These Seriously Chic Perfumes and Candles Have Your Holiday Gift Game Covered

The high-concept fragrance house Régime des Fleurs, which founders Alia Raza and Ezra Woods consider as much an art practice as a brand, fittingly debuted in a gallery setting. The name of the jewel-like first collection, Fait Main—French for handmade—alludes to their painstaking production process (small-batch, hand-poured scents in vivid custom-painted flacons) and also to their status as self-taught perfumers specializing in fragrances that they describe as “naive opulence” or “exquisite folk art.”

Today, Régime broadens its scope with a handsome candle collection and a five-piece perfume line called Pour Tous—or, in the brand’s adopted lingua franca, “for all.” “We think that we see the world in a particular and unique way, and we want to share that with as many people as possible,” Woods explains of their decision to create the more accessible range. For the first time, the founders also enlisted outside help: the Robertet nose Mathieu Nardin, a native of the French perfume capital, Grasse.

In contrast to the freewheeling creative exercise that is Fait Main, “Pour Tous is all inspired by the emotions and drama that are inherent in the botanical kingdom,” Raza explains—a distillation that extends to the spare (and notably non-neon) packaging. One highlight is Falling Trees, a woodsy scent that nods to the wellness practice of forest bathing and riffs on what it would be like if “a tree’s entire life flashed before its eyes,” says Woods, while Willows—a restrained iris fragrance lightened up with tonka bean and mimosa—strikes the same neutral, comforting tone as the interiors in Nancy Meyers movies, they explain. (It was also inspired by a flowering tree they once stumbled upon that smelled inexplicably like a baked potato.)

Meanwhile, the four-piece candle collection, Artefacts, is the sort of thing one actually would find in a Nancy Meyers movie. “We wanted a matte, stately bisque porcelain feel to them,” Raza explains of the vessels’ kinship with antique busts or statue fragments. The name takes after Régime’s rarefied online boutique, where one can pick up a clay vessel from Biblical-era Jericho ($1,800) or a Neoclassical carved-marble medallion ($6,500). The new category has been a way to explore fragrance not typically suited to skin (like Naiad, which blends Egyptian mint, jasmine auriculatum, and vetiver). And with the two Francophiles set to leave Los Angeles for a months-long Paris residency in January, the candles might be just the thing to create a sense of home away from home.

 

The post These Seriously Chic Perfumes and Candles Have Your Holiday Gift Game Covered appeared first on Vogue.