Once the site of the legendary Eden Theatre, number five on the Opéra-Louis Jouet Square has opened its doors once again – this time to devotees of perfume, with illustrious French perfume makers Fragonard now at the reins. Fragonard has always striven to be much more than just a name on a bottle, and in the century since they opened their first factory in Grasse, on the French Riviera, they’ve welcomed the public into free museums around France to learn about the processes and history behind perfume creation. Their latest opening in Paris not only gives visitors the chance to learn about the different stages of extraction, distillation and bottling, but is a real curiosity shop of perfume paraphernalia, from vials belonging to coquettes during the early 1900s to a buffalo head from Mesopotamia that’s thought to preserve precious elixirs. In the on-site ‘perfumer’s workshop’, you can even create your very own mixes, like an eau de cologne of lemon verbena, Tunisian orange blossom and lemon peel oil.
TRANSLATION: FLORA HUDSON