FROM THE ATELIER
Three generations of botanists. A perfumer's organ in the Drôme provençale. Aimée de Mars was born when a family who had worked with plants for a hundred years decided to compose perfume the way it had always composed its remedies — by hand, in small batches, every ingredient declared.
My name is Valérie Demars. Daughter and granddaughter of farmers from the Drôme provençale, classically trained perfumer, third generation in my family to work with plants. The maison Aimée de Mars carries my grandmother's name.
My path begins in her garden. There, where the river takes its source, where she distilled her own remedies, where I understood very young that plants speak to whoever knows how to listen. That first revelation — to become a perfumer — has guided my entire professional life, and my life's path as well.
I studied chemistry, then cosmetics and perfumery at Versailles. There began my years of learning the corporate world: twenty years inside the cosmetics industry, formulating for the great houses, learning the rigour of the laboratory and the language of raw matter.
I do not disown those years. They taught me precision, discipline, the patience required to hold a formula together. But they also taught me what I no longer wanted to do: composing with materials one is not allowed to name, following briefs that ask you to hide rather than reveal.
Motherhood was a rupture. A postpartum depression that is rarely spoken of brought me back to what had always healed me: the plants of my childhood garden. I set up a perfumer's organ in the attic of the family house and I began composing again — but differently.
With essential oils this time. With the most concentrated essences, the ones my grandmother used in her tisanes and her balms. Slowly, I relearned how to hear what the plants wanted to tell me — and how to transcribe it faithfully into the bottle, the way one transcribes a language only one person speaks.
In 2015, at Aimée's source, came the second revelation: to incorporate the water of that source into the perfumes. To think outside the frame. To step beyond the corpuscular view of matter that school had taught me, and accept that the memory of water, the energy of a plant, the intention behind a formula are as much a part of a perfume as its molecules.
Another world was opening to me: that of energy, of the invisible. I was a classically trained chemist. I had heard of quantum physics only from a great distance. It took me time to accept that what I had been sensing while working with plants had a scientific grammar of its own — and that there was something to compose there.
From that path was born Aromaparfumerie®: a method of composition that brings together the rigour of classical perfumery and the precision of botanical aromatherapy. Every Aimée de Mars perfume is composed under this method. Every formula carries an intention — an emotion to reveal, a season of life to accompany — and declares the entirety of its ingredients on the label.
We hide nothing. Not the concentrations, not the origins, not the certifications. Transparency, when it concerns what one wears every day on the skin, is not a marketing argument. It is a working standard.
Aimée de Mars is composed and bottled today in Mévouillon, on the family lands at the foot of the Baronnies provençales. Lavenders, roses, immortelles: what you read on the label, you can see growing at the foot of the laboratory.
My grandmother taught me that to take care of someone begins with telling them the truth about what you are giving them. That is the promise of the maison that bears her name.
I distil perfumes the way my grandmother distilled her remedies: by hand, in small batches, declaring every ingredient. An honest formula is the first form of care I can offer.
I make the wish that every human being on Earth might have the joy of finding their life's mission. Mine fits inside a bottle — and inside what it refuses to put there.
Every Aimée de Mars perfume is composed at the Mévouillon farm under the Aromaparfumerie® method — botanical aromatherapy and perfumery brought together. Begin where most readers begin: the women's catalogue.
Seasonal notes on ingredients, the rhythm of the garden, and the work behind every composition.
