The dreamy return of a long-lost French fragrance house
It’s not unusual to arrive at a lunch wearing the same Betty cardigan, Will jacket or Gloria sandals from French fashion brand Sézane as your host, but to find yourself sitting across from the woman who helped bring them to the UK? Meet Cécilia Mergui: ex-head fashion buyer turned beauty entrepreneur and vintage brand revivalist, with a deep love of art deco and a finely-honed eye for a flea market find.
Who was Robert Bienaimé?
One particular flea market find has brought us here: a 1930s powder box from a forgotten French fragrance house founded by Robert Bienaimé, creator in 1912 of the iconic floral fragrance Quelques Fleurs by Houbigant, followed by his own range of eaux de parfums, makeup and skincare.
Charmed by the ‘lovely little powder box’ and intrigued by a name she hadn’t seen before, Mergui embarked on a journey that began on Google that night and ended with buying the house of Bienaimé – now forgotten but once hugely successful – from a perfumer who had bought it but done nothing with it. Three years later, the new Bienaimé was launched by Mergui; a Paris boutique followed in 2022 and we can now buy it here in the UK via fragrance curation service Fiole.
That’s the whistlestop version; what’s also lovely to know is quite how modern Robert Bienaimé was. Self-taught in perfumery, this brilliant chemist was working with synthetic molecules known as aldehydes a good nine years before perfumer Ernest Beaux made the iconically aldehydic No.5 for Gabrielle Chanel.
‘It was a time when the industry understood it would have to resort a little bit more to chemistry to create perfume,’ explains Mergui over salmon tartare at Bob Bob Cité. ‘Natural molecules were very expensive, and so strong that they were not always good for your health,’ she continues. ‘Bienaimé was one of the first to create a beautiful perfume out of synthetic molecules, and it made him very, very famous.’
Bienaimé: scents and sustainability
In creating refillable packaging such as that art deco powder box, Bienaimé was also, as Mergui points out, both ahead of his time and perfectly in it. ‘I’ve been passionate about art deco ever since I was a little girl and have been collecting ever since I had the money to do it,’ she says. ‘There was no plastic in the 1930s, and the starting point for any beauty item was that it looked nice on your dressing table. They were decorative objects with cosmetics inside.
‘Our products are refillable and made of sustainable materials that you can keep for a long time, and maybe pass down from mother to daughter,’ continues Mergui. ‘When I was little, my grandmother gifted me some of her old perfume bottles and lipsticks; that's really the idea. Even the boxes can be used to store makeup, hair accessories or jewellery, and everything is produced in France by very old companies that have maintained their artisanal craftsmanship.’
Bienaimé: the art of glass
Mergui is proud of her refillable bottles: they're hand-poured in the last factory in France to use this technique, so that the glass is thin but incredibly resilient. Her hand wash is traditionally produced in Marseilles (the home of liquid soap) and the candles are made in the South of France with vegetable wax.
'It's a pleasure to bring back this kind of craftsmanship,' she says. Every purchase comes with a retro-style packet of Panini stickers featuring vintage Bienaimé ads and commissioned artwork, and if you can visit the Bienaimé boutique in Paris, your box will be hand-stamped in a sweet personalisation ceremony.
And the perfumes? Inspired by Robert Bienaimé's original formulas and updated for a modern audience, they're floral, feminine and dreamy. 'I wanted to create a cocoon where you can escape your everyday struggles and time-travel to a world of childhood memory, as I do when I remember the powdery smells of my grandmother's bathroom,' says Mergui. 'It's important to us that everything we do has a lot of softness.' We think she's done exactly that.
Shop Bienaimé at Fiole now
This is Bienaimé's solar scent, with top notes of bright bergamot and lilac, and a sunny heart of ylang ylang, jasmine and creamy white chocolate. It's complex but happy, and slightly honeyed, with none of the animalic notes that can come with buttery white florals.
‘The ultimate lipstick scent, very powdery,’ says Mergui, who reworked this in the name of her grandmother’s dressing table. It has the soft and creamy power of iris, with nougat-like notes of heliotrope, vanilla-ish tolu balsam, musk and sandalwood.
Probably the most comforting of all, with its notes of powdered almond, tonka and vanilla. 'People love it, especially in the winter,' says Mergui, 'It makes them feel like they're wrapped in like softness.' Think clean skin, expensive-smelling soap and old-fashioned face cream.
This is Bienaimé's solar scent, with top notes of bright bergamot and lilac, and a sunny heart of ylang ylang, jasmine and creamy white chocolate. It's complex but happy, and slightly honeyed, with none of the animalic notes that can come with buttery white florals.
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