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Journal

The journal.

The perfumers. The houses. The way a fragrance makes you feel.

  • Expositions

    The expositions: where the houses show their work

    The niche perfumery calendar turns on a small number of fairs where the houses gather, the perfumers come out from behind the bench, and next year's fragrances are smelled for the first time.

    2 min

  • House

    Henry Jacques, perfumery as a private art

    For most of its life the house composed only for individuals, by appointment, in crystal. It opened its doors to the public late and reluctantly, and it remains the standard for what haute parfumerie means.

    1 min

  • House

    Puredistance, the house of very few words

    Founded in Vienna, and in more than twenty years it has released only a handful of fragrances. Each is an extrait, each is composed by a single perfumer without a deadline, and each is finished when it is right.

    1 min

  • House

    Papillon, one woman at her own bench

    Liz Moores taught herself perfumery in rural England and composes every Papillon fragrance herself. The results are dense, animalic and entirely her own.

    1 min

  • House

    Hiram Green, perfumery without synthetics

    A perfumer who works with natural materials only, from a studio in the Netherlands, and who has made some of the clearest, most beautiful fragrances of the last decade with one hand tied behind his back.

    1 min

  • House

    Naomi Goodsir, an Australian in Paris

    Born in Australia, trained as a milliner, and now composing in France. Her fragrances have the sculptural sense of someone who spent years shaping things by hand.

    1 min

  • House

    Goldfield & Banks, the scent of this country

    A Sydney house that composes with Australian native botanicals, worked by perfumers trained in Grasse. The bush, the coast and the desert, bottled with a great deal of care.

    1 min

  • House

    Grandiflora, a florist's perfumery

    Saskia Havekes is one of Sydney's great florists. Her fragrances are portraits of single flowers, composed by some of the finest noses in France, and they smell the way the flowers actually smell.

    1 min

  • House

    Maison Crivelli, fragrance built on a moment

    Thibaud Crivelli founded his Paris house on a single principle: every fragrance begins with a real, unexpected sensory moment, and the composition exists to recreate it.

    1 min

  • House

    Marc-Antoine Barrois, a couturier's fragrances

    A Paris couturier who wanted a fragrance to go with the clothes, and asked Quentin Bisch to compose it. The result, Ganymede, became one of the most talked-about niche fragrances of its decade.

    1 min

  • House

    Nasomatto, the crazy nose

    Alessandro Gualtieri named his house for the Italian for crazy nose, seals every bottle with a carved wooden cap, and refuses to say what is in them. The fragrances are extreme, and adored.

    1 min

  • House

    Orto Parisi, perfume from the body

    Alessandro Gualtieri's second house takes its name from his grandfather's garden and its ideas from the human body: its smells, its heat, its animal side. It is not for everyone. It is for exactly the right people.

    1 min

  • House

    Parfums de Marly, the court at Versailles

    Founded by Julien Sprecher and named for the Château de Marly, where Louis XV kept his horses and his pleasures. A house that takes the opulence of the eighteenth century seriously and makes it wearable.

    1 min

  • House

    Initio, the science of attraction

    A Paris house built on an old idea and a modern claim: that fragrance is chemistry between people, and that a perfume can be composed to work on the person standing next to you.

    1 min

  • House

    Mind Games, perfumery as chess

    A London house whose every fragrance is named for a move on the board. The idea is that a perfume, like a game, unfolds in stages and rewards those who think ahead.

    1 min

  • House

    Tiziana Terenzi, an Italian family and the night sky

    A house from the Adriatic coast that began with candles in 1968 and grew into one of the most opulent fragrance ranges in Italy, its perfumes named for stars, constellations and the figures of myth.

    1 min

  • House

    Widian, the Gulf in a bottle

    Founded in Abu Dhabi by Ali Al Ahmed, Widian composes in the Arabian tradition for a modern wearer: oud, amber, rose and saffron, built with restraint and finished with gold.

    1 min

  • House

    Kajal, where Paris meets the Gulf

    A house that names itself for the kohl of the East and composes in Paris. Arabian sensibility, French craft, and a small collection of fragrances built on the meeting of the two.

    1 min

  • House

    Guerlain, the house that invented the idea of a house

    Paris, 1828. Five generations of one family, a bee on the bottle, and two of the most important fragrances ever made. The house where modern perfumery began.

    1 min

  • House

    Ex Nihilo, the house that starts from nothing

    Founded in Paris in 2013 with a Latin name that means out of nothing, and a boutique on the Rue Saint-Honoré. A young house with an old idea: begin with one extraordinary material and build around it.

    1 min

  • Perfumer

    Jordi Fernández, the perfumer who tamed oud

    A senior perfumer at Givaudan, and the man the industry calls the master of oud. What he does with the most difficult material in perfumery, and where to smell it.

    1 min

  • Perfumer

    Quentin Bisch, and the theatre in the bottle

    He came to perfumery from music and the stage, and it shows. A perfumer who builds a fragrance the way a director builds a scene, with an entrance, a turn, and a last line you remember.

    1 min

  • Opinion

    How a fragrance makes you feel

    Stacey's opinion, held for twenty years and offered here as opinion. A fragrance does not describe you. It changes the temperature of the room around you.

    2 min