N° I — 5h04
Aube
« La première lueur, encore froide. »
Cold light on white stone. A garden not yet awake, and no intention of waking it.
Bergamote givrée · Poire nashi · Muguet · Musc de soie
Maison de haute parfumerie · Grasse · depuis 1947
La lumière, distillée.
Les Compositions
Each Aurelia is a single hour of the day, caught at its point of turning — then suspended, indefinitely. We make three. There is no fourth hour worth keeping.
N° I — 5h04
« La première lueur, encore froide. »
Cold light on white stone. A garden not yet awake, and no intention of waking it.
Bergamote givrée · Poire nashi · Muguet · Musc de soie
N° II — 12h00
« Le plein soleil, immobile. »
Noon vertical over the orange grove. Shade you could pour into a glass.
Fleur d’oranger · Iris beurré · Miel blanc · Santal
N° III — 00h00
« Ce qui luit quand tout s’éteint. »
The last lit window on the street. Smoke settling, slowly, into velvet.
Encens · Prune noire · Rose sombre · Ambre gris
L’Architecture
We compose in three registers, the way dawn arrives: an instant, an hour, a memory.
Bergamote, aldéhydes, poire givrée. It vanishes in twenty minutes; we spend two years on it.
Rose de mai, iris pallida, fleur d’oranger. The temperature of skin, the exact middle of the day.
Santal, musc blanc, ambre gris. What the room remembers after you have gone.
La Maison
We do not bottle flowers.
We bottle the hour they opened.
Aurelia was founded in Grasse in 1947, in a house with seventeen windows and no electric light. Élise Aurel composed only between five and seven in the morning, when the air was still cold enough to hold one scent apart from another.
We keep her hours. Three compositions, never more; each touched only when its hour changes — which is to say, never quickly. The rest is patience, silk, and weather.
É. Aurel