The Origin
Our Story
01
An Evening in the 7th
It began, as most things of consequence do, over wine.
Our founder a respected and accomplished professional, and a woman with two restraining orders filed against former acquaintances she had not pursued — was seated at a private dinner in Paris with six close friends. The conversation turned, as it often did among this particular group, to men.
Specifically: the extraordinary, disproportionate, and frankly alarming things men had done to gain their affection. A friend from Lyon described a man who had remodeled and re-landscaped his entire property to face her apartment window. Another recounted how three separate men had independently learned Portuguese after a single conversation with her at a conference. Our founder herself mentioned a man who had moved to every country and city she had lived in over 20 years, a situation which she preferred not to discuss in detail.
02
The Pattern
What struck our founder was not the stories themselves. What struck her was the people.
Not all of her friends or acquaintances experienced this phenomenon. It was a specific subset of them. She became determined to understand what they had in common, and what might be causing it.
She compiled a list of everyone she knew who had experienced this kind of extreme infatuation of partners, acquaintances and colleagues.
03
The Distillation
Our founder spent the next fourteen months in a laboratory. She consulted three biochemists, two of whom later requested that their names be removed from any associated documentation. She cross-referenced every incident in her notebook — which ran to 340 pages — all known scents and compounds used in the formulation of perfumes, soaps, etc.
The compound, once isolated and concentrated from the founder herself, required her to perform a non scalable and immense volume of extractions per 100ml bottle. It could not be synthesized. It could not be replicated by industrial means. It could only be produced in the quantities nature permitted, which is to say: very small ones.
In the first and only production run, sixty-nine bottles were filled.
04
Why It Was Discontinued
The trial distribution — twelve bottles, given to women our founder trusted to document their experiences — produced results within the first week that she had not anticipated and could not, in good conscience, ignore.
The documentation included: four bridge-related incidents across three countries, an unsolicited oil portrait of gallery-exhibition quality, seventeen reports of men purchasing quantities of roses that strained regional supply chains, the trial subjects reported receiving expositions of love from men they had only just met that rivaled epic poems in length and substance, and one letter from a municipal government in northern Italy requesting that the wearer be asked, respectfully, to visit less often.
She received informal correspondence from two coast guards and a strongly worded note from an entity that identified itself only as "concerned parties in the private aviation sector."
She consulted her attorney. Her attorney consulted his attorney. The decision was made to sell the remaining fifty-seven bottles quietly and retire the formula.
The formula no longer exists. The laboratory notes were destroyed. Our founder has relocated and does not accept correspondence.
Fifty-six bottles have since been sold. One remains.
“Some things are too powerful to remain available. We knew this. We sold it anyway. We regret nothing. Our founder could not be reached for comment.”
— Maison PJ, 2024