Our first three perfumes

Reviews

Okay! Our first three perfumes are now out. You can get access today by going here and joining the mailing list, and the site will be open to everyone tomorrow — as well, the perfumes will be available in person at Scent Bar NYC and LA, Arielle Shoshana in DC, and Ministry of Scent in SF. (Just call ahead to make sure before you go…)

We can only do US shipping. However, Luckyscent will offer international shipping when our products go up on their website in a few days.

Here are my thoughts on them.

Incarnate

Incarnate has a dual personality. Pretty much everyone loves it—but for some, it presents as straightforwardly carnal, whereas others see it as innocent and optimistic. “I want to have sex with this perfume,” said one friend.  “I feel like it’s Christmas morning,” said another. For us, the name evokes both: that sugar-rush moment when an idle fantasy becomes an embodied reality. 

The duality is the careful result of master-level craft. Our perfumer for this one was Yann Vasnier, an accomplished pro whose resume includes perfumes like Tom Ford’s Velvet Orchid. He performed some magic here. Incarnate is an incense-heavy fragrance, but it doesn’t act like one. Incense-forward perfumes are usually dry and dark, gothic and resinous. But Yann somehow managed to fit all of the shadowy, churchy character of incense into this with none of the heaviness, and in the space remaining, he placed the chewy, delicious vanilla that makes this such a crowd-pleaser. The vanilla is also balanced out by a lot of delicate facets that are only revealed with attention, like a tiny metallic kiss of violet leaf. It’s perfectly balanced right on the edge of too much—Incarnate is powerful and lush but you somehow never get sick of it. At once excessive and refined. 

The result is like a really great pop song—the whole point of the craft is that you don’t glimpse it unless you’re looking for it, you just perceive something universally attractive that is instantly recognizable, like it was always there. 

El Dorado

Many times, I’ve had people ask me for a good petrichor scent. And I didn’t really have any I loved. There are a few memorable perfumes containing geosmin, one of the main aroma components of petrichor, and I would tend to recommend those. But rather than conjuring the experience of encountering petrichor, which has a clarity and lightness to it, those fragrances tend to produce a thick, damp impression.

Now I have an answer for this query: El Dorado. The funny thing is that “rain smell” isn’t what we set out to do, or even the main point of this perfume. It’s a fresh woodsy-aromatic with a big slug of vetiver, designed to evoke a particular place: El Dorado county, in Northern California. But during the design process, we kept nudging it in the direction of airiness and atmosphere, and it took on a dewy cleanliness that, for me, conjures the majestically hygienic aura of freshly damp earth. It is a breath of fresh air. Often, I have wished that friends who don’t live in the Bay could be teleported along with me on some of the hikes surrounding Berkeley. This perfume is the next best thing. 

Initially this struck me as a solidly masculine scent, sitting next to other classy vetivers on the market like Sycomore. Think of it as Sycomore’s wild rural cousin. But some of the biggest fans of this perfume, so far, have been women. So I have concluded that rather than being gendered, it is simply good: crisp, clean, picturesque.

Fun fact: there is a bit of an aromachemical here that’s often used in tropical fruit accords. Here, it just adds a bit of organic lift and sparkle, somewhat like the citrus-ish essence of a freshly squeezed chamomile bud. But think “pineapple” when you smell El Dorado, and you’ll see what I mean. Part of the fun of this company has been getting to observe little tricks like this pulled from the giant artistic toolkit of classically trained perfumers. 

Coney Island Baby

Hearing Scout’s idea for this perfume was one of the moments that prompted me to start a line with her. Her vision: you’re eating soft serve ice cream at a seaside theme park. You smell the gasoline from the roller coaster, the wood from the boardwalk, and the sea spray. I understood immediately. Since I grew up in a city, a lot of my gustatory childhood memories were laced with smog—my earliest memory of indulgence was eating a Snickers by the mouth of a subway station. In the right ratio, industrial odors can be a beautiful complement to industrial sweets.

We almost gave up on Coney Island Baby repeatedly. It is a heinously difficult concept to execute, and the early prototypes were all valiant misses. We tried to convince ourselves that some of them had potential, but we were flailing for months, lost in rounds of revision that weren’t taking us any closer. Finally, we came up with a Hail Mary plan: rather than aiming for the complicated final product first, start by having the perfumer make a somewhat boozy but straightforward vanilla, and then ask them to crank up all of its raunchy facets and add rubber. Lose the marine theme, lean into the gasoline angle. 

I am so glad we stuck with it, because the result of this final try was exactly what we wanted. It’s solidly a gourmand, which is to say, a perfume that smells like food—in this case, funnel cakes, waffle cones, lemon curd. At the same time, there is a recognizable smog component. Neither overrules the other. It is a nostalgic, playful fragrance that is also kind of fucked up. It is comforting, pretty, and very unusual. Scout came up with the lovely phrase “industrial gourmand” to describe it. I don’t think it’s pretension, I think it’s simply a fact that this perfume deserves to herald a new genre. I really have never smelled anything like it.