Elevated Classics

An unusual tropical fruit composition by perfumer Pascal Gaurin, with an elegant, richly textured drydown that makes this new American fragrance worth discovering. Maison d’Etto was founded in 2019 by Brianna Lipovsky, whose background in luxury branding and creative direction helped shape this independent American fragrance house. A lifelong equestrian…

The constant arrival of new fragrance brands had made me suspicious of almost every founder’s story. Then a woman in Hawai‘i sent me hers. Whenever a new perfume brand introduces itself to me as “unique,” “niche” and “unlike anything else on the market,” I hold my breath a little. Oh…

In nineteenth-century France and Britain, the perfume a woman wore could invite judgments about her respectability. We have abandoned many of those social rules, but our habit of judging people through fragrance is proving harder to shake. I started researching the perfumes associated with nineteenth-century courtesans expecting to find a…

Say “powdery perfume” and most people already have a smell in mind. Face powder. Lipstick. Baby powder. Maybe something their mother or grandmother wore. The problem is that powder is not one smell. Iris and orris are obvious places to start, but violet, heliotrope, musk, aldehydes, mimosa, vanilla, tonka and…

I started noticing the same move across several neo-niche brands: $350-plus for 50 ml, the same outsourced fragrance-house model, and suddenly the language shifts to “Haute Parfumerie.” That caught my attention. If the perfumers, production system and basic business model have not fundamentally changed, what exactly moved into a higher…

A handful of exchanged samples led me to one of the strangest survival stories in French perfumery A few weeks ago, an Instagram follower who had become a friend handed me a small box of perfume samples. No publicist, no launch event, no carefully staged introduction to a brand, just…