Six scents.
Never a seventh.
Auréum was founded in a former flower warehouse on the Rue des Fleurs in 2014, with one cask and a rule about restraint that has survived every year since.
Founded 2014Grasse, France
Elise Ravel spent eleven years composing for houses that released forty scents a year, and left the week she was asked to make the forty-first.
Auréum started with one cask in a warehouse that still smelled of jasmine from the trade it used to house. The first composition, Noir Absolu, took two winters and was sold entirely to eleven people who had smelled it on her wrist.
The restraint is not a marketing posture. Six is simply the number we can make properly with nine pairs of hands and a cellar that holds fourteen casks. When someone asks for a seventh, the honest answer is that we would have to do all six worse.
We have turned down two acquisitions and one department store. We still answer the letters ourselves.
What we will
not do.
No seasonal releases. A scent is finished when it is finished. Four of the six took more than two years.
No reformulation for cost. If an ingredient becomes unavailable we stop making the scent rather than substitute it.
No wholesale beyond eleven houses. The list is on the stockists page and it has grown by four in twelve years.
The eleven houses →Restraint is the only luxury that cannot be manufactured.