Jo's Scent Notes: Maison Louis Marie
Photos: © Jo Fairley
As I mentioned in my last Jo’s Scent Notes column, most of us are feeling the pinch too much in January to lavish hundreds, nay thousands, on a new perfume. But there are quite a few exciting brands reading the room out there about people’s consciously careful spending habits, and so I’m delighted to draw your attention in this column to another brilliant and affordable fragrance house, for skin and for spaces,.
I’m going to kick off with a lovely story about Maison Louis Marie’s heritage, though. While it’s a contemporary-looking brand, and founded by a super-cool Belgian woman living in California, Marie du Petit Thouars, this brand taps into a her family’s ancestry, which saw a relative – Louis Marie Albert du Petit Thouars – exiled to Madagascar, Réunion and the islands of Mauritius, during the French Revolution.
A plant-hunter and botanist, Louis Marie amassed a huge wealth of plant specimens, ultimately returning with 2,000 when he came back to France a decade later, becoming elected to the Académie des Sciences.
Fast forward a couple of hundred years, and scent-loving Marie, who first began experimenting with making scents as a child, has created a range of beautiful fragrances and candles – which she describes as ‘clean’, containing no toxic or environmentally ‘harmful’ ingredients, not tested on animals and avoiding animal-derived materials.
She’s brought her clean visual aesthetic to the brand, too; having worked as a fine art fashion photographer, everything looks beautiful, with its off-white packaging and simple but sophisticated designs.
What really matters, though, isn’t how a product like this looks, or its history – it’s how it smells. And Maison Marie Louis doesn’t disappoint. In particular, I’ve fallen for the perfume oils and candles. No.04 Bois de Balincourt is the one I’m returning to often, a soft, soothing scent which really does smell like a breath of nature, with its notes of sandalwood, cedarwood, vetiver, spiced by cinnamon and nutmeg and warmed by amber.
‘Bois de Balincourt’ references a place that’s historically significant to the de Thouars family, in this case taking its name from their family home, set in an ancient, ‘mysterious’ forest. It’s outdoorsy, woodsy, mossy, yet with an intimacy – comforting as smelling your own skin, for a sensory reset. (There’s a really well-priced entry point rollerball for this oil, at £18 for 3ml, here.) Eau de parfums are also available, but there’s something about the oils that’s truly nuzzleable and cocooning.
Candle-wise, two especially push my buttons: No.13 Nouvelle Vague (pictured above), which is floral with lily of the valley, green with Tuscan fig, zesty with a touch of lemon, and ultimately wrapped in tonka and golden woods. I also like woody-zesty No.09 Vallée de Farnay, a fusion of orange, grapefruit, black pepper, cedarwood, geranium (always a favourite note), along with vetiver and musk. Again, it smells like nature – not like a ‘perfume’. At £36.50 for 250g, promising a 60-hour burn time, the candles are definitely not silly money.
The US-based maisonlouismarie.com website has the best selection of Maison Louis Marie creations (slightly bewilderingly large, actually, not least because of those non-sequential numbers). Prices are in English, but when you get to the checkout there’s a bit of an ‘ouch’ moment for shipping. So la-gent.com is your best best for UK shopping (although annoyingly, they don’t have the No.13 candle, at time of writing).
This is an exciting range worthy of exploration by people who call themselves ‘non-perfume-people’ (thanks to the naturalistic scents), who veer towards ‘clean beauty’. Or who are simply counting the pennies…
No.04 Bois de Balincourt Perfume Oil/from £18 for 3ml – buy here
No.09 Vallée de Farnay Candle/£36.50 – buy here
Find Maison Louis Marie at La Gent – here
