Three Towns and a Bottle
Grasse, Seville, Florence. On why certain materials are only themselves when they come from where they are made best.
Some places have spent centuries becoming good at one thing. Grasse learned flowers — the jasmine and orris that arrive there with a depth grown fields cannot fake. Seville learned the bitter orange, sun-hard and sharp, that gives a citrus its spine. Florence learned iris, and the slow craft of drawing powder from a root.
Provenance is not a flag to wave. It is a practical fact: the same botanical, grown in the wrong soil or lifted the wrong way, is a different material with the same name. The town is shorthand for everything that had to go right before the note reached the bottle.
We source from these three not for the labels but because the materials refuse to be improved elsewhere. A house that begins with scent can afford to be stubborn about this. It is, after all, the whole of the work.
And then the material travels — to a studio, into a composition, onto skin that lives in a warmer climate than any of those towns. Which is its own kind of provenance, and the next thing worth getting right.