily of the valley, and patchouli, a progression praised for its “contrast of surprise and charm.”​

By the Way…

• Sympathy for the Sun and the Velvet Underground: Some Roos & Roos fragrances contain discreet tributes to music. Sympathy for the Sun was inspired by Pale Blue Eyes, the Velvet Underground classic Alexandra has loved since her teenage years. By coincidence, both Chantal and Alexandra are said to have pale-blue eyes. A small but beautiful story lies behind the fragrance, bringing together the mother’s and daughter’s eyes, beloved music, and the light of southern France.​
• FiFi Award recognition: Mentha Religiosa won a FiFi Award, and at the 2023 Fragrance Foundation France Awards, Malamata won Best Perfume from an Independent Brand. Frédéric Malle and Maison Francis Kurkdjian were also among that year’s finalists, conveying the significance of the accolade.