Rozenn

It’s the story of a memory. A distant reminiscence of childhood. A fragrance that has disappeared, but here restored like a ghost, like a fantasy. Christophe Le Bo, founder of the eponym house, wished like Proust and his madeleine to rediscover the smell of his grandmother. Not the extract on his dressing table, but the precise taste of her cheeks when she took him in her arms and sang him the Breton songs of her youth, born at the beginning of the 20th century at the end of Finistère. This smell, he did not know it yet but it was a fragrance. The fragrance of the rice powder with which the aged and coquettish lady veiled her wrinkles. It smelled of roses, the emblematic flower of this coastal region with its microclimate where even splendid palm trees grow. Roses as if it rained as much as the sleet, roses that were found in every garden, sweet roses that calmed the heart of the little boy, roses like caresses, like the essence of tenderness. And then, at the heart of this powdery blush, there was the fragrance of iris. Or at least the rhizome of the iris, the authentic, the most noble, which is plucked from the stones of Tuscany and then left to age for at least three years, like a great liqueur. The Florentine iris, with its low-key, subterranean impulses (if you pay attention, you can sometimes distinguish some aspects of… carrot), supremely elegant, whose “matte” smell brought since the 15th century and Catherine de Medici, its character to this rice powder that today, unfortunately, nobody wears anymore. A memory, indeed…