For as long as she can recall, Alia Raza has been obsessed with tuberose.
“I remember being 12 years old and all the fragrances I would gravitate toward centered around this flower, this note,” said Raza, who paired her love of fragrance with a background in film to cofound Régime des Fleurs with Ezra Woods in 2014. “I know it’s become trendy for people to say they started their brand as an art practice, but I really did.”
Though Raza has scaled the brand past its once-hand-painted labels and bottles, her creative process remains rooted in fine art. Launching Oct. 1, the founder’s newest eau de parfum, Tóor Tóor, is no exception.
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Retailing for $240, Tóor Tóor aims to offer a more unisex take on tuberose. “This is for the perfume lover who has five tuberose, white-floral fragrances that smell similar to each other and wants to understand this ingredient in a completely new way,” said Raza, who tapped IFF master perfumer Dominique Ropion to accomplish this.
“They call [Ropion] the master of white florals,” said Raza, who first became an admirer of the perfumer’s work through Frederic Malle’s Carnal Flower. When Raza approached IFF during the pandemic with the idea for Tóor Tóor, Ropion was “intrigued by her multisensory and aesthetic-driven approach to scent creation,” and signed on for the project.
“I wanted the perfume to amplify the smell of the natural tuberose extract, which is kind of earthy, green, spicy and almost bitter — a lot of that gets lost during the modifications of turning [tuberose] into a commercial fragrance,” said Raza, who, alongside Ropion and her friend Christopher Niquet, referenced examples of brutalist architecture to inspire the juice for Tóor Tóor.
The scent features notes of freesia, grapefruit rind, violet leaf and a trilogy of vetiver extracts, resulting in a “mysterious and distorted tuberose,” Ropion said. “I call it a brutalist tuberose: it’s complex, unisex, beguiling and totally unexpected,” she added, estimating Tóor Tóor could do $100,000 in sales during its first 12 months on the market.
The fragrance is the 10th in Régime des Fleurs’ core eau de parfum collection, which sells at Moda Operandi, Ssense and The Row’s stand-alone stores in Los Angeles, New York and London.
“Most of our discovery right now comes from The Row,” said Raza, who describes the brand’s primary consumer as “tastemakers and early adopters — we’re not a household name, we’re not all over TikTok; people love the brand because it’s considered sort of a brand for insiders.”
Régime des Fleurs has seen some momentum on TikTok, where it counts 2.5 million hashtag views, but Instagram is its primary social platform. “I’m not sure yet what I’m finding to be most effective [on TikTok], but what I’m finding surprising is there is this generation of younger people who are obsessed with fragrance, but are coming at it from a totally different angle — their interest is more technical,” said Raza, who grew up in a suburb in Buffalo, N.Y., and saw the world of fragrance then as a glamorous thing. “That part of the conversation is not so much there anymore; it’s not about kids trying to have a luxury lifestyle or be fancy — there is a passion for the nitty-gritty details and ins and outs of actual perfumery.”
