Grasse

Grasse first made its living from wool cloth. In the 16th century the town turned to tanning, shoemaking and glove making. Scented gloves were in fashion among European nobility, and tanned leather needed another smell to cover its own. The first records of perfumery in Grasse date from the same period.

In 1614 the glovers of Paris gained the monopoly on making and selling scented extracts, and the title "gantier parfumeur" (glover perfumer) took hold. In 1724 Grasse founded a separate perfumers' guild, split from the glovers, as the leather trade declined.

From the mid 19th century Grasse built real factories: fifteen between 1860 and 1910. Firms stopped selling finished goods and made concentrated extracts for other houses instead. In the early 20th century they opened plants in Lebanon, Egypt and Réunion, then Madagascar, the Comoros and Java. After 1950, synthetics and cheaper flowers from elsewhere turned Grasse from a growing region into an aromatic industry cluster.

The story that Queen Catherine de' Medici brought perfumery to Grasse is a legend. The Fragonard perfume museum notes there is no record she ever visited.

Each village once kept its own flower: orange blossom in Vallauris and Le Bar-sur-Loup, violet in Tourrettes-sur-Loup, rose in La Colle-sur-Loup, geranium in Pégomas. The calendar below covers the plants still grown today.

Rose and jasmine do not tolerate still heat the way lavender or lemongrass do. Grasse has handled them in three ways, in historical order.

Enfleurage. Petals are laid on a layer of lard or oil and replaced daily until the fat is saturated with scent, producing a pomade. Before steam power arrived around 1850, olive oil mills were used to crush the fat. Today the method survives mostly in museums.

Volatile solvent extraction. Used industrially in Grasse since 1898. The solvent draws scent and wax from the flowers; once it evaporates, a waxy scented mass remains, the concrete. One kilogram of concrete replaces about one hundred kilograms of pomade. Washing the concrete with ethanol, chilling it to set the wax, filtering and concentrating under vacuum gives the absolute.

Supercritical CO2. A newer method that leaves no solvent residue, accepted by the Absolue Pays de Grasse GI alongside volatile solvents and enfleurage.

Flowers must reach the factory within three to four hours of picking. That is why the factories stay close to the fields.

Most of the houses below make materials for other perfume houses rather than selling under their own names. Several have since merged into larger groups.

In November 2020 the French Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) approved the geographical indication "Absolue Pays de Grasse". It was France's tenth GI for an industrial or craft product rather than a food. The application came from the association Les Fleurs d'Exception du Pays de Grasse.

To carry the name, flowers must be grown within the defined zone, covering parts of the Alpes-Maritimes, Var and Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, and extracted by one of the methods in section 03. The first seven processors were Firmenich, Jean Gazignaire, IFF-LMR, Mane, Payan Bertrand, Robertet and Sotraflor, about 90% of the processors in the zone.

The name Grasse on a bottle of absolute therefore carries legal meaning: where the flowers grew, and how they were processed.

In 1930 Grasse picked around 1,800 tonnes of jasmine. By 2011 the figure was about 20 tonnes, most of it from a single family. Grasse jasmine costs roughly 20 to 30% more than Egyptian or Indian jasmine; most of the world's jasmine moved to those two countries in the 1970s and 1980s.

Over the past decade or so, a new generation of growers has returned, often tied to a single perfume house. The Mul family in Pégomas has grown exclusively for Chanel since 1987. Domaine de Manon and Clos de Callian sell their whole harvest to Dior. In 2018 the mayor of Grasse set aside 70 hectares for perfume crops.

Grasse remains home to factories, laboratories and training schools. The world's flowers pass through it, even if most no longer grow there.