Régime des Fleurs: A Rebellion of the Senses Ruling a Kingdom of Flowers

“I believe that wearing perfume is a creative act. It is an invisible way to express emotion, change how you feel, and discover yourself.”

— Alia Raza, founder​

Basic Information

• Founded: 2014 (Los Angeles)
• Founder: Alia Raza; co-founder Ezra Woods has since departed
• Current head: Alia Raza (Founder / CEO / Creative Director)
• Official website: regimedesfleurs.com

Régime des Fleurs means “the rule of flowers” or “the kingdom of flowers” in French. The French name was not intended to suggest that the brand was French. Rather, it was chosen because Alia feels such an affinity with French culture that she describes herself as “French at heart.”

The Founder and the Origins of the Brand

A Childhood Surrounded by Flowers

Alia Raza comes from Buffalo, New York. Her parents immigrated from Pakistan, and both were doctors. Despite Buffalo’s cold climate, her mother was passionate about growing tropical plants.

There were lilac bushes and honeysuckle vines, but what was most deeply imprinted on the young Alia was the scent of stephanotis, or Madagascar jasmine, entwined around the banister of the staircase leading to her bedroom. She recalls that every summer, whenever she opened her bedroom door, an explosion of white-flower fragrance greeted her.​

Love of flowers was woven into the very atmosphere of her childhood home. She remembers admiring the perfumes on her mother’s dressing table and buying her first perfume at The Body Shop (in Japanese) in middle school. Then, in the summer of 1995, the 16-year-old Alia visited New York, taking classes at Parsons while wandering around the West Village. She happened to stumble into the long-established niche perfume shop Aedes de Venustas. Its Austrian owner, Karl, noticed that everything she picked up shared “gardenia and tuberose,” and recommended L’Artisan (in Japanese)’s tuberose. It became her lifelong signature fragrance. She is reportedly so attached to it that, even now that it has been discontinued, she keeps a stock of 12 bottles.​

New York, Then LA: Her Path as a Filmmaker

The day after graduating from high school, Alia flew to New York. Over the next few years, she appeared in filmmaker friends’ short films and helped with scripts, eventually making short films and video art of her own. She later relocated to Los Angeles to work as a production assistant on independent films.​

A few weeks after moving to LA, Alia was introduced to a friend of her roommate. He was fashion stylist Ezra Woods.​

“On the very first day we met, we talked about perfume and flowers for two hours.”

— Alia Raza​

Ezra’s upbringing was likewise inseparable from flowers. Born in Los Angeles, he grew up in a family of florists spanning four generations in Southern California. His grandfather began by selling flowers on the streets of downtown LA, and his parents ran a well-regarded flower shop in Brentwood. Flowers and plants had been part of Ezra’s identity since childhood. Even while working as a celebrity stylist with clients including Chloë Sevigny and Michelle Williams, that affinity for flowers remained at his core.

The Decisive Turning Point: A Gallery’s Scent

The two remained friends and even co-hosted a dance party named “Indole (in Japanese).” Indole is a molecule found in white flowers such as tuberose and jasmine (in Japanese), responsible for that “sensual, melting richness,” while also carrying the smell of decay and death. It was this paradoxical chemical that lent its name to the event.​

In 2013, Alia had an opportunity to exhibit her video work at a small gallery in downtown LA. She decided to add a scent installation to the exhibition. Having made a series of videos themed around “poisonous flowers that bloom at night,” she wanted to create a fragrance inspired by those images. She gathered materials herself and set up a miniature perfumery laboratory in her room.

“When I presented the scent at the gallery, people’s reactions were wonderful, and I fell in love with the process of making it. I decided to take a step back from art and film and try something different. Then it took over my life. Not that I’m complaining.”

— Alia Raza​

One day, Ezra visited Alia’s apartment after they had not seen each other for a while. His eyes lit up at the bottles, test tubes, and jars of materials covering the table. Alia moved into Ezra’s apartment “for a month,” and they began composing fragrances together. It turned out that Ezra also had his own independently assembled collection of materials, and their collaboration gathered pace.​

“Within a few months we had completed six formulas and started designing bottles. Then we launched in 2014.”

— Alia Raza​

The Brand’s Birth and Growth

Régime des Fleurs debuted in March 2014 with six handmade perfumes. They were presented as a collection divided into three tiers, Lyrics, Ballads, and Epics, followed that November by Collection Two, which added three more fragrances. The Wall Street Journal covered the brand early on, describing the pair as “lifelong fragrance geeks.”

The brand gained a cult following in niche perfumery, fashion, and art, and continued to grow steadily. In January 2018, it opened an atelier in LA, which also became a place for cultural and creative exchange through contemporary art events and exhibitions.​

Around 2020, Alia herself revealed that co-founder Ezra Woods had “decided to go in a direction other than fragrance.” Today, Alia Raza leads the brand alone as Founder / CEO / Creative Director. She has also moved her base to Paris, continuing to create while traveling between New York and Paris.​

The Brand’s Distinctive Commitments

“A Perfume Is a Complete Little Film”

If the philosophy of Régime des Fleurs can be expressed in a single phrase, it is to design perfume as a “multisensory experience.” For Alia, a former filmmaker, perfume is not simply “a pleasant smell.” Visual mood boards, historical research, and literary narratives are all condensed into a single fragrance.​

“I think there are different worlds within the Régime universe. We explore visual art, historical periods, and botanical themes. We can go anywhere. But the starting point is always nature, history, and art.”

— Alia Raza​

In the fragrance-development process, Alia sometimes begins by collecting as many as 100 images, eventually narrowing them down to around 10. She then gives those visuals and “keywords” to a perfumer to develop a formula.​

A Sincere Commitment to Rare Materials

One of the brand’s greatest distinctions is its high proportion of rare natural materials.

“I began making perfumes by hand and fell in love with rare flower absolutes. Even now, we continue to use rare, fine materials in proportions that even many luxury brands do not.”

— Alia Raza​

Emblematic of this is Nymphaea Caerulea ($990), which could be called a flagship fragrance. It uses an ultra-pure extract of blue water lilies from Egypt, harvested before sunrise in a two-acre pond in India. This is a material to which only Régime des Fleurs has access, making it a symbol of “a perfume that cannot be copied.”​

A Commitment to Bottles and Packaging

For Alia, with her deep love of film and visuals, bottle design was conceived from the beginning as an “art object.” Every bottle in the early Fait Main collection was finished by hand-painting and marked with a serial number.​

For years, Alia “had no choice but to customize stock bottles with colors and caps.” In the brand’s seventh year, she was finally able to create an original glass bottle from scratch. That landmark fragrance was Rock River Melody in 2021.​

“For so long, I had to use stock bottles and customize them with different color treatments and caps. But after seven years, I was finally able to create a custom glass bottle from scratch. It was a dream.”

— Alia Raza​

The bottle was designed by New York-based architecture practice New Affiliates. Inspired by the brand’s shield emblem, it uses a shape in which a square and a circle intersect, “forming the outline of a shield when viewed from above.” One face is flat and the other gently rounded, designed to fit comfortably in the hand.​

As an overall packaging philosophy, Alia has deliberately resisted “a brand keeping the same appearance for decades.” She believes packaging, like perfume itself, should evolve and grow with the brand.​

The Fragrance Lineup

The Régime des Fleurs range is structured not simply around seasonal divisions, but as “collections,” each with a distinct world shaped by its theme or concept.

The Original Three-Tier Structure: Lyrics / Ballads / Epics

From the brand’s debut in 2014, its creations were categorized into three levels of complexity.

• Lyrics: Fresh, watery and leafy notes, expressing nature’s understated side.
• Ballads: More conceptual, self-referential works, with more abstract references.
• Epics: Ambitious compositions lavishly using rare materials, such as Indian and Hawaiian blue lotus and white ambergris.

The Fait Main Collection

A handmade, avant-garde collection that could be described as the brand’s starting point. All bottles are hand-painted and carry serial numbers. One of its greatest achievements, Nymphaea Caerulea, contains at least 80 ingredients and centers on an exceptionally rare blue water lily extract. A limited edition that can be produced in batches of no more than 250 bottles at a time, it was once available in Japan exclusively through Estnation.

The Eau de Parfum Collection

The main line, added in 2016. It began around five perfumes inspired by the spectacle of the plant kingdom: Cacti, Falling Trees, Gold Leaves, Willows, and Glass Blooms. It has since expanded into a broad range at the heart of the brand.

Representative creations from recent years:

• Rock River Melody: A scent of green sap, ivy, and bergamot inspired by muddy horseback rides in the forest of Fontainebleau, Tarkovsky’s film Mirror, and the music of Tyler, the Creator. A landmark creation that introduced the brand’s first custom bottle.​
• The Tuberose Collection / Tóor-Tóor: A “brutalist tuberose” created with world-renowned perfumer Dominique Ropion, often called the “king of white flowers.” Composed with grapefruit peel, violet leaf, and vetiver, it reconsiders that sensual bloom from a new perspective, “full of life, green, earthy, and bitter.” In Alia’s words, “a complex, unisex, captivating, and utterly unexpected creation.”
• Tears: Inspired by a love of lilac and “Stendhal syndrome,” a rare phenomenon in which beautiful artworks provoke physical reactions such as tears, chest pain, or loss of consciousness. Created with perfumer Mathieu Nardin.​
• Blood Spider Orchids: Introduced as a limited extrait de parfum in 2024 and returning as an EDP in 2025. Taking as its subject a real orchid with “blood-stained petals,” it combines cinnamon, smoked clove, frankincense, and patchouli in a “gothic-dark” scent. Alia herself calls it “Dracula’s flower.”

Chloë Sevigny Little Flower

A rose perfume born from a two-year collaboration with actress and style icon Chloë Sevigny. The fact that “Régime had never had a rose” converged with Chloë’s love of roses, and the finished creation became “the most widely loved perfume since we started.” Sometimes described as “a fragrance for the coolest girl in the room,” it is a tart, green, dewy rose.

The Personal/Space Collection

A multi-use fragrance collection born in 2018 from inspiration during a residency in Hawaii. Its experimental concept allows it to be used on skin, hair, or in a space.

The Artefacts Candle Series

A candle series inspired by the stories, myths, and relics of ancient civilizations. Each candle comes in a white porcelain vessel, presented in a transparent cube like a museum exhibit. The series comprises four scents: Thaleia, Naiad, Return, and Swans.​

By the Way…​

• The Tuberose Legend: Alia’s friend Christopher Niquet heard the following anecdote from their mutual friend, singer Chan Marshall, also known as Cat Power: “The first 10 or 20 times I met Alia, her tuberose and gardenia scent was so strong that I couldn’t take in a word she was saying.”​
• Expanding into Skincare: In 2021, Alia co-founded Topi, a “climate-responsive skincare” brand, with curator and entrepreneur Quentin Smith. Conceived to protect skin in all climatic conditions, it debuted with two products, Sun Serum and Snow Serum.​
• A Connection with Japan: Régime des Fleurs created a fragrance called Himitsu Violets, inspired by the work of Japanese woman photographer HIROMIX and by university students in Kyoto.