Pauline Rochas - Practice of Contemporary Perfumery

PAULINE ROCHAS
Developing Fragrances with a Personal Approach

Pauline Rochas works with scent as a way to observe how people experience their surroundings and how certain notes influence attention, mood, or rhythm.

The brand carries her name, yet its direction reflects a long development shaped by training, lived experience, and a consistent focus on sensory awareness. She grew up in an environment connected to perfumery through her grandparents Hélène and Marcel Rochas, who shaped a significant chapter in French fragrance history. This background forms an early point of orientation.

Pauline Rochas Campaign / seen by Mato Johannik

Pauline Rochas
EAU DE NUIT / NOCTURNAL

Her own path emerged through photography, which she studied and practiced in New York. The work with still lifes and composition strengthened her sensitivity for detail, tone, and quiet structure. Over time, her interest expanded toward the world of scent, leading her to train in Grasse, where she learned the technical foundations of perfumery.

Her brand brings these strands together in a steady creative process. Each fragrance evolves through careful formulation and repeated fine-tuning with perfumers in France and Italy. Pauline selects materials for their clarity and character, working with natural ingredients whenever possible and shaping each composition through intuition and precise adjustments.

The Seven Collection reflects this approach. Each fragrance addresses a specific emotional or energetic focus and invites a moment of orientation within daily routines. The collection is structured with the intention to create sensory space and a sense of order. Vienna serves as her base of work and life. Her home studio functions as a testing ground for new ideas, with blotter strips, essences, and small batches forming a quiet landscape of ongoing research. People who visit for consultations encounter a slow and attentive process. Pauline encourages them to explore notes one by one, allowing associations and memories to surface naturally. This way of working mirrors her view that scent requires time, presence, and a certain openness to personal response.

Portrait of Pauline Rochas / seen by Mato Johannik

Pauline Rochas
EAU DE NUIT / NOCTURNAL

Pauline Rochas
SEX IN A BOTTLE / CHAKRA N°2 - SACRAL CHAKRA

Physical spaces also play a role in the brand’s development. Pauline first introduced her fragrance Nocturnal in the Vienna Retti Store designed by Hans Hollein. The architectural clarity of the space aligned with her interest in structures that support sensory focus. Such presentations provide a setting where the fragrances can be experienced directly, without distraction, and where conversations about materials and process can unfold at an unhurried pace.

The brand continues to grow through measured steps. Each release is built from clear ideas and patient refinement, forming a coherent body of work that reflects Pauline’s background in photography, her experience in Grasse, and her ongoing interest in the emotional dimension of scent. Heritage remains present as a steady reference, while her own approach defines the identity of the brand. Through this combination, Pauline Rochas develops fragrances that accompany everyday moments and offer small anchors of presence within changing environments.

Pauline Rochas
www.paulinerochas.com

based in Vienna, Austria and creating contemporary fragrances developed in collaboration with perfumers in France and Italy
Pauline Rochas fragrances average price range: 150 € – 240 €

all images by Mato Johannik

ART BRÜT - Berlin Perfume House

.specials
Inside ART BRÜT

*A Berlin Perfume House Expands Its World with Je Ne Regrette Rien

written SARAH ARENDTS

Berlin drifts through the senses like a half-remembered song, full of movement and invention, and somewhere within its steady pulse, Daniel Matousek builds ART BRÜT.

A perfume house that treats scent as a raw language of experience rather than decoration, a medium that carries emotion the way light carries dust. Founded in the heart of Europe, ART BRÜT unfolds through intuition and intellect in equal measure, through a curiosity that refuses to settle, through a creative rhythm that treats imperfection as its truest form of grace.

Daniel Matousek, trained through years of beauty and fashion photography, learned early that every image holds a scent and every scent carries an image. His transition into perfumery followed the same inner tempo, he began shaping atmospheres instead of frames, moods instead of compositions, always in pursuit of what he calls the essence of freedom. ART BRÜT emerged from that pursuit as a studio where fragrance becomes reflection, where luxury translates into awareness, and where the material of scent functions as a bridge between instinct and intellect. Every perfume starts its journey at the rice board in Berlin, where Daniel Matousek sketches emotion in notes and gestures, later carried to Paris and refined in collaboration with the perfumers of FLAIR. The partnership flows like a shared language — a conversation about precision and imagination, about the ways chemistry and intuition can occupy the same space without hierarchy. The process ends in Bavaria, at the Dirnberger Mühle, a family atelier whose patience and craftsmanship turn formulas into tangible presence. This triad — Berlin, Paris, Bavaria — forms the invisible structure of ART BRÜT’s world: trust, craft, creation, each relying on the other with quiet devotion.

Among the house’s creations, JE NE REGRETTE RIEN, composed by Amélie Bourgeois, stands as a declaration of vitality. The name reads like a raised glass, a pulse, a line spoken into the night. Bourgeois builds the fragrance around tension and release, drawing from the rhythm of excess that follows celebration. The opening carries the electricity of bergamot, lemon, grapefruit, and fresh ginger — a kinetic burst that floods the senses and settles into the velvet warmth of rose and geranium. Beneath this brightness lies an earthy heart of black truffle, surrounded by white musks, cashmere wood, and sandalwood, a structure that holds the perfume in a slow and luminous breath. The composition behaves like a city at dawn, where the air glows from the residue of movement and every molecule holds light and weight.

Daniel Matousek speaks of perfume as a mirror, and each formula reflects a state of being rather than a mood; each bottle exists as an artifact of process. ART BRÜT’s design language follows that thought — heavy glass with matte surfaces, typography reduced to its essential rhythm, labels printed with slight irregularities that reveal the trace of human touch. Nothing within the brand asks for perfection; everything exists through presence, through the physical fact of its making.

ART BRÜT
scent: Je Ne Regrette Rien 50ml

The philosophy of ART BRÜT finds its clarity in this cycle — conception, collaboration, creation, reflection. Every element exists within continuity, each action leads to another. The perfumes record these movements, leaving traces of human thought embedded in material form. JE NE REGRETTE RIEN embodies that continuity. The fragrance moves without pause, carrying a single direction — forward. It expresses acceptance through abundance, strength through sensitivity, art through scent. Within its trail lives a single affirmation: the moment already holds everything. And in that affirmation, ART BRÜT speaks the language of freedom — a language built from curiosity, devotion, and the unrepeatable pleasure of experience itself.

check more: www.artbruet.com

ART BRÜT
scent: German Angst 50ml

The ethical dimension of ART BRÜT runs parallel to its aesthetics. Each fragrance is vegan, cruelty-free, CITES certified, shaped through a supply chain that lives entirely within Europe — caps from Poland, bottles from Italy, perfume oils from France — a network built around conversation. This European fabric defines the texture of the brand: transparent, interconnected, human. Every bottle carries that geography in its weight.

JE NE REGRETTE RIEN functions as perfume and statement, it channels the exhilaration of the incomplete moment, a sensory architecture that invites the body to inhabit time more fully. Bourgeois writes emotion into structure — a circular composition where citrus dissolves into wood, where brightness folds into gravity, where the scent remains suspended between pulse and calm. The result feels continuous, fluid, never ornamental, always alive.

Inside ART BRÜT’s philosophy, art belongs to life, and life enters art without threshold. The house extends beyond fragrance into installations, collaborations, and experiments like AI AM JESUS, a multisensory work with the artist BASD-ART that merged poetry, image, and scent into a single space of perception. These gestures reflect the same purpose that moves through the perfumes themselves: to open awareness, to transform observation into intimacy. For Daniel Matousek, creation acts as a gesture of trust. Each project grows from friendship, each collaboration from conversation. ART BRÜT is less a company, more a collective rhythm held by people who share an affection for authenticity, for things made with care and consequence. That affection runs through JE NE REGRETTE RIEN, giving it the quiet dignity of work created in faith — faith in craft, in emotion, in the moment that follows excess and still breathes light. And when applied, the fragrance settles into the skin like a memory still unfolding, expanding through warmth rather than projection. The scent aligns with the body’s own rhythm, forming a personal tempo that changes with air, time, and pulse. In this intimacy, the perfume performs its purpose: it turns awareness into experience.

ART BRÜT
scent: Wet Dreams 50 ml

all visuals (c) ART BRÜT