Expressions Parfumées Brand Guidelines: A 1982 Grasse Fragrance House, Givaudan’s Since 2018

A creation house in the perfume capital.

Expressions Parfumées is a fragrance creation house in Grasse, in the Alpes-Maritimes in the south of France. Givaudan, in the media release of 15 December 2017 that announced its plan to buy the company, gave the founding year as 1982 and described it as a French fragrance creation house based in “the historic area of perfumery.” Its completion release of 29 May 2018 repeated the date and place: founded in Grasse in 1982. The company’s own website uses the same year and says it was founded by perfumers; it does not name them.

The business it built supplies other companies. It develops and manufactures fragrance compositions, the concentrated blends that other companies put into their perfumes, shower gels, candles and cleaning products. On its website it describes itself as a “Maison de Création de parfums,” a perfume creation house, whose compositions are meant to support its clients’ product launches.

By December 2017, Givaudan said, the company employed about 200 people and operated across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Givaudan’s release also said Expressions Parfumées was the first perfume composition house to obtain the French “Origine France Garantie” label, a claim given here as Givaudan’s. The company itself still lists that certification today, alongside its membership of the Prodarom trade body, which it says defends the interests of its industry, and of the Grasse Expertise association, which it says works for the attractiveness and lasting economic development of the Pays de Grasse.

Its values, as it lists them, are creativity, passion, expertise, flexibility and responsiveness, and it stresses what it calls its Grasse roots. The website says its head office is anchored in the Pays de Grasse and that its production is “100% made in France.”

Fine fragrance, personal care, home and laundry.

Expressions Parfumées works across four business lines, according to its website: fine fragrance, for luxury, niche and mass-market perfume; personal care, from cosmetics and shower gels to soaps and hair care; home fragrance, including candles, gels and car fresheners; and laundry and household care, from detergents and fabric softeners to surface cleaners and washing-up liquid. Givaudan, in 2017, singled out fine fragrance, personal care and air care as the categories where the company had done well internationally.

The house says its perfumers make up close to a fifth of its staff worldwide and that they work with a palette of natural and synthetic materials, including captive molecules and what it calls Signature and upcycled raw materials. Evaluators, trend studies, sensory panels and testing programmes support the creative work, the company says.

Naturals are central to how others describe it. Givaudan called Expressions Parfumées “the pioneer of natural fragrance compounds” and pointed to its NATCO range, perfumes designed for products labelled organic. The company today lists COSMOS certification for organic and natural cosmetic products and describes itself as one of the pioneer perfumery companies to be certified under it.

Responsibility is a large part of its self-presentation. The company says it follows the guidelines of ISO 26000, the international guidance on social responsibility, holds ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certification, and has received an EcoVadis Platinum rating for four consecutive years. It also describes an in-house tool it calls the Conscious Index, meant to measure the environmental and social impact of its compositions.

The company now reports a larger footprint than in 2017. Its website lists about 300 staff, roughly 15,800 square metres of offices and factory, ten offices and subsidiaries across five continents and creative centres in Dubai and Bangkok. It says it is active in more than 50 markets and exports more than 83 per cent of what it makes, with production times of about six days.

Design and documentation.

Flavour and fragrance houses sell to other companies, so their public identity is built for buyers, investors and future staff more than for shoppers. Their websites tend to divide the business into a few lines: flavours for food and drink, fragrances for fine perfumery and consumer goods, and ingredients sold in their own right. Mane groups its pages under flavours, fragrances and ingredients, for example, and Robertet adds natural raw materials and natural actives.

Creation is shown through people and places. Houses publish pages on their perfumers and flavourists, their training schools and their creation centres: Mane describes a perfumery school where apprentices train for at least two years, and Robertet lists a New York creation centre opened in 2006.

Natural materials are the other recurring story. Houses around Grasse lean on the region’s flower and plant heritage and on extraction methods: Robertet frames its sourcing as “Seed to Scent,” from the field to the finished creation, while Mane presents named extraction technologies and, in 2026, an experimental garden. Sourcing pages often pair those stories with certifications and supplier assessments, stated in the companies’ own words.

Ownership is part of the identity too. Some houses stress family control and independence; listed ones publish regulated announcements on shareholders and acquisitions. Robertet, listed in Paris since 1984, set out a change of shareholders in November 2024, and Mane’s change of chief executive in February 2025 kept the group in family hands, WWD reported. This guide sets out what can be checked about each house: who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its materials come from.

Owned by Givaudan, run on its own.

The company’s ownership changed in 2018. In December 2017 Givaudan, the Swiss flavour and fragrance group, announced exclusive negotiations to buy it; Reuters, in a report carried by the French financial site TradingSat on 18 December 2017, reported the planned purchase. Givaudan announced on 29 May 2018 that it had completed the acquisition from the company’s shareholders, the investor Orfite and Expressions Parfumées’ management. The terms were not disclosed.

For Givaudan the deal had a symbolic side. Its chief executive called it a return to Grasse, where the group’s history began 250 years earlier through perfume houses such as Roure and Chiris. Le Journal des Entreprises reported in January 2025 that Givaudan had left Grasse in the mid-1990s after stopping its naturals production there, and that it had come back “by proxy” through the purchases of Expressions Parfumées in 2018 and Albert Vieille in 2019, before planning a naturals site of its own in the town.

Givaudan said in 2018 that Expressions Parfumées would be managed as an independent entity within its fragrance division, keeping its brand while drawing on the group’s ingredients and sourcing network. The company’s website today describes itself as autonomous within the Givaudan group since 2018. Its executive committee is led by Christophe Marin as president, with a global managing director and a creative director of its own.

For a design guide, Expressions Parfumées shows how an acquired house can keep a name, a town and a story of its own inside a much larger group. Compare Givaudan, its owner, and Robertet, another fragrance and naturals house in Grasse. For this guide we use lavender, plum, limestone and a mimosa yellow with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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