Heritage
A house, in its own words
Vanessa Tugendhaft comes from a Belgian family with several generations of experience in the diamond trade. She began working with diamonds and jewellery in 2004, then established her Parisian-Belgian jewellery brand in 2005. That same year, the designer’s profile described her as based in Paris, a detail repeated in later accounts of the house. Her early work centred on combining diamonds and gold in sleek, close-fitting pieces, establishing a visual language built around polish, proportion and restrained contrast. The house gained wider recognition when Eclat de Mode named Tugendhaft designer of the year for 2010. Independent coverage of the award confirms a milestone early in her career, before fragrance entered the brand’s repertoire. By 2012, she had turned to perfume and released Eaux Diamantees, the first Vanessa Tugendhaft fragrance collection. Its three compositions, Or Blanc, Or Jaune and Or Rose, all appeared that year and remain the defining scents associated with the designer’s entry into perfumery. The name of the collection is especially revealing. “Eaux Diamantées” can be translated as diamond waters, joining the brilliance associated with gemstones with the fluidity and intimacy of perfume. Rather than presenting fragrance as separate from jewellery, Tugendhaft treated scent as another material through which the house could explore elegance. The jewellery business supplied the origin story and the imagery; the perfume trilogy made that world wearable in a different register. The available history is concise but specific. Tugendhaft trained within a multigenerational diamond family, entered jewellery work in 2004, founded her Paris-based practice in 2005, received the Eclat de Mode designer award in 2010 and launched Eaux Diamantees in 2012. These points trace a progression from gemstone heritage to an independent design career, then into fragrance. No reliable sources in the supplied material identify individual perfumers for Or Blanc, Or Jaune or Or Rose, so the compositions cannot yet be assigned to a documented nose with confidence. Tugendhaft’s creative approach begins with the relationship between a precious material and the person wearing it. In jewellery, that has meant diamonds and gold treated as refined components of form rather than weight in themselves. Her pieces are commonly described as sleek, modern and intended to sit close to the body, an idea reflected in the “second skin” language associated with the house. Fragrance extends the same principle through scent, turning proximity into the central creative experience. Eaux Diamantinées, usually written in the supplied coverage as Eaux Diamantees, gives this philosophy a compact structure. Its name evokes diamond water, while Or Blanc, Or Jaune and Or Rose refer respectively to white, yellow and pink gold. These names avoid a conventional floral or ingredient-led framing. They present each perfume through colour, material and associations with the designer’s jewellery practice, creating a collection that feels like a set rather than three unrelated releases. The approach is selective rather than demonstrably experimental. Tugendhaft’s established reputation rests on mixing diamonds and gold, and the perfume titles continue that dialogue of contrasting surfaces. There is no verified evidence in the supplied material that she uses unusual extraction techniques, collaborates with outside artisans or follows a documented natural-ingredient manifesto. Any discussion of her perfumery values should therefore remain grounded in what can be observed: material-led imagery, close bodily placement, a restrained palette and the translation of jewellery symbolism into scent. For discovery, Eaux Diamantees offers a useful frame. Or Blanc suggests the brightness and visual purity associated with white gold, Or Jaune introduces warmth through yellow gold, and Or Rose draws on the softer romance traditionally assigned to pink gold. Those associations are interpretive prompts, not verified descriptions of the accords. They express how the house has chosen to organise fragrance within the visual world established by Vanessa Tugendhaft jewellery.