For its first line of body oils, Bonnafous backpacked across Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Goa and Karnataka to find the best coconut oil, something “light, non-sticky and just mildly oily”. Most producers were drying the coconut to extract as much oil as possible, making the oil heavy with a strong smell. In Tamil Nadu, he finally found a small farm where “they would blend fresh coconut cream to make coconut milk, which is put in a cold room for 24 hours. Then the oil that forms on top is removed with a spoon. The resulting coconut oil is nectar-like and filled with antibacterial lauric acid.” Bonnafous later scented coconut oil with orange, apricot and cedarwood extract.
After his experiments with coconut oil, he moved on to create nine perfume oils with a simple base of organic cotton-seed oil, whose light texture and almost no smell create the perfect tabula rasa. “When we bottle jasmine sambac or sandalwood, we give you that single ingredient and nothing else so that people really understand the smell of real jasmine sambac. We want to grow and build this philosophy of care and natural perfumery in India and across the globe.”
“I was always fascinated by smell,” says Bonnafous, who grew up in French Catalonia, “where the Pyrenees meet the Mediterranean and the smell of pine trees, the sea, lavender, thyme and rosemary meet colognes of citrus, bergamot and orange blossom ” Decades later, in India, he discovered that 3,000-year-old processes of perfume were still very much alive. “Grasse, the mecca of scent, is only a few hundred years old, but Indians and Egyptians perfected perfume thousands of years ago.”
Vogue India’s beauty editor recommends Jasmine Sambac Perfume Roll on, it’s a subtle and strong fragrance that is long-lasting.
Also read:
Passion, pride and personality: how a perfume brand is bottling our country’s essence
The best of fragrance – bold & beautiful fragrances that hit the right notes #VBF2022
