Matière Première
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Matière Première Vanilla Powder
Vanilla Powder by Matière Première is a powdery vanilla fragrance for women and men - Madagascar vanilla absolute dried out with coconut powder and heliotrope and set against white palo santo wood, so it reads cool, airy and almost crystalline instead of sugary. It is a dry vanilla rather than a dessert, and a little goes a very long way. "Dark vanilla beans, pale wood and a cloud of powder."
$10.99
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Matière Première Vanilla Powder Extrait
Vanilla Powder Extrait by Matière Première is an amber vanilla fragrance for women and men - the house's powdery vanilla rebuilt around Fair for Life Madagascar vanilla absolute, from beans cured for about eighteen months on land between jungle and sea, which gives it a dark, faintly salty edge. Venezuelan tonka stands in for the powder, and the result is smoother, more buttery and closer to the skin than the eau de parfum. "The same vanilla, turned down and turned richer."
$12.99
Matière Première was founded in 2019 by Aurélien Guichard, seventh generation of a Grasse perfume family, after two decades composing for Gucci, Mugler, Issey Miyake and Narciso Rodriguez. The brief he set himself was narrow on purpose - build each fragrance around one exceptional raw material and let that material be the entire point.
So the sourcing is the composition: Paraguayan guaiac wood in Bois d'Ébène, Australian sandalwood in Santal Austral, Italian citron in Cologne Cédrat, Somali incense in Encens Suave, Peruvian ambrette in Parisian Musc - and in French Flower, tuberose from the hectare Guichard has farmed himself outside Grasse since 2016. The rest of the range pushes single ingredients somewhere unexpected: Radical Rose strips the flower of every powdery habit, Crystal Saffron turns saffron cold and metallic, Falcon Leather drives birch tar into oud.
No synthetic colorants are used, so the juice deepens in the bottle as it ages - the house treats that as honesty rather than a flaw. Composed and made in France.
