A small house, making slowly.
Jafafa is a perfumery of two: a chemist who grew up in Grasse, and a botanist who grew up in Karelia. We make five fragrances. We intend to make ten, perhaps, by 2032.
Jafafa began as a notebook between two friends — pressed leaves, a date, weather. Compositions came later, sometimes by years. The first bottle of Glory was filled in a kitchen in Helsinki on a March afternoon; the iris had been waiting for three winters.
We work in editions of two thousand. When a fragrance sells out, we wait — sometimes a season, sometimes a year — until the ingredients meet us again. Patience is the only material we have in abundance.
We are based in two places. The benchwork happens in a small atelier in Grasse; the bottling, labelling and posting happens in a warehouse outside Helsinki, on a street the locals still call the perfume road, for no good reason.
Laure Audemars
& Mikael Aaltonen.
Laure trained at the Givaudan school in Grasse before working five years for an indie house in Marseille. Mikael read botany at Helsinki and spent a decade as a forager and distiller in the Finnish lakelands.
They met in 2017 at a frankincense cooperative in Oman, both there for the same week, both buying small. Jafafa is what came of that week, eventually.
The full biography
Helsinki · by appointment
Korkeavuorenkatu 22. Tuesday through Saturday, twelve to six. Bring an afternoon; we will make tea.