WHY CREATE ANOTHER PERFUME IN 2026?

Published on 24 March 2026. Updated on 2 October 2026.

There are probably already enough perfumes in the world.

That may sound like a strange thing for a perfume house to say.

It is still worth saying.

In 2025, around 6,000 new perfumes are thought to have been launched worldwide. Before 2019, the figure was about 2,500 a year. Source: Le Monde. Perfumery does not really have a shortage problem. If anything, it has a problem of abundance.

So why create one more?

We asked ourselves that question throughout the eighteen months that led up to Rose Graffiti.

Not to build a pretty story around the launch after the fact.

But because a perfume that adds nothing may have no reason to exist.

IN SHORT

Rose Graffiti was born after roughly eighteen months of development with Jean-Claude Ellena.

At Les Bains Guerbois, we do not hand the perfumer a list of materials to use. We tell him a story, a place, a feeling, sometimes an era. After that, he is free to find his own way.

With Rose Graffiti, that way led us somewhere other than our first instinct.

We talked about literature, colour, music, rhythm and contrast far more than about raw materials.

The result is a fruity rose built around mandarin, passion fruit, Centifolia and Damascena roses and a rare musk, inspired in particular by a street mural painted at Les Bains in the 1980s.

So the question was not simply:

how do you make a new perfume?

It was rather:

do we have something true enough to add to all the ones that already exist?

IS PERFUMERY REALLY SHORT OF NEW LAUNCHES?

No.

And that may be exactly what makes creating one harder today.

For a long time, launching a perfume felt like an event. Today, newness has become a rhythm.

New collections.

New concentrations.

New editions.

New bottles.

New flankers.

New houses.

Fragrance remains one of the most dynamic categories in beauty, but that vitality also produces a huge number of competing offers.

Newness sometimes becomes an end in itself.

We do not want to add a perfume simply because a marketing calendar says it is time.

That would be fairly easy.

Creating something we genuinely want to wear is far less so.

IS EIGHTEEN MONTHS REALLY A LONG TIME TO CREATE A PERFUME?

Not necessarily.

And here too, it pays to be wary of easy storytelling.

A long development time is no guarantee whatsoever of a good perfume.

Eighteen months do not magically make a formula better.

But time allows something else.

Trying.

Setting aside.

Coming back.

Leaving a formula alone for a few weeks.

Wearing it again.

And again.

Asking whether what charmed us on the first try still holds up on the tenth day.

A perfume is not just something you smell on a blotter during a meeting.

It has to live.

Everything we make, we have to want to wear ourselves.

Rose Graffiti took about eighteen months, not because we decided in advance that eighteen months would make a nice number to tell.

It took them because the project had not yet found its shape.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO GIVE A PERFUMER CARTE BLANCHE?

The expression gets used easily.

Sometimes a little too easily.

For us, carte blanche means something very concrete.

We tell the perfumer a story.

We might talk about a place.

A year.

An image.

An architectural material.

A song.

A feeling.

But we do not hand him a list of ingredients meant to guarantee the success of the next launch.

We do not ask him to use a particular material because it performs well on social media.

We do not build a perfume from a list of boxes to tick.

And we do not ask him to replace a material he considers necessary just because its price upsets the target cost of the formula.

The perfumer has the palette he needs.

That does not mean we are absent from the process.

Quite the opposite.

We smell.

We discuss.

We wear.

We doubt.

But we do not ask the perfumer to prove us right.

We ask him to take us somewhere we might not have gone on our own.

WITH JEAN-CLAUDE ELLENA, THE PROJECT CHANGED DIRECTION

This is where Rose Graffiti becomes interesting.

We had arrived with a story and a few hunches.

Jean-Claude Ellena saw something else in it.

He stopped at something that was already there at Les Bains.

A mural.

Shapes.

Colours.

The graphic energy of a graffiti in the patio, in the early 1980s.

Rather than pulling the project back towards what we had first imagined, we chose to follow that intuition.

It is easy to talk about creative freedom as long as the perfumer heads exactly where you expected.

Carte blanche really begins when he goes against you.

WHY A ROSE?

It is a question we could have asked in a very marketing-driven way.

Is the rose coming back into fashion?

Is it recognisable enough?

Is it international enough?

That is not how the project came together.

For Jean-Claude Ellena, the rose became a colour.

Not a well-behaved rose.

Not an old-fashioned rose shut away in a vase.

A rose sprayed onto a wall.

Passion fruit brings brightness and acidity.

Mandarin opens the composition.

Centifolia and Damascena roses form its heart.

A rare musk, clean and slightly woody, carries the perfume on the skin.

So the material did not arrive because we needed “a rose” in the collection.

It arrived because it made it possible to tell this story.

To us, that difference is essential.

WE TALKED ABOUT LITERATURE, COLOUR AND MUSIC

Much of the development happened without long technical discussions about the formula.

We talked about rhythm.

Colour.

Literature.

Music.

Contrast.

Style.

That can be hard to explain if you picture perfumery as a sum of raw materials.

But a perfume is not a list of ingredients.

Two perfumers can work with the same materials and write two perfumes that have almost nothing in common.

What matters is how those materials are arranged.

The silence between them.

What you take away.

How quickly a note appears.

The room left for another.

Perfumery is also a form of writing.

That is probably one of the reasons working with Jean-Claude Ellena appealed to us so much.

SHOULD YOU ALWAYS FOLLOW THE PERFUMER?

No.

Carte blanche is not abdication.

An artistic director who said yes to everything would not be much use.

We smelled many versions.

We discussed the balance.

The fruit.

The rose.

The musk.

What had to stay.

What had to go.

The difference lies elsewhere.

We are not trying to draw the formula ourselves.

We are trying to decide whether the perfume still tells the story we want to tell.

It is a dialogue.

And sometimes the hardest part is admitting that a better idea than yours has just arrived.

IS TIME STILL A LUXURY?

In the first version of this article, we wrote that our definition of luxury was knowing how to wait.

We believed it.

We still do.

But with one nuance.

Taking eighteen months is not luxurious in itself.

Making people wait for a launch is not a virtue.

Time only matters if it serves something.

A formula.

A decision.

A doubt.

A change of direction.

Otherwise, slowness just becomes another marketing pose.

We would rather put it differently:

perhaps luxury means not launching until you are convinced.

That can take six months.

Eighteen.

Sometimes longer.

In the end, the number matters very little.

DID ROSE GRAFFITI DESERVE TO EXIST?

That is probably the only real question.

Since its launch in 2026, Rose Graffiti has joined the Formes & Matières collection, alongside Oud Laqué, Damier and Raku among others.

The collection starts from the shapes, patterns and materials found at Les Bains and turns them into olfactory sensations.

Rose Graffiti translates a street mural into a perfume.

An image becomes a rose.

A colour becomes a fruit.

A movement becomes a musk.

It is a very particular way of building a perfume.

It will not be everyone’s.

And that is precisely the point.

In a market that certainly does not need one more launch just for the sake of it, we believe a perfume should at least have a personal reason to exist.

Rose Graffiti gave us one.

SO WHY CREATE ANOTHER PERFUME?

Not to stake out territory.

Not to add a launch to the year.

Not because a material is becoming fashionable.

Not because a competitor has just launched theirs.

Creating another perfume can make sense when a story meets a perfumer and something emerges that neither of them had fully foreseen.

We thought we were launching a new perfume.

Jean-Claude Ellena made us ask ourselves why.

The answer became Rose Graffiti.