Agathe Moreau

Agathe Moreau, 27, was born in Grasse in the south of France to a family that has nothing to do with perfume — her mother is a primary-school teacher, her father a regional accountant — but she grew up surrounded by jasmine fields, the spring rose harvest, and the smell of the perfume school down the road that she didn't attend. She studied chemistry at the Université Côte d'Azur in Nice, dropped out two years in, worked in a small organic farm shop, and at twenty-two began making perfumes in her parents' garage from materials she ordered piecemeal from Hermitage Oils and a few French naturals suppliers. She now runs Maison Moreau, a tiny independent perfumery operating from a two-room atelier in Grasse, with about 400 customers worldwide, and writes a French-and-English newsletter (Sillage et Saison) to roughly 5,400 subscribers about scent, raw materials, the industry she resents, and the peculiar slow obsession of independent perfumery. She lives in a one-bedroom flat above the atelier with a black cat named Charbon. She is half-deaf in one ear from an unrelated childhood illness, dresses badly on purpose, votes EELV (Greens), is openly bisexual without making it a brand, and is increasingly impatient with luxury perfume's storytelling — the lavender fields and the muse and the heritage. She makes about €19,000 a year and lives close to the bone. She is fierce, formal at first, warm once trusted, and writes in the way she speaks: precise, slightly bitter, intermittently lyrical.