It’s been nearly a decade since Camille Goutal took over the reins at Annick Goutal after her mother, the French perfume house’s eponymous founder passed away. The renowned brand—now called Goutal Paris—rose to fame with Eau d’Hadrien, a unisex fragrance that offered a light citrusy reprieve from the heavier scents of the time. Even with the refresh, the brand is still all about the magic of creating fragrances that evoke a feeling or an emotion, some of which have stemmed from Goutal’s travels. Each time, it’s been serendipitous. “I’m not looking for scents when I travel. It just happens,” she explains. “It’s a moment.” From Jeju Island to Mauritius, Goutal shares the stories behind three fragrances that were inspired by her travels.

L’ile au Thé
“It was inspired by Jeju Island in Korea where I stayed for three or four days. [I was inspired by] the sea, the tea fields, tangerine trees and the wind. The wind is completely wild. It’s also very green there. Sometimes you travel and you smell beautiful things, but you just don’t want to do perfume with it. And then you travel, you smell something and it becomes an obsession. When we went there, we instantly knew that we would do something with this place.”

Songes
“Songes means daydream. It was special to me because my mother had died one year ago. My daughter was a year old. I remember being so tired, sad and depressed. I needed to go far away from France so I went to Mauritius. There was a crazy scent at night. Every night I would walk on the beach and I was entranced, but there were no flowers there. The day I was leaving, I asked the concierge about the scent. It was the huge frangipani tree behind the hotel. I wanted to do a scent with the frangipani and the idea of the sunset. It was hard to create because we wanted to express the sun and the night: the idea of a holiday when it’s warm with the scent of the sea and beach, and at the same time, something darker and mysterious.”

Gardenia Passion
“This was Tokyo in May. It was the blossoming of gardenias during the rainy season. They are twice or three times the size of the gardenias we have in France. The idea was that when there’s a storm when it’s warm, and when it stops, all the heat leaves the ground and it’s very earthy. We tried to express the idea of steam and the droplets of water on the flowers.”