Parfumeur · Plascassier · trois parfums

A 50 ml bottle is a field. We will tell you exactly how much of one.

Jasmine is picked before the sun reaches it, because heat drives the oil off within the hour. Everything here follows from that — the four-thirty start, the twenty mornings in May, and the reason a small bottle costs what it costs.

Count the field The three perfumes

A picker's hands lifting small white jasmine blossoms into a woven wicker basket in a field at first light, dew still on the petals. — Picking at Plascassier, a little before five. The blossoms are still closed.

01 — La cueillette

Why four in the morning

The constraint the whole year is built around

This is not a romantic detail. Jasmine grandiflorum carries its highest oil concentration before dawn and loses it measurably once the sun is on the plant. Picked flowers also begin to heat in the basket, so there is a hard window between the field and the extraction vessel.

04h30

The pickers start. Jasmine is picked closed and cool, before the sun opens it and drives the oil off.

08h00

Baskets are weighed at the end of the row. A good picker does about four kilos in a morning; a kilo is roughly eight thousand blossoms.

09h30

The last basket reaches the workshop. Past this the flowers begin to ferment and the day's picking is worth measurably less.

22h00

Extraction finishes. What began as fifty kilos of flowers is now a few hundred grams of waxy concrete.

Long rows of low jasmine bushes in a Provençal field at dawn with mist lying between the rows. — The plots at Plascassier — 1.4 hectares, walled, on old restanques.

Macro view of freshly picked white jasmine blossoms heaped in a wicker basket, dew on the petals. — A kilo of these is about eight thousand flowers, and it is one picker's hour.

02 — De la fleur à l'absolue

What a field reduces to

Concrète, then absolue

Flowers go into solvent and come out as concrète, a waxy solid that still holds the plant's fats. Washing that with alcohol and freezing out the wax leaves the absolue — a few hundred grams of it from a room full of flowers. These are the numbers everything on this site is computed from.

A row of tall copper extraction vessels in a whitewashed stone workshop with morning light on the polished copper. — The vessels run from mid-morning until about ten at night through the season.

One kilo of jasmine flowers: ≈ 8,000 blossoms
Flowers for one kilo of absolute: ≈ 700 kg
Rose centifolia for one kilo of absolute: ≈ 800 kg
Orris rhizome, before it is any use: aged 3 years
Our jasmine harvest, a good year: 1,900 kg

03 — Ce qu'il y a dedans

Count the field

Not notes. Flowers.

Choose a perfume and a size and the page works backwards through the yields to the raw plant matter that had to be grown, picked before dawn, and carried. Every mark in the frame is 25 flower heads. The frame is the same size for all three, so you can see which of them is a bigger field.

1.26 kgof raw plant matter in one Eau de parfum, 50 ml of Plascassier — including 4,658 flower heads.

one mark = 25 flower heads · the frame holds 9,600

67%Muscs et boismade in a laboratory, and we would rather say so4.77 g, synthesised

14%BergamoteReggio di Calabria1.7 fruits

8%Jasmin grandiflorumPlascassier — our own plots3,192 blossoms

6%Fleur d'orangerVallauris1,411 blossoms

3%Rose centifoliaLe Bar-sur-Loup — a neighbour's field55.6 roses

2%Iris pallidaChiusi, Tuscany71.3 g of rhizome, aged three years

€140

The musks and woods are made in a laboratory. We say so because the alternative — real deer musk, real oakmoss at the old concentration — is either illegal, unsustainable, or both, and pretending otherwise is how this industry earned its reputation.

04 — La collection

Three, and no fourth yet

No flankers, no licensing, no seasonal editions

Margaux has composed three. There will be a fourth when there is a reason for one, which there has not been since 2021.

the jasmine

Plascassier

Jasmine picked in our own plots, with bergamot over it and orris underneath. The one that smells of the field it came from.

Tête: Bergamote, fleur d'oranger
Cœur: Jasmin grandiflorum
Fond: Iris, muscs, bois

Count this one

the rose

Mai

Rose de mai from one field, picked across about twenty mornings in May, which is the entire window there is.

Tête: Bergamote
Cœur: Rose centifolia
Fond: Patchouli, muscs

Count this one

the dry terrace

Restanque

Lavender, rosemary and labdanum — the hillside itself rather than anything grown for perfume. The least floral thing we make.

Tête: Bergamote, romarin
Cœur: Lavande fine
Fond: Ciste labdanum, muscs

Count this one

A woman perfumer at her perfumer's organ holding a paper smelling strip to her nose, surrounded by small glass bottles, lit by a large window.

A perfumer's organ: tiered wooden shelves crowded with small amber and clear glass bottles of essences, with a stack of paper smelling strips in front. — The organ she trained on. About four hundred materials, of which she uses perhaps sixty.

05 — Le nez

Margaux Estève

Trained in Grasse, then eleven years composing for houses that never printed her name on anything. She bought the plots at Plascassier in 2016 with her brother, who runs the field.

She works from the same organ she trained on, and reformulates nothing: when a material becomes restricted, the perfume is either rebuilt honestly and renamed, or it is discontinued. Two have been discontinued.

She smells about 40 strips a day and says the useful ones are the first six.

06 — Commander

The order

An order request — no card is taken here

Set quantities against whatever you want. We reply within two working days with a total including shipping and a payment link; nothing is charged on this page, and nothing ships until you have replied.