“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
- The Founder and the Brand’s Beginnings
- A Science-Loving Boy from a Family of Craftspeople
- Meeting Amélie Bourgeois in Evening Classes
- Beginning in 2015 with Six Fragrances That Set the Classics in Motion
- Changing Sunday Evenings with a Clean Scent
- Keeping His Mother’s Flower within a Fragrance
- Creating a Manufacturing Base across the Road from Where He Sold Vegetables with His Grandfather
- What Matters to the Brand
- An Aside…
- References
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’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).
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
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.
The Perfume Collections
Les Eaux Primordiales develops its perfumes around four collections: Superclassique reworks classical fragrance structures; Supercritique explores flowers; Superfluide focuses on woods, resins, and spices; and Supermassive brings together extraits de parfum. Even when rose or vanilla appears in more than one collection, its role changes according to whether it is the central floral theme or part of a composition with woods and resins.
In 2024, Poulain explained that dividing the range into collections helps people find a fragrance that suits them across a broad choice of fresh, spicy, musky, and floral scents.
Superclassique
Superclassique was the first collection Poulain worked on. It draws on combinations developed in twentieth-century French perfumery and reworks them into contemporary perfumes. Its starting point is an exchange between memory and the classics, also present in the early Champ d’Influence and Mémoire du Futur.
Couleur Primaire moves from aldehydes and pear into jasmine, peony, and rose, then white musk and Ambroxan, evoking freshly laundered linen. A clean smell becomes a perfume with fruit and flowers. Poulain names it among the fragrances he found difficult to develop: its simplicity is only apparent, and the formula combining freshness with longevity is among the brand’s most complex.
Iris Palladium pairs the delicacy of iris with the strength of the silvery precious metal palladium. Cardamom, lavender, and coriander lead into iris and violet, followed by sandalwood and vanilla. Spices and woods support a powdery, silky floral texture. The metal is an image contrasting with the softness of the flower, not the name of a fragrance ingredient.
Elevation joined the collection to mark ten years of creation. Its themes are continued growth and looking back at the path already traveled. Pear and hazelnut meet the toasted character of sesame and cardamom, opening into orange blossom, freesia, vanilla, and guaiac wood. The pear also found in Couleur Primaire is surrounded here by nuts and woods, creating a soft, cotton-like sweetness.
Supercritique
Supercritique puts flowers familiar to perfumery, including rose, mimosa, neroli, and tuberose, at its center. Its name comes from supercritical extraction using carbon dioxide. Poulain’s interest extends beyond reproducing a flower’s smell to imagining the scene in which his flower might bloom.
Rose Supercritique was the collection’s first creation. Inspired by a rose in an Eastern palace, it opens with pink pepper and bergamot, combines rose with blackcurrant and cardamom, and gains depth from myrrh and incense. A setting suggesting spiced tea and incense drifting through a palace changes the flower’s character.
Mimosa Supercritique, dedicated to his mother, imagines a Mediterranean wedding at the end of winter. The last snow falling on the flowers becomes icing sugar, with jasmine, tuberose, orange blossom, and white musk layered into the composition. His mother’s bouquet of mimosa leads to flowers blooming at the boundary between snow and spring. Multiple flowers and musk broaden the scene while preserving its personal memory.
Superfluide
Superfluide turns to woods, resins, and spices from around the world. In contrast to the floral collection, its starting points are the substance of woods, the sweetness of resins, and the warmth of spices. A name borrowed from physics also expresses an interest in the movement and texture of materials.
Ambre Superfluide depicts a velvet armchair beside a fireplace and a freshly baked apple and cinnamon pie. Apple, cinnamon, and honey meet rum, tobacco, and the resin benzoin. The fragrance composes a warm interior, taking in time spent beside the fire as well as the pastry itself.
Cèdre Superfluide, also featured in the Milan installation, imagines the Atlas Mountains at dusk. Rose, immortelle, and plum surround the image of cedar, followed by saffron and vanilla. Flowers and fruit accompany the wood in a landscape moving from mountain dusk toward dawn.
Oud Superfluide surrounds Laotian oud with bitter orange, sesame, guaiac wood, vanilla, and benzoin. Whereas Ambre evokes the warmth of an interior, this fragrance focuses on oud’s combination with other woods, citrus, and vanilla. The materials around the wood shape its character.
Supermassive
Supermassive is a collection of extraits de parfum. Drawing on cosmology and oceanography, it likens the deep sea and distant galaxies to the attraction exerted by fragrance on skin. Alongside the distinctions between materials such as flowers and woods, it explores the contrasts that give a concentrated scent its form.
In its red bottle, Ambre Supermassive evokes the depth and warmth of red amber. Apple, pineapple, and cinnamon meet honey, rum, black vanilla, and tobacco. It shares honey, rum, and tobacco with Ambre Superfluide but also includes pineapple and heliotrope. Where Ambre Superfluide depicts a winter interior, Ambre Supermassive layers fruit and resins to express amber’s density.
Vanille Supermassive brings bergamot, elemi, cinnamon, fir balsam, and labdanum to vanilla’s sweetness. Caramel is also present, but patchouli, resins, and woody impressions support the composition, with white musk adding softness. It approaches vanilla through spices and woods as well as confectionery sweetness.
Oud Supermassive grew from a collaboration between Poulain and perfumer Julien Rasquinet. Peach, osmanthus, and passion fruit contrast with the depth of oud, leather, olibanum, and tobacco. The two perfumers have discussed the contrast between fresh citrus and fruit and the velvety oud foundation. Unlike Oud Superfluide’s sesame and vanilla, the pairing of fruit and leather plays an important role here.
Superose: Rose through Fruit and Spice
Superose is an eau de parfum presenting another face of rose. Bright pear, lychee, and peach lead into Damask rose and saffron, supported by patchouli, vanilla, and white musk. Where Rose Supercritique suggests a palace with tea and incense, Superose expands the richness of rose through fruit and spices.
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
- 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
- Les Eaux Primordiales, “Our Story” — Founding, upbringing, and the origin of the brand name — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/pages/notre-histoire
- 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/
- 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/
- 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
- 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
- Les Eaux Primordiales, “Couleur Primaire” — Memories of clean linen and pear, and the fragrance composition — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/products/couleur-primaire
- 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/
- 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
- Les Eaux Primordiales, “Supercritique” — The floral collection’s inspiration and current fragrances — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/collections/supercritique
- Les Eaux Primordiales, “Mimosa Supercritique” — The wedding scene and fragrance composition — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/products/mimosa
- Les Eaux Primordiales, “Superfluide” — The collection centered on materials — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/collections/superfluide
- Les Eaux Primordiales, “Ambre Superfluide” — The inspiration of a winter interior and the fragrance composition — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/products/ambresuperfluide
- Les Eaux Primordiales, “Supermassive” — Inspiration from cosmology and oceanography, and current fragrances — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/collections/supermassive
- Les Eaux Primordiales, “Ambre Supermassive” — Amber inspiration, notes, and official bottle images — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/products/ambre-supermassive
- Les Eaux Primordiales, “Savoir Faire” — Maturation, the Resonance Room, and the making of furniture and displays — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/pages/savoir-faire
- Les Eaux Primordiales, “La Genèse” — The Bechers, Tania & Vincent, and visual expression — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/blogs/les-eaux-primordiales/la-genese
- Les Eaux Primordiales, “Art & Design” — The 2023 Milan installation and its award — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/pages/art-design
- Les Eaux Primordiales, “Scented Candles / Les Expériences Immobiles” — Ceramic containers, scents, wax, and production — https://www.leseauxprimordiales.com/en/collections/experiences-immobiles
- Les Eaux Primordiales: Superclassique
- Les Eaux Primordiales: Iris Palladium
- Les Eaux Primordiales: Elevation
- Les Eaux Primordiales: Rose Supercritique
- Les Eaux Primordiales: Cèdre Superfluide
- Les Eaux Primordiales: Oud Superfluide
- Les Eaux Primordiales: Vanille Supermassive
- Les Eaux Primordiales: Oud Supermassive
- Les Eaux Primordiales: Behind Oud Supermassive
- Les Eaux Primordiales: Superose
- Les Eaux Primordiales: Supercritique Collection (French)
