"That's brave," remarked a dear friend of mine when I announced the name, "calling a botanical perfumery Fleurs du Mal!"

Fleurs du Mal, flowers of evil; it's the brilliant and evocative name of a collection of poems written in the 19th century by the great French writer Charles Baudelaire. (You can even say it in a sort of hiss, as my 10 year old daughter did, pronouncing the 's' that would be silent if we were all speaking French.)

And it's true; perfumeries - particularly natural perfumeries, such as this one is - tend to be named for the pure beauty of nature, rather than its darker side. But I've always loved those poems, with their dissonances and harmonies, and the way they entangle beauty with disgust, love and desire with bitterness, abandonment, and exaltation.

Like poems, perfume can evoke all of these sensations, and more.

Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.  (Leonard Cohen, 'Anthem')  

Perfume, far from being a merely venal luxury, may even be a way to reach the gods. 

Fleurs du Mal makes natural botanical perfumes, taking inspiration from the weeds as well as the flowers to create strangely beautiful scents. 

‘Natural perfumes’ and ‘botanical perfumes’  contain no synthetic ingredients. They can be as beautiful, mysterious, and evocative as perfumes that do contain synthetics (‘mixed-media perfumes’) but in general, they do not linger for as many hours, and their sillage (projection) is more moderate, too. This however depends on the concentration of the perfume itself, and also on the individual chemistry between the wearer’s skin and the fragrance.

Our perfumes are composed of natural materials, so there may be some slight variations between batches, due to seasonal differences in the materials themselves. The scent of plants reflect the conditions in which they grow; thus for example we will smell distinct differences between the Lavender angustifolia, say, that is grown in France, England, Spain, and New Zealand.

We blend our colognes and eaux de toilettes in pure alcohol. All-natural and handmade in small batches here in Ponsonby, Auckland, Aotearoa/NZ.