Ex Fabularum Discovery Kit

The collection draws on dark folklore and regional narratives from around the world.

Cultural reference, locally rooted material and the emotional undercurrent of each tale all get worked into the finished liquid. A water spirit in Scandinavia. A faceless rider in the Balkans. A beast from the ancient accounts of Aethiopia.

Everything is compounded by hand in a Melbourne studio, uncoloured, in small batches. Production typically runs eight to twelve weeks, including at least two weeks of maceration and two of maturation.

The place to start when a wall of full bottles is too much to choose between.

Grimoire Parfums is the work of one person. Trung Vu spent a decade in luxury retail and cosmetics, trained as a dancer before that and worked as a makeup artist, and the craft itself is self-taught. Every formula is created and compounded by hand in a Melbourne studio. The label artwork, the cap specification and the outer packaging are designed in-house, with components produced to exact specification.

The name comes from Old French for a book of magic or spells, and the house is built on narrative, folklore and gothic themes. The first collection ran to five volumes, each drawn from a different region's dark storytelling, and a sixth has since followed. The reference point is the golden era, from the 1920s through the late nineties, when work carried a distinct point of view and moved independently of trend.