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 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 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 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 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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Roos & Roos fragrances draw on an unaccompanied voice, an unforgettable rock song, the unexpected pairing of mint and incense, or the plants growing in a garden. Its main collections today are Les Originaux, Les Exclusifs, Les Orientaux, and Les Simples. Les Iconiques brings together signature fragrances from across these collections, so a fragrance may appear in more than one selection.

Original Collection / Les Originaux

Roos & Roos began in 2014 with five fragrances by Fabrice Pellegrin, released under the name Dear Rose. More creations followed, and today Les Originaux comprises A Capella, Pale Blue Eyes, White Ballad, Sympathy for the Sun, and La Favorite. These are not the same five fragrances with which the house began.

A Capella grew from Alexandra’s wish to express the beauty of a voice rising without accompaniment. Pellegrin translated that idea into rosebuds still covered in morning dew. Bright bergamot and mandarin meet the green impression of ivy leaves and a soft trail of white woods. Rather than naming the fragrance after a rose, its creators arrived at the flower through the purity of a singing voice.

Sympathy for the Sun looks to the south of France, where the Rolling Stones stayed in 1971. Bringing together a band important to both mother and daughter and the light of the Côte d’Azur, Pellegrin composed it with lemon, bergamot, peony, and an accord of damp, salty wood. Chantal also evoked the wind, sails, and salt-soaked wood of southern France. The subject extends beyond flowers to sun-warmed skin and seaside air.

Pale Blue Eyes, by Dominique Ropion, arose from another musical memory. Alexandra chose the title of the Velvet Underground song she had listened to since her teenage years. Tangerine and blackcurrant meet tuberose and violet, leading into vetiver, sandalwood, and Cashmeran. At its announcement in 2019, Chantal discussed bringing Ropion into the house for this new fragrance, following the early creations by Pellegrin.

La Favorite playfully imagines a mother and daughter competing for the leading role, recalling the two founders themselves. Pink pepper and saffron, rose and an oud accord, patchouli and sandalwood form its spicy, woody composition. White Ballad takes a moonlit walk as its setting, evoking night-scented flowers through jasmine, hawthorn, almond blossom, vanilla, and musk. Both are by Pellegrin: one explores the interplay between mother and daughter, while the other turns to white flowers on a sleepless night.

Bloody Rose also belongs to the house’s early story. Its name pairs an emphatic British expression with the boldness of a woman like Chantal. Chantal recalled imagining a woman who enters a room wearing white roses and makes people turn to look. Ylang-ylang, orange blossom, and jasmine meet praline, patchouli, and incense. Although it no longer appears on the current Les Originaux collection page, its product page remains available.

Les Exclusifs

Les Exclusifs explores more adventurous combinations of materials and brings together fragrance and artist-designed bottles. In 2019, Chantal described the collection, then comprising six fragrances, as a place to pursue both materials and packaging further. Today it presents five: Mentha Religiosa, Nymphessence, Song for a Queen, Woods in Love, and Les Larmes de Tirésias.

The bottles also pay tribute to art. Chantal described the hypnotic design for Mentha Religiosa as a homage to Victor Vasarely’s Op Art.

Mentha Religiosa began with the idea of pairing mint and incense. Its name plays on mint and mante religieuse, the French for praying mantis. Alexandra imagined a captivating, hypnotic woman. Pellegrin faced the challenge of using mint, with its associations with oral-care products, in a perfume, combining it with dark incense, patchouli, and vanilla. He identified the balance between the vivid little green leaf and a powdery, ambery drydown as central to the composition.

Discussing his approach to this fragrance, Pellegrin observed that “designing something simple is in fact very complex”.

The name Nymphessence was another starting point for creation. Alexandra recalled imagining a nymph beside a river as she developed it. Pear and mandarin, magnolia and freesia, and blond amber woods form its fruity, floral, woody composition. With fruit and flowers at its centre, it takes a different direction from the contrast of mint and smoke in Mentha Religiosa.

The queens honoured by Song for a Queen are singers such as Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, and Patti Smith. Pellegrin added the animalic side of osmanthus to jasmine and orange blossom, then layered them with Madagascan vanilla, cashmere wood, and benzoin. Its tribute to the singing voice includes density and strength as well as the purity of white flowers.

Woods in Love began with the wish to be deeply enveloped in the freshness of wood. Pellegrin leads bergamot and mandarin through iris, violet, and orange blossom to cedar, patchouli, and vetiver. Chantal likened this fragrance to Matisse.

Alexandra Carlin composed Les Larmes de Tirésias. Its subject is Tiresias, the figure in Greek mythology who was transformed from a man into a woman and then back into a man. Alexandra Roos explained that the name and myth came first, followed by long discussions with Carlin about the story’s meaning and the materials.

Carlin brought together pink pepper and juniper, milky incense, a mellow, aged fig note, orange blossom, vanilla, leather, and amber woods. Cool leather recalling snakeskin sits alongside a milky softness in a fragrance intended to encompass both masculinity and femininity. The myth’s transformations find expression in flowers and woods, softness and coolness.

Les Orientaux

Les Orientaux centres on impressions of oud, leather, and tobacco. In 2019, Chantal explained that the house had introduced two new oud-themed fragrances in response to demand from the Middle Eastern market, where it was already present. Today the collection comprises Oud Vibration, Smoke and Mirrors, and Purple Leather.

Pellegrin’s Oud Vibration reimagines the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations in a fragrant world evocative of the Middle East. Raspberry is sharpened with cardamom, while rose, geranium, and clove lead into an oud accord, sandalwood, and cedar.

Smoke and Mirrors follows the memory of the pipe Chantal’s father occasionally smoked. Its evocation of Amsterdamer tobacco is layered with the apricot and leathery facets of osmanthus, tonka bean, myrrh, and honey, leading into the warmth of oud and cedar. Purple Leather joins the unforgettable smell of an old leather jacket to a tribute to Prince’s Purple Rain. Cardamom, bergamot, and cinnamon give way to layers of leather, saffron, and cypress.

Nicolas Bonneville collaborated with Pellegrin on these two fragrances.

Les Simples

Launched in 2022, Les Simples pays tribute to the herb gardens in which monks cultivated aromatic plants. Its beginnings also lie in Alexandra’s experience during lockdown. Living in the countryside, surrounded by nature, she asked Dominique Ropion whether they could make a nettle perfume. Their conversation about a familiar plant grew into a collection devoted to the plants of the garden.

The first three fragrances were Malamata, inspired by nettle; Bel Absinthe, by wormwood; and Globulus, by eucalyptus. Angelica Florae joined them in 2023. Fully vegan formulas, lightweight glass, and caps made with wood and cork are also part of the collection’s approach.

For Malamata, Ropion took on nettle, a plant often disliked for its sting. The green notes of peppermint, galbanum, mastic, and violet leaf are layered with rose and lily of the valley, sage and wormwood, before developing into hay, patchouli, an ambergris accord, and musk. Rather than simply bottling the plant, the composition evokes its presence through green leaves and stems, flowers, and a warm drydown.

Bel Absinthe takes the silvery leaves of wormwood in a botanical garden as its subject. The herbal scents of wormwood and chamomile lead into sandalwood-like Dreamwood and white musk, Indonesian patchouli, and the ambery-woody character of Cetalox. Its focus is on the herb from which the drink is made and its contrast with soft woods and musks, rather than the intoxication associated with the name absinthe.

In Globulus, by Nicolas Bonneville, the leaves and buds of Eucalyptus globulus play different roles. The leaf essence provides an aromatic impression, while the bud extract adds a green-fruit facet. Spearmint, Guatemalan cardamom, and sage-leaf-like Salviac are combined with the watery effect of Cascalone. Its subject is eucalyptus foliage cut at dawn, with morning dew still on it.

Bonneville’s Angelica Florae turns to Angelica archangelica. It combines angelica seeds with star anise, pink and black pepper, jasmine, and patchouli. Patchouli supports the rain-like scent of the seeds, creating a green floral that embraces seeds and damp earth as well as flowers.

By the Way…

• A Song Title and the Founders’ Eyes: Pale Blue Eyes is the fragrance named after the Velvet Underground song. The mother’s and daughter’s light-coloured eyes also echo the title: one has green eyes and the other blue.
• Recognition for Independent Perfumery: Mentha Religiosa was named the best fragrance from an independent niche brand at the 2017 FiFi Awards. Malamata won the independent-brand category of the niche perfume award at the 2023 Fragrance Foundation France Awards.