Rose Graffiti by Les Bains Guerbois: A Rose Written on the Wall
Written by Eveline Nagajeva
The new fragrance from Les Bains Guerbois, Rose Graffiti, was launched within the Formes et Matières collection, which is inspired by the physical details of Les Bains: lacquered wood, checkerboard floors, raku ceramics, and walls. Each fragrance turns one of these visual or tactile elements into scent.
What I love about Les Bains Guerbois is its approach to perfumery. The house has a bold historical concept, and it truly adheres to it. Each fragrance is connected to a moment, a memory, an atmosphere, or a fragment of the building’s long and layered history. With Les Bains Guerbois, perfume never feels detached from place. It always belongs somewhere, to a room, a night, a wall, a piece of music, a guest, or a trace left inside Les Bains.
For Rose Graffiti, inspiration came from an interior detail: an urban fresco in the patio of Les Bains Paris. The fragrance was created in collaboration with Jean-Claude Ellena, a master perfumer whose style often feels like light itself — airy, precise, luminous, and built with the elegance of a few perfect strokes.
Rose Graffiti is inspired by a fresco painted in 1981 on one of the walls of Les Bains. The house describes it as the work of a pioneer of New York graffiti, and it belongs to the mythology of Les Bains Douches and the early 1980s. When the building was later transformed and reborn as the five-star Les Bains Paris hotel at 7 Rue du Bourg-l’Abbé, this fresco was carefully preserved. It remains part of the place, not simply as decoration, but as a surviving fragment of its past.
And this is exactly where Les Bains Guerbois is so strong. The brand does not simply create perfumes inspired by abstract ideas. It takes pieces of its own history and turns them into olfactory memories. Rose Graffiti is a rose created from color, wall texture, movement, and the electric spirit of a place that has lived many lives.
The Les Bains Guerbois team also shared some insights into the creation of this perfume, including a charming story behind it.
At the beginning, the team actually had another project in mind for Jean-Claude Ellena. But he did not really give them the choice. Very quickly, he took the conversation somewhere else. Looking back, it seems he was right.
Jean-Claude Ellena / Photo provided by the brand
Working with Jean-Claude Ellena was described by the team as almost like being a child suddenly invited to play football with Cristiano Ronaldo. In perfumery, he is one of those figures who make people want to enter the industry in the first place. So of course, the team was impressed. Very impressed.
The relationship also developed slowly. At first, everything was formal. In French, they used “vous”, as one naturally would with Monsieur Ellena. Then, one day, he decided to move to “tu”. It may sound like a small linguistic detail, but in French it changes the whole atmosphere. For the team, it felt like a big day — as if they had entered his circle a little bit.
The work on Rose Graffiti was completely synesthetic. They almost never spoke about ingredients. Instead, the conversation was about colors, textures, light, and sensations. At one point, the team tried to bring the discussion back to notes and raw materials, but they quickly understood that the maestro was not very happy with that direction. He did not want to start from ingredients. He wanted to start from perception.
Photo credit: Eveline Nagajeva
The fresco in the patio was one of the starting points, but Ellena did not treat it as one whole image. He selected fragments inside it, almost like crops in a photograph: an orange area, a pink gradient, a blue zone. Even the texture of the wall became important. Not only the colors, but the surface itself, the roughness, the way paint lives on the wall, the way time remains visible in material.
So, Rose Graffiti is not a literal perfume about graffiti. It is more a translation of fragments, colors, and textures into scent. A rose, but not a polite one. Something tender, insolent, luminous, and slightly electric, the Les Bains Guerbois team explains.
Jean-Pierre Marois, CEO/Owner of Les Bains / Photo credit: Tristan Hollingsworth
When Les Bains Guerbois finally revealed the perfumer behind the fragrance, I already knew I would probably love it. Jean-Claude Ellena always speaks to me, and when one of my favorite perfume houses collaborates with one of my favorite perfumers, it already feels like a double reason to fall in love. But Rose Graffiti surprised me even more than I expected.
On my skin, it feels like a tender rose growing in bright, vivid bushes. And I swear, somewhere in this composition I smell blackcurrant leaves. Maybe they are not officially there, or maybe another material creates this illusion, but I perceive them very distinctly. As a big fan of this note, this was the surprise that made me fall even stronger for the fragrance.
There is also a bold, juicy tropical facet of passion fruit. But if you know Jean-Claude Ellena’s style, you understand that this boldness is never heavy-handed. It is not a thick tropical fruit covering everything. It is more like one vivid stroke across a rosy watercolor, bright and juicy, but still controlled, still full of air.
The rose itself does not feel dark, old-fashioned, or overly romantic. It feels tender yet radiant and alive. There is something almost urban about it, as if the flower has been painted directly onto a wall, surrounded by splashes of color and light.
Unfortunately, detailed images of the fresco cannot be freely shared for publication because of image rights and copyright questions. But perhaps this also preserves some of its mystery. For anyone visiting Paris, the best way to discover it is directly at Les Bains Paris, in its original place, surrounded by the atmosphere of the building. Some things are more powerful when seen where they belong.
And Rose Graffiti belongs exactly there, between memory and modernity, between street art and haute perfumery, between a preserved wall and a radiant rose. A rose, yes. But one written on the wall.