Heritage
A house, in its own words
Arman Manoukian Parfums was established in 2014 by Arman Manoukian, a perfumer, artist, and designer who reportedly began recognizing and remembering roughly sixty distinct scents by the age of ten. The house positions itself as the first Armenian perfume brand operating under French perfumery traditions, a dual identity that frames every release. Among its earliest recognized works is the 2016 leather composition Cuir Blanche, followed by the cinematic Mulholland Drive the same year. In 2017, the floral-woody Malek was inspired by a dream Manoukian described having that year, a detail consistent across independent fragrance databases. The catalog grew steadily through 2018 with Libre and Extraordinair, then 2019 with Aqua Armenia Dolce, and continued into the early 2020s with the Unico Grande Amore line (2021) and the elixir extensions Bonjour Tristesse Elixir, Unico Grande Amore Elixir, and Pour Monsieur in 2022. Parfumo currently lists twelve fragrances under the brand name, a modest but deliberate portfolio consistent with an independent, creator-led house. Manoukian approaches perfumery as an autobiographical art form rather than a market-driven exercise. Compositions are often seeded by personal or imaginative triggers. Malek, for instance, arrived to him in a dream in 2017, and the Mulholland Drive name signals a willingness to borrow from film as a storytelling device. The brand's Instagram describes its creative mission simply as 'The First Armenian Perfumes With French Traditions,' a formulation that captures the tension the work sets up between heritage and reinvention. Rather than chasing mainstream olfactory trends, Manoukian works in concentrated extrait de parfum formats across categories that span aldehydic, chypre, citrus, animalic leather, and white floral territory, suggesting a creative appetite more aligned with classical French haute parfumerie than with mass-market scent design.