Elevated Classics

When Jan Ewoud Vos wrote to tell me that Ambragio had finally launched, his excitement carried through the email. The founder of Puredistance hoped it would make the cold, dark days ahead a little warmer and lighter. After reading the story behind it, that wish feels like the heart of…

On perfume, personal bias, and why we trust the people we follow. Give me a perfume built around nutmeg, balsam fir, black pepper, tobacco, palo santo, cedar, patchouli, vanilla and tonka, and I am already halfway persuaded. These are among the notes of New York, a collaboration between Fueguia 1833…

Why I’ve stopped counting my perfumes. I was looking at the bookshelves in my home recently when I found myself thinking about my perfumes. I have books I’ve read several times, others I haven’t opened in years, and memoirs I return to when I need inspiration, encouragement, or simply the…

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…