.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.
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