The Patina line · brass and the years
Béton Chaud, Patina 50 ml
Brown Blue Patina. Three brass pieces, each at its own age, set on the glass.
Each plate is one of a kind, made for one owner.
4.860.000 ₫US$195 Incl. 8% VAT
Chapter VI · Spicy Amber · Eau de Parfum
Summer days · the empty lot · the early 2000s
Béton Chaud Kite Season
Where Summer Felt Like Freedom
A memory of summer freedom. Rei Nguyen recalls the early 2000s: on blazing summer days, she and the neighbourhood children sat inside the concrete pipes on an empty lot, watching stingray kites spread their wings. Béton Chaud, French for “hot concrete”, began there.
See the full fragrance pyramid and choose a bottle on the Béton Chaud page →Scroll
Béton Chaud, in brief
Béton Chaud, French for hot concrete, is a spicy amber eau de parfum by R Parfums, an independent fragrance house from Saigon, Vietnam. Rei Nguyen made it from memories of summer days inside concrete pipes on an empty lot. Peach and orange open; cumin and caramel follow in the middle; cinnamon and vanilla stay on the skin.
It comes in two 50 ml bottles: Patina, with three brass pieces corroded by hand, and Ceramic, with a round ceramic cap, brushed with glaze and fired in the kiln.
A blazing summer day. Sunlight pours onto the empty lot.
You crawl inside a concrete pipe, your back against cement that has been warming since morning.
Overhead, a stingray kite spreads its wings. Your eyes follow it, and you feel you are flying too.
Every season has its game. When the wind rises, the kites go up.
Two definitions
What is hot concrete?
A place to set up base or build a fort; to shelter from the rain; to hide my secret toy gun; to post letters; to play hide-and-seek; to make new friends… (the list goes on)
The children’s definition
Béton Chaud was made from this one.
At first
Fivefold
As Rei tells it, Béton Chaud at first held five times as much cumin as it does today.
In Béton Chaud, cumin makes the heat flare in the middle notes.
Amber, without dye
R Parfums adds no dye to its perfumes. The amber of Béton Chaud in the bottle is the colour of the raw materials themselves, close to the colour of the sun as it sets.
Heat on the skin
The skin remembers the heat
A scent can make the skin flush with heat without a single flame. In Béton Chaud, that heat comes from dry cumin. Choose a moment to see how it moves across your skin.
Juicy Peach · Sweet Orange · Pink Grapefruit
The fruit is not cool but dry and bright, like ground giving off heat.
The bottle · Brown Blue Patina
On the bottle,
summer takes the colour of brass
“Brown laced with blue, like a thin veil of smoke over an old memory…”
Brown Blue Patina is kept for three scents in a lower register: Béton Chaud, 221B and Shadow Éclat.
The idea came from relics in Huế; twelve months of research and development went into the Patina line.
The bottle · Ceramic
A ceramic cap for summer
Pictured here, Béton Chaud wears a speckled-glaze cap and a black tassel: a cream ground flecked with brown, like dry earth in summer.
The kiln decides the glaze and the maker’s hand the tassel, so each Ceramic bottle comes to you as it was finished.
Perfumer’s memo
“On those blazing summer days, the neighbourhood children and I sat inside the concrete pipes on the empty lot, watching kites spread their wings across the sky. Looking up at them, I thought I was flying too. And inside those concrete pipes, we children truly believed we were the freest creatures on earth.”
“Back then, we children never feared the wind would tear our kites. We only wanted them to climb higher.”
In July 2022, R Parfums opened at 34 Nguyễn Duy Hiệu with five scents, Béton Chaud among them: Archive · Open House & Showcasing · The Béton Chaud film, shot in November 2022
Taking summer home
One scent, two 50 ml bottles. One summer, written in brass or fired in the kiln.
See the full fragrance pyramid and choose a bottle on the Béton Chaud page →
The Ceramic line · earth, glaze and fire
Béton Chaud, Ceramic 50 ml
A round ceramic cap fired in the kiln, its glaze recalling Chu Đậu ware. The glaze changes with the light and shifts from one firing to the next. A ceramic charm engraved with an R.
Glaze by the kiln, tassel by hand.
4.131.000 ₫US$165Currently unavailable · expected back late November Incl. 8% VAT
Currently unavailable · expected back late November
Smaller sizes
Béton Chaud 12 ml 1.285.200 ₫US$50 · 2 ml sample 224.640 ₫US$9 · Discovery Set (5 × 2 ml) 918.000 ₫US$35 · incl. 8% VAT
See smaller sizes →Smell it at any of our three houses in Ho Chi Minh City, open every day: 34 Nguyễn Duy Hiệu, 8:00 – 18:00 · 42 Nguyễn Huệ, Level 2, 9:00–22:00 · 26 Lý Tự Trọng, Level 3, 9:00–22:00. Delivery within Vietnam. Payment: Bank Transfer by VietQR (VND) or Credit Card (USD).
Read more in the Journal: “Béton Chaud: Back to a Memory of Freedom”, 18 September 2023 and “When Scent Meets the Tactile: Béton Chaud Experience”, 12 August 2025. Journal →
Questions about Béton Chaud
What does Béton Chaud mean?
It is French for hot concrete. The name comes from the concrete pipes on an empty lot where Rei Nguyen and the neighbourhood children sat watching kites on summer days in the early 2000s.