The Perfumers of Grasse

A city that has smelled good since the sixteenth century

Nestled in the hinterland of the French Riviera, between the sea and the pre-Alps, Grasse is not simply another Provençal town. It is the birthplace of an industry that has profoundly reshaped Europe's relationship with beauty and luxury. Its fragranced history begins in the sixteenth century, in the workshops of tanners who prepared skin types destined for the region's glove-makers. These craftsmen took to fragrancing their wares, a technique imported from Italy via Catherine de' Medici and her scented coffers, in order to mask the acrid scent of worked leather.

The town was then home to numerous glover-perfumers, a hybrid trade that would gradually disappear as perfumery gained its independence. It is precisely this shift, this slow move from leather to flower, that would transform Grasse into the world capital of parfum. From the seventeenth century onwards, the surrounding hills were turned into vast cultivated gardens, where centifolia rose, jasmine, tuberose and orange blossom grew beneath a particularly generous Mediterranean sun.

The golden triangle of historic houses

Three names dominate the perfume history of Grasse with remarkable consistency: Molinard, founded in 1849, Fragonard, whose origins date back to 1926, and Galimard, which proudly claims a founding date of 1747, making it one of the oldest perfume houses still in operation in the world. These three houses form what insiders sometimes call the golden triangle of Grasse perfumers, three pillars around which the city's international renown was built.

Galimard deserves particular attention. The house was founded by Jean de Galimard, official supplier to King Louis XV, whose Versailles court was renowned for its immoderate use of parfum — indeed, Versailles was nicknamed the fragranced court. This proximity to royal power gave the perfumers of Grasse a prestige that quickly extended beyond the kingdom's borders. Molinard, for its part, built its reputation on the extraction of local floral essences, developing cold enfleurage techniques that have been inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity since 2018.

Extraction techniques inherited through the centuries

What fundamentally sets the perfumers of Grasse apart from their counterparts is their mastery of a technical craft of rare precision. Enfleurage, a technique now almost abandoned owing to its prohibitive cost, involves laying flowers on frames coated with purified animal fat — the fat base — which gradually absorbs the odour molecules. After several days, the parfum-saturated fat is treated with alcohol to extract the precious absolute. The result offers unrivalled olfactory fidelity, particularly for delicate flowers such as jasmine or tuberose, whose aromatic molecules cannot withstand the warmth of classic distillation.

Steam distillation, another pillar of Grasse's expertise, is used to extract essential oils from hardier plants. Copper stills, some dating from the nineteenth century, can still be seen in several workshops across the region. More recently, extraction using volatile solvents, which produces concretes and then absolutes, became the dominant method in the twentieth century for processing the large quantities of flowers gathered during the annual harvests. The jasmine harvest, in August and September, still mobilises hundreds of pickers today, who work at dawn, when the flower's scent is at its peak.

The Grasse perfumer, between craftsman and artist

The perfumer is often given the poetic title of "nose", but in Grasse, this term carries particular resonance. The perfumers of Grasse long formed something akin to a caste, passing on their knowledge from father to son, from master to apprentice, within a jealously guarded guild tradition. ISIPCA, founded in 1970 in Versailles, and later the École Supérieure du Parfum, which opened in Paris in 2012, certainly modernised and broadened access to training. But Grasse has its own institution, the CFPC — Centre de Formation des Professionnels de la Cosmétique —, which continues to offer teaching rooted in the reality of local raw materials.

Among the guiding figures of Grasse perfumery, Jean Carles deserves special mention. Born in Grasse in 1892, he created Ma Griffe for Carven and Shocking for Schiaparelli, but is above all remembered as the inventor of an innovative teaching method that consists of teaching scents by family and by contrast, much as one might teach music through scales. His method, published in the 1940s, remains a reference in the teaching of olfaction. He founded in Grasse the first perfumery school worthy of the name, training generations of noses who would go on to work at leading houses in Paris and beyond.

Grasse today: between heritage and renewal

The 2018 inscription of the expertise of Grasse perfumers on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity was a major symbolic recognition, but also a strong signal to an industry sometimes threatened by the standardisation of raw materials and economic pressure on local flower cultivation. Jasmine cultivation in Grasse, which covered several hundred hectares at the start of the twentieth century, now covers only around twenty hectares. Labour costs and competition from producing countries such as Egypt or India have gradually reduced local production, though without extinguishing the trade altogether.

Concrete initiatives point to a renewed interest in Grasse's raw materials. Several major luxury houses have forged direct partnerships with local producers to secure their supply of jasmine or Rose de Mai. Chanel, in particular, has cultivated its own fields in Pégomas, a town neighbouring Grasse, since the 1980s, guaranteeing full traceability of its floral essences. This pioneering approach has since inspired other players in the industry. The Musée International de la Parfumerie, renovated in 2008 and housed in an eighteenth-century mansion at the heart of the old town, traces four thousand years of the history of parfum through an exceptionally rich collection of bottles, stills and archival documents. Visiting Grasse today means journeying through several centuries of sensory history, from the jasmine fields to the creative workshops, in a city that continues to produce, to train and to invent.