At Work With: Ormaie
Can you bottle a family memory, and would anybody else want to smell it if you could? Annick Weber meets the mother-and-son duo intent on finding out.
Nothing conjures memories like a scent. The smell of flowers might fill one person with echoes of childhood summers. For someone else, it might cast the mind back to far-flung holidays. This nostalgia is a key ingredient in the fragrances dreamed up by Marie-Lise Jonak and Baptiste Bouygues, the mother-and-son duo behind the all-natural French perfume brand Ormaie. “If you want people to feel something, you have to turn to what has marked you the most,” says Bouygues. “All our inspirations come from the places and people we have known.”
To smell the seven fragrances that make up the Ormaie collection is to flick through a family album. Bouygues and Jonak have spent much of their lives in the same homes. They also attended the same school in rural France, albeit a generation apar...
