Roja Dove spent nearly twenty years inside Guerlain before he put his own name on a bottle. He joined the French house in 1981 and became the first person since Jacques Guerlain allowed into its fragrance archive.
Dove is British, which was unusual for that job. He was the first non-family, non-French nose to create for Guerlain. He left to work on his own, opening a Haute Parfumerie counter in Harrods, then launched his house, Roja Parfums, in 2011.
The pitch was old-school luxury with no cost ceiling. Roja offered a bespoke service where a private client could commission a personal scent for a reported 30,000 dollars, using the kind of naturals most brands price out of a formula. The retail line runs on the same logic. Heavy doses of rose, oud, jasmine and saffron, and price tags to match.
Elysium Pour Homme arrived in 2017 as a market test. It worked. A bright grapefruit and woody-amber scent, it is the fragrance most people now name first when they hear Roja, and it pushed the house from niche curiosity to a status buy.
Here is what the hype leaves out. A Roja bottle can run to several hundred pounds. Part of that is genuine naturals and part is the name on the glass. The formulas are excellent. They are not sealed, and independent perfumers can read the same accords everyone else can.
Skip the Harrods counter. Our Elysian, our take on Elysium, and Amber Opulence, our take on Amber Aoud, are UK-made sprays at 35% concentration. See the full Roja collection.
