As a young boy surrounded by a kaleidoscope of smells, Bouygues would dedicate his free time to making rose essence from the flowers picked in his grandmother’s garden. Or he would sit with his grandfather, watching him make sculptures from freshly cut wood—a scent that, for him, is akin to the Proustian madeleine. “I’ve always wanted to found a maison, where generations of one family could share their creativity,” explains Bouygues. “I love this type of know-how, this way of going through a lot of time and effort to make great things together.” And so in spring 2016, while working in fashion communications in Europe and Asia, Bouygues told his mother about an idea he had been playing with for some time: to join forces and reclaim the craft of making non-synthetic, 100% natural fragrances.
Bouygues’ proposal was met by Jonak with skepticism. Decades of professional experience had taught her that all great modern perfumes were built on synthetic molecules because they “bring a softness that people are accustomed to.” Obtaining that same effect from all-natural components was going to be a complex task, one that the perfumers already in her orbit told her was impossible. “It took a long time, but finally we managed to find a group of perfumers who were really passionate about raw materials and ready to take on the challenge,” says Jonak. “They had to know what naturals to replace the synthetics with. Otherwise, you risk ending up with an unbalanced composition that feels like it has holes between its top, middle and base notes.”
Patience and dedication play a central role in all Bouygues and Jonak do. The mixing process, for example, involves waiting up to five weeks between trials as smells can take weeks to develop; when using synthetic components, this is a five-minute procedure. While Jonak liaises with stockists and the perfumers in Grasse, Bouygues travels all across France to visit flower fields and producers, commission typography for the Imprimerie du Marais–printed labels and meet the craftsmen behind the sculptural perfume bottles, which are made from 30% recycled glass and beechwood sourced from renewable forests. But for Bouygues and Jonak, the care put into every step of the process pays for itself: “You can feel the people cultivating the flowers in each of our fragrances,” Bouygues says. “This is what makes them poetic. They touch you in a way that is more deeply linked to memories and feelings. Try comparing the experience of eating an apricot ice pop to that of biting into a real apricot, freshly picked from a tree; they are nothing like each other.”
What people feel when smelling an Ormaie fragrance is firmly rooted in their own personal history. Although inspired by a Tuscan landscape under the morning mist, the citrusy-gingery cologne Les Brumes also reminds Jonak of the lemon-scented soap used on the trains from a bygone era, long before Bouygues was born. “Sometimes we disagree on what exactly it is that we smell, but the overall story is always the same,” Jonak chuckles. Other scents, like the fresh floral 28 Degrees, waft you away to a summer evening in the South of France, just when the scorching heat begins to fade, the air smelling of orange blossoms, jasmine and the remains of sunscreen on warm skin.
Two of the Ormaie fragrances are particularly close to Bouygues and Jonak’s hearts for their direct link to family members. Le Passant, a classic cologne with top notes of lavender and bergamot, was made in honor of Bouygues’ father, who wore a similar fragrance. “It’s the perfume that took the longest to make, because I didn’t want to compromise on this memory,” he explains. The second one, Ormaie’s take on a classic feminine fragrance, is named after Jonak’s mother, Yvonne, referencing the rose and red fruit bushes from her garden. “We wanted it to be a timeless fragrance that both my mother and daughter could wear,” says Jonak. “Yvonne found herself feeling really young when she first smelled it,” Bouygues laughs, explaining that his grandmother keeps asking for more bottles of the perfume to give to her friends: “She’s so proud, all the grandmas in the village are now wearing Yvonne.” For a maison rooted in family values, there can be no better seal of approval than that.