Explore The Côte d’Azur
Grasse, 16km inland from Cannes and an easy day-trip from the coast, has been the world capital of parfumiers for almost three hundred years. These days it promotes a fragrant image of a medieval hill town surrounded by scented flowers, though in truth, the glamour of this friendly place is mostly bottled, and the perfume industry is at pains to keep quiet about modern, unromantic innovations and techniques.
Though the main purpose of coming here is to buy perfume, there are also several worthwhile small museums including the fascinating Musée International de la Parfumerie, a worthwhile adjunct to a factory visit, and probably far more informative. It displays perfume bottles from the ancient Greeks via Marie Antoinette to the present, and has a reconstruction of a perfume factory.
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Sniffing around the perfume factories
Sniffing around the perfume factories
There are ten parfumeries in and around Grasse, most of them making not perfume but essences-plus-formulas, sold to Dior, Lancôme, Estée Lauder and the like, who make up their own brand-name perfumes.
The ingredients that the “nose” – as the creator of the perfume’s formula is known – has to play with include resins, roots, moss, beans, bark, civet (a secretion from the cat-like civet), ambergris (whale vomit), bits of beaver and musk from Tibetan goats. You can visit three local showrooms for free, with overpoweringly fragrant shops and guided tours, in English, of the traditional perfume factory setup (the actual working industrial complexes are strictly out of bounds).
Fragonard 20 bd Fragonard wfragonard.com.
Galimard 73 rte de Cannes wgalimard.com.
Molinard 60 bd Victor-Hugo wmolinard.com.
