“Such a confusing name when it wasn’t founded in 1833.” “I hate the scent changing from one edition to the next, so I bought a ton of the previous edition.” “My Fueguia collection just keeps multiplying.” “The discount for Argentina winning doesn’t apply online. Crying.” “Their stores are only where wealthy people live.” Fueguia regularly sets Japan’s perfume-obsessed corners of social media buzzing with comments like these. Just who is Julian Bedel? What exactly is Fueguia? I would like to explain this brand, which has not yet left a deep mark on perfume history but inspires such enthusiasm among Japanese fragrance lovers, in as much detail as possible.
Fueguia is born from a fusion of a botanist’s dedication to plants, a chemist’s approach of analyzing fragrance down to the molecular level, and an artist’s intuition. The approaches of botanist, chemist, and artist cannot be separated. We offer not only the scents of nature, but a range of fragrances that let you experience something akin to a musical performance and other experiences.
Julian Bedel, from an interview with WWD Japan
Basic Information
Founded: 2010
Founder: Julian Bedel
Official website: English-language official website (Japanese-language official website)
Founding History
Talking about my life is boring. I think the main aspects of Fueguia are botanical research and our own manufacturing. So yes, I don’t think my story matters as much as the products, or how we make them every day. But, well, my father and I are both artists, and I am also a musician. I play guitars, and sometimes make them. I think of making perfume as something like working in a workshop.
Julian Bedel
Fueguia 1833 was founded in Buenos Aires in 2010 by Argentine artist Julian Bedel and his then business partner Amalia Amoedo, who has since left the company.
Who is Julian Bedel? Born in Buenos Aires in 1978, Julian counts the French entomologist Louis Bedel, the travel writer Maurice Bedel, and Filiberto Oliveira de Cézar among his ancestors. His father and siblings are artists.
He himself had no interest in perfume and was not a perfumer. While making guitars, playing music, and studying painting and sculpture, he reached a major turning point when his father sent him an article about the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It concerned biologist Linda Buck and neuroscientist Richard Axel’s research into the genome and olfactory receptors, a molecular genetic investigation into how we identify smells. Fascinated by the science of smell, Julian felt this was what he should create through his art and decided to pursue fragrance.
Although he did not come from a family involved in the perfume industry, scents had always been tied to his emotions, and he apparently found it easy to remember the differences between ingredients and the facets of their aromas.
The brand name Fueguia is a tribute to Fuegia Basket, an Indigenous woman from Tierra del Fuego, the island at the southern end of Patagonia in South America, whose name means “Land of Fire.” Her local name was Yokcushlu, and in 1830 she became one of the hostages taken by Robert FitzRoy, a naval officer and captain of the Beagle. She was only nine years old at the time, and the intention was to hold her until the local people returned a boat they had stolen from the Beagle. Despite being a captive, her cheerful smile made her popular aboard the ship. The men who were making a basket boat to replace the stolen boat and return to the Beagle gave her the name Fuegia Basket.
Ultimately, FitzRoy took Yokcushlu to Britain to educate her as part of his plan to “civilize” Tierra del Fuego. There she met important British figures, including the king, Darwin, and various scientists. In 1831, it was decided that she and the other captives should be returned home, and the Beagle began its second voyage, carrying the young Darwin. In his diary, Darwin described her as “a pleasant, modest, reserved young girl, with a rather agreeable but sometimes sullen expression, and very quick to learn anything, especially languages.”
In December 1832, the Beagle finally reached Tierra del Fuego, and its crew returned the three captives, who had been educated for the purpose of civilization, to the local people. The “1833” in Fueguia 1833 comes from the year she returned, though precisely what is correct here remains a mystery. Yokcushlu lived until 1883, and Eduardo Rawson’s 1991 historical novel Fuegia includes a dedication in her memory.
Fueguia’s perfumes are created as tributes to the plants native to South America and its Indigenous communities, almost as if they express through scent the civilization Captain FitzRoy had envisioned.
Patagonia is our point of origin, an undeveloped land with few people where nature reigns. In that environment, local communities harvest the native species we have been looking for through sustainable projects, allowing us to extract unconventional essences. I much prefer supporting communities by buying sustainably grown crops to making a fortune from a popular perfume project. Fueguia is not a popular brand; it is just a small brand that releases a lot of perfumes.
Julian Bedel
Julian conducts botanical research, and in 2016 acquired a 50-acre plantation in Uruguay, roughly the area of four to five Tokyo Domes, where aromatic plants are sustainably cultivated and distilled. The synthetic fragrance ingredients (in Japanese) he uses mainly come from Firmenich and Givaudan.
Because the materials are generally harvested from the company’s own farm, supplies are limited and each production run consists of 400 bottles. These runs are called editions, and the scent varies slightly from one edition to the next. When a key ingredient can no longer be harvested, a fragrance is discontinued.
The entire process takes place at Fueguia’s laboratory in Milan, Italy, where Julian composes the perfumes.
Fueguia perfumes are made using facilities borrowed from universities in Patagonia and the Inca region (perhaps now at its own facilities in Italy?). The wooden boxes housing the perfumes are all handmade from wood from Patagonian forests at a carpentry school in Patagonia, with the help of the nonprofit Help Argentina Foundation, which Bedel established with Lloyd Nimetz in 2002. The brand also declares that it never uses plastic.
We noticed that perfumes that did not sell very quickly were getting better with time. So we decided to keep 10% of our production, not sell it, and let it rest for five years. […] This is the concept of the Vintage Cave, and I think we were the first company to do it.
Julian Bedel
Fueguia does not use an olfactory pyramid (in Japanese) to describe the principal accords of its perfumes. The pyramid is a traditional French perfumery convention, but Julian, who has no background in that world, uses an “atom” approach that he finds easier to understand. He describes the principal ingredient as the tonic, or keynote, and the two supporting ingredients as the dominant and subdominant.
The pyramid is aimed at salespeople and customers, but the atom should be easy to remember. We are creating a new way to introduce all our many perfumes. So we do not use blotters (in Japanese), nor do we spray perfume into the air. We simply spray it into flasks. The scents do not mix, and the boutique itself does not smell of perfume, so customers can smell the true fragrance inside each flask. Another reason is that I discovered paper does not show the real scent as it smells on skin, and some molecules do not diffuse properly on it.
Julian Bedel
In Japan, the first store opened at the Grand Hyatt Tokyo on October 7, 2015. A second Japanese store opened at Ginza Six in 2021 during the pandemic, and another was scheduled to open at Azabudai Hills in November 2023.
Writing this article left me with the sense that Fueguia offers a range of perfumes almost broad enough for a single brand to satisfy everyone’s individual taste. Perhaps its appeal lies in Julian’s rich sensitivity, an enthusiasm so absorbing that he himself compares it to masturbation, and his extraordinary fixation on Argentina. Personally, I am not especially fond of a brand having at least 100 fragrances. Still, perhaps that number reflects an exceptional gift for inspiration and for carrying an idea through to completion.
