ROGER & GALLET | Two merchants, an inherited cologne and fragrance for everyday rituals

eau de Cologne is retailed at 12 francs per litre
Armand Roger, writing to Charles Gallet in 1862

Roger & Gallet’s beginnings include the words of a merchant assessing a perfume business. The partners acquired a cologne, expanded production and carried fragrance into soaps and toilette powders. The house grew through the work of two founders and their families, bringing a formula, a factory and a shop counter into one enterprise.

Contents

Essential information
The founders and the making of the house
The house’s approach
References

Essential information

Brand: ROGER & GALLET
Founders: Charles Armand Roger and Charles Martial Gallet
Established: 1862, Paris, France
Starting point: the Paris perfumery descended from Jean Marie Farina and its Eau de Cologne
Official website: Roger&Gallet

The founders and the making of the house

A hat merchant and a banker

Armand Roger and Charles Gallet both came from Vire in Normandy. Roger’s father was a prosperous cloth merchant. Armand became a hat merchant in Paris, then made his fortune in Chile. As an exporter, he also dealt with Parisian perfumers, encountering the fragrance trade through the business of taking goods abroad.

Gallet’s father was a grocer. With his father’s help, Charles established a small bank, then looked for another business opportunity as the banking network expanded and competition intensified. Their shared enterprise began with experience in commerce and finance, and with a business that already had products and customers.

Farina’s shop and the Collas family connection

The shop they would acquire traced its history to the Paris perfumery founded by Jean Marie Joseph Farina in 1806. The house’s official history places it within the older tradition of the herbal preparation Acqua Mirabilis, describing Farina’s use of contemporary advances in distillation to develop that water into a fragrance. This is the history preceding the foundation of Roger & Gallet in 1862.

In 1840, Jacques Collas bought Farina’s business to establish his son Léonce. Roger married Coralie Collas in 1844; Gallet married her sister Octavie in 1847. The men were cousins as well as brothers-in-law, and these family connections brought them into the business they would run together.

When considering the acquisition in 1862, Roger told Gallet that the cologne’s cost was 2.90 francs per litre, alongside the retail price quoted above. The letter records a commercial assessment of a celebrated fragrance. The history of the formula and the economics of selling it were part of the same decision.

Coralie and Octavie alternated at the shop counter in the first year. In 1863, the partners built a steam-powered factory in Levallois, expanding production. Family members greeted customers while the factory supplied the goods. In 1885, Roger’s son-in-law Paul Pellerin took over management.

From wearing fragrance to washing and wrapping

The house’s round scented soap arrived in 1879. When rectangular bars were the norm, its circular form offered a different shape to hold, with fragrance incorporated into the soap itself. Washing became another occasion for encountering the house’s scents.

Perfumes were accompanied by lotions, soaps and rice powders in the same fragrances. Bottles and packaging received equal attention, including Le Jade, whose bottle René Lalique designed in 1923. Scent reached its recipient through something held in the hand or presented as a gift.

That visual work also shaped the Boutique du Bonheur, opened on rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré in 1932. Refined imagery by Mucha, Icart and Fabiano contributed to the pleasure of the shop. The house’s bottles and round soaps belong to a history in which colours, illustrations and packaging made fragrance appealing to the eye as well as the nose.

Everyday objects for another generation

After the Second World War, the house concentrated on eaux de Cologne; during the 1950s, its products became increasingly associated with daily bathroom rituals. In 2007, the house collaborated with designer Martin Szekely on renewed bottle designs. A maker of many everyday objects, Szekely described his wider practice in these words:

I tirelessly ponder the presence and use of objects in daily life.
Martin Szekely

A perfume bottle, too, has a role as something picked up, used and kept close at hand. The collaboration brought the house’s decorative heritage into contact with a designer concerned with the objects of daily life.

Work with perfumers continued, including the Extraits de Cologne collection in 2017. On 29 June 2020, L’Oréal completed the sale of Roger & Gallet to Impala. New fragrances have continued to appear, including Vanille Soleil in 2025.

The house’s approach

Thinking about the last use

The round soap brings together shape and a way of incorporating fragrance. Today’s Savon Parfumé Jean Marie Farina uses the traditional cauldron method. Fragrance runs through the soap, with the intention that it remain scented until the final use.

The Jean Marie Farina cologne balances the brightness of lemon and orange with aromatic elements including petitgrain, lavender and rosemary. Fragrance sprayed on skin and fragrance released in lather offer different ways to encounter that world during the day.

Finding new expressions within cologne freshness

The 2017 Extraits de Cologne project explored different materials through the work of individual perfumers. For Thé Fantaisie, Alberto Morillas wanted to create:

a bergamot tea less classic than an Earl Grey
Alberto Morillas

He added vetiver’s woody character to the freshness of natural bergamot and Calabrian lemon, comparing its root-like, smoky dimension to Lapsang Souchong. A citrus-fresh cologne structure could acquire the depth of a tea accord.

For Néroli Facétie in the same collection, Fabrice Pellegrin drew on memories of his origins.

Neroli, orange blossom—that’s my whole background.
Fabrice Pellegrin

Neroli and orange blossom meet ingredients including immortelle in his Mediterranean interpretation. Pellegrin described sea spray and a lightly salty impression, aiming for something airy and open. The smoky suggestion of tea and the coastal air around neroli show how different choices of material and setting can develop from the cologne starting point.

Keeping lightness within fruit and vanilla

Francis Kurkdjian’s Fleur de Figuier combines the warmth of fig pulp with bittersweet grapefruit and green mandarin-leaf notes. Citrus and foliage support the roundness of the fruit, while a soft musky foundation belongs to its theme of resting in the shade.

For Vanille Soleil in 2025, Karine Dubreuil-Sereni described her intention as:

an urban vanilla less sweet than the one we know
Karine Dubreuil-Sereni

Madagascan vanilla meets a salty marine facet and luminous white flowers. She sought a vanilla to wear throughout the year, using saltiness and floral lightness to shape its sweetness. The house’s newer subjects continue to explore the balance between a material’s fullness and a feeling of freshness.