Reviving Violet: The Forgotten Perfume House Brought Back to Life

Written by Kristina Kybartaite-Damule

Violet – this name used to be well known in perfumery a couple hundred years ago, but in the middle of the 20th century, it vanished almost completely. Until 2017, when three perfume enthusiasts decided to bring this house back. Anthony Toulemonde, one of them, shares the story behind this idea in an interview for PlezuroMag.

The founders of revived Maison Violet and the historic photo of the house / Images provided by the brand

Violet was first founded in 1827 and was well recognized in Paris. By the mid-19th century, Violet officially became the supplier to Empress Eugénie (whose symbol, the bee, can be found in the brand's logo) and Queen Isabella II of Spain. The house was among the ten largest French perfume houses.

However, it didn't stand the test of the World Wars and the economic crisis in the US – around 1955, the brand vanished. It's fascinating how a once large and important house disappeared from people's memories – until 2017, when three young perfume enthusiasts – Anthony Toulemonde, Paul Richardot, and Victorien Sirot – discovered the story behind it and decided to revive the brand, recreating old formulas with the help of master perfumer Nathalie Lorson and reclaiming Violet's heritage.

Anthony Toulemonde agreed to share with the readers of PlezuroMag the story behind bringing Maison Violet back to life and what the house is heading toward next.

First things first. How did you, Paul, and Victorien meet?

All three of us met in a perfume school in Paris. We were at the École Supérieure du Parfum, which is a perfume school of five years. In our first year, we instantly became very close friends and wanted to create something together. It was in our third year that we were able to bring back Violet.

We actually randomly came across the name, and we were very intrigued because we'd never heard of that house before throughout our classes or perfume conferences. We started looking for more information about the brand because we really liked vintage perfumery and completely fell in love with the house and wanted to bring it back.

Why did you choose Violet? What exactly attracted you to this house? Why didn't you just create a new house instead?

At first, in our first year, as I mentioned, we really wanted to create something together, and that's kind of what we were going for. We wanted to create our own brand. But when we came across Violet, it was that period where we were very intrigued by French perfumery, and I was collecting a lot of vintage fragrances. And we thought it would be interesting to bring back such a huge house to life.

Since Violet was so big, it was on the French stock market. They had 250 employees in their factory back in the days. We thought it was incredible that such a huge house had completely vanished. We started looking for clues to find out what happened to the house. All of this process made us completely fall in love with the house, and we said, okay, we know what we have to do. We just have to bring this house back to life.

It really happened naturally. I think that the main thing that made us bring Violet back to life was curiosity.

And what was the biggest challenge when reviving the house?

I think the difficult aspect, which makes us sometimes think it would have been so much easier if we had started our own company from scratch, is being able to take inspiration from the past but also not be stuck in the past and think of something that's a bit modern and in today's time. So I think that was the hardest part – trying to find out what we enjoyed about Violet and making it modern and viable for today.

Once you started researching, discovering the old formulas, what surprised you the most?

I think what surprised us the most was the fact that it was on the French stock market. Also, the fact that the house was once very big, but we'd never heard of it before. We've attended many conferences on French historical perfumery, we had classes in school about the history of perfumery, and no one ever mentioned Violet. And it felt so odd to us because we should have known this house since it was one of the biggest French houses back in the day. It really got us intrigued, and we didn't fully understand how it was possible that no one had mentioned it.

What is your opinion now – how and why could the house vanish like this?

It's something that we're still trying to figure out. I think there are a lot of fragrance houses that disappeared during that time, and it had been alive for a very long time. And I think that Violet had been in decline since the Second World War, and it disappeared gradually over a few years. But yeah, it's still kind of a mystery to us.

For your fragrances, you're working with the master perfumer Nathalie Lorson. How did you choose her? What convinced you that she's the right person for this project?

When we were about to launch the brand and wanted to start working on the creations, we were kind of scared to do it ourselves because we were in a perfume school. We did learn to formulate, and it was something that we enjoyed doing and wanted to do. But at the same time, Violet was such a huge house that we felt a lot of pressure. We felt like we weren't on the same level, and it kind of scared us. So we thought that we needed to work with someone that had a name, someone that could create fragrances at the same level as Violet would have wanted back in the day.

With Nathalie, it started pretty randomly. She came to our school to talk about the job of a perfumer. And we started asking her a lot of very specific questions. And they were too specific to just be student questions. So she asked us why we were asking those questions. And we said to her that we would explain it to her after the class because we were still very secretive with our project at that time.

A few weeks later, when we were thinking about what to do with our first fragrances and who we wanted to work with, we thought of Nathalie. We thought that she does great work, and we knew that we had gotten her a bit intrigued with our project.

So we decided to send her an email and meet to discuss it more. She really enjoyed our project idea and was willing to hop on board with us. I think that it was a very fortunate meetup at school. And it ended with this great collaboration.

Iris note is your signature in the house. What's the story behind it – why iris?

I think that iris in general was pretty frequently used back then, but it wasn't something that Violet claimed in all of their fragrances, at least not that we know of. But iris does have this almost vintage powdery feel that we liked.

But the true story behind that is that iris is my favourite raw material. And every time we would work with Nathalie, I would always ask to add more iris to the perfume. In the end, it kind of became a signature, and we thought it made a lot of sense because iris is very powdery, has this almost vintage lipstick-y, powdery vibe.

When we brought back Violet, we wanted to share high-quality fragrances, we wanted to be able to use high-quality ingredients. And iris is such a rich ingredient. So that's why today we still want to add iris to our fragrances – to add quality and texture to each fragrance.

When you're creating a new perfume, how much do you rely on the old formulas and how much do you create yourself?

For the first three fragrances, we never found any formulas, but we have a lot of vintage bottles. We smelled them with Nathalie and took a bit of time to write down the ideas that came from smelling them. The goal was not to recreate them exactly the same way they were, but more to be inspired by them and bring them back through a more modern vision.

For instance, I remember when we smelled Apogée, which we had to rename to Un Air d'Apogée, there was this very animalic tone to it that we thought was interesting, but a bit too much. So we thought, why not work on this leathery animalic aspect and make it a bit softer, more suede-like. We also added iris to this leather to make it even softer.

Anthony Toulemonde

For a few fragrances, we worked that way, but there are also a few fragrances – like, for instance, Nuée Bleue. The name is very inspiring to us, and when we smelled the fragrance, it didn’t match. Nuée Bleue means blue mist or blue cloud. And we instantly thought of something very blue, airy, musky, fresh. And when we smelled the fragrance, it was more white floral.

So we thought that it would make more sense to work on what the name inspired in us. That’s why we worked around iris, the creaminess of sandalwood, a lot of musks, and this very fresh head start of bergamot and zesty tones.

When we originally started, we felt like we really had to stay close to what Violet did, and we leaned more towards recreating the fragrances they had. But at some point, we shifted, and we wanted to bring our feelings into the brand as well. That's why we took a bit more freedom to take inspiration from the name and recreate based on what it evoked to us.

And do you ever feel limited by the heritage of the house, or do you think it liberates you?

I think a bit of both. Sometimes it does limit us because we have to stay within something that matches the whole heritage range, keeps the same poetry, the same almost vintage-y feel. So in that sense, it does bring limitations. But at the same time, when there are no limitations at all, sometimes that can be a limitation in itself. I think it's good to have a frame to work in. So it is limiting, but it's limiting in a good way. It can help us be more creative in specific things.

You mentioned a few times that you want your fragrances to smell modern as well. What is modern in perfumery nowadays, in your opinion?

That is a really good question. I think that modern comes through specific ingredients. There are, for instance, white musks that they didn't have back then, that we have today, that can really bring a modern feel to the fragrance.

But it's also in the construction of the fragrance. The fragrances we see today are very different from the ones we saw in the past. They're maybe not as heavy; they're structured very differently.

Let's talk about your newest project – you just released a collection of Les Expressions. Can you tell our readers a little bit more about the collection? What's it about?

With Les Expressions, we wanted to be able to express ourselves more. We had ideas of things we wanted to see in perfumery that didn't really match with the Heritage range – things that were a bit more different, more new.

You asked if this heritage frame was limiting for creation, and I said that sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. For those ideas, it was. And so that’s why we thought, well, why not just create a new collection where we could share more modern fragrances and something a bit different.

This collection is a way for us to free ourselves from these more retro fragrances and be able to work a bit more freely on other things.

Thank you for your time.