I discovered KV during Perfume Week in Paris. The extraordinary bottles caught my attention first. The perfumes are what made me stay.
There is a point during perfume week when your nose, and frankly your attention span, begins to protest. You have smelled dozens of fragrances, heard dozens of origin stories and seen enough elaborate bottles to become slightly immune to all of it. So when something makes you stop, you pay attention. That was my experience with KV by Kateryna Vel’menko.
I first encountered the house in Paris this spring, where I was walked through its collection of eleven fragrances. The bottles are immediately striking, with a sculptural mountain rising through the glass beneath a porcelain cap. But packaging can get me to a table; it cannot make me care about what is inside the bottle. What interested me about KV was how complete the collection already felt.
There are fresh perfumes, florals, gourmands, darker leathers and spice-heavy compositions, but they share a certain restraint. Even when the materials are rich, they are allowed room to breathe. The sweeter perfumes are balanced by woods, spice or bitterness. The fresh ones have enough structure to stay on the skin. And throughout the collection, I found something increasingly important to me: performance without brute force. After Paris, I wanted to know more about the woman behind it.
From Corporate Life to Perfumery
Kateryna Vel’menko is Ukrainian-born, with a family that has lived in northern Italy for more than two decades. Her route into perfumery was anything but linear. She originally worked in human resources before leaving corporate life to pursue a career as an oriental dancer and choreographer, which took her through the Middle East and beyond. Bahrain, Oman and UAE became part of her sensory education, as did the perfumes she had been fascinated by since childhood.
She later began studying perfumery seriously, including training in Thailand and further study during the pandemic. That period gave her the time to move from simply loving fragrance to considering what she wanted to create herself.
KV was ultimately built as a family-funded project. Kateryna took the lead on fragrance while her husband became deeply involved in the design and production of the packaging. Even the bottle became an exercise in persistence. Its internal mountain, inspired by Monviso in the Italian Alps, proved technically difficult enough that some manufacturers were unwilling to make it. The finished design required several specialized suppliers working across different components.
A Perfume Wardrobe Rather Than a Signature Scent
Kateryna describes KV as a perfume wardrobe, and that idea makes more sense once you smell through the line. She does not believe one perfume needs to perform every role in a person’s life. Her analogy is simple: we would not expect one pair of jeans to work for the office, gym, dinner and every other occasion, so why demand the same from a fragrance?
Four of the fragrances were composed by Kateryna herself, while the others were created with perfumers including Amélie Bourgeois, Patrice Revillard, Camille Chemardin, Elia Chiche and Antonio Alessandria.
Laconic. Less is More is one of the easiest places to begin. Iris, cedar, citrus, pepper, leather and musk create a clean woody fragrance that feels polished rather than sterile. When we smelled it together, I described it as my version of a “clean girl” perfume: bright, soft and incredibly easy to wear, but with enough spice and structure to give it character. It is the one I would reach for when traveling, working or simply wanting to smell put together without making perfume the first thing everyone notices about me.
One Mojito for the Road is far more playful. Lime and mint give you the expected cocktail reference, but the fragrance quickly expands into tropical fruit, green notes and solar florals. I expected something much more literal from the name. Instead, it smells like summer skin, something cold in your hand and an evening ahead of you. Fresh, but with a little sex appeal.
Then there is Amore Dolce Amaro, a cherry fragrance that avoids one of my recurring problems with modern gourmands: sweetness without opposition. Amarena cherry, tuberose, jasmine, coconut and honey are deliberately offset by patchouli, woods and the bitter-fruity quality of davana. It is gourmand enough to satisfy someone who loves cherry and almond, but not so literal that you feel like dessert. On skin, the drydown reminded me of an extraordinarily expensive body cream.
One of the most interesting compositions is Not a Morning Person, which Kateryna created herself. It grew out of Persian tea and family gatherings in Bahrain, with black tea, rose, saffron and a Bulgarian Burley tobacco material used to recreate the dark, dry character she wanted. What impressed me most was not any single note, but the space between them. I could smell tea, then tobacco, then rose and saffron, as though different parts of the room were reaching me at different moments. It feels less like a perfume “about tea” than the atmosphere around the ritual of drinking it.
Silent Serenity was already familiar to me before our conversation and remains one of my favorites. Inspired partly by the peonies in Kateryna’s grandmother’s garden, it moves from green notes into rose, peony and raspberry before becoming deeper with patchouli, milk and cacao. It is a fruity floral, but decidedly not a girlish one. I think of it as an evening perfume: sophisticated, softly sweet and confident, with enough diffusion to make its presence known without overwhelming the room.
The name Chilli Candy Crush gives you a reasonably good warning that something unusual is coming. Chilli, wasabi, pepper and ginger cut through cotton-candy sweetness before vanilla, musk and woods soften the drydown. It is clever because the heat is not simply there for novelty; it prevents the sweetness from becoming cloying. This is one of those perfumes that changes personality as it dries, and Kateryna says it can behave surprisingly differently on men’s skin.
If I were buying another KV bottle tomorrow, however, Icicle Popsicle would be very high on the list. Kateryna based it on the childhood experience of breaking an icicle from a roof and eating it, complete with the slightly metallic, mineral, almost dirty sensation that comes with it. Eucalyptus, mint and wintergreen create the cold; sandalwood, musk and modern woody materials give it warmth and longevity underneath. The result is an exceptionally good everyday skin scent. If you like molecular perfumes and clean musks but want something with more texture and sophistication, start here.
Good Mood Is Loading, another of Kateryna’s own formulas, works in a completely different direction. Pepper, grapefruit, gooseberry, sage and vetiver make it brisk and almost mentally stimulating. I told her I could imagine wearing it before an important meeting or even an exam. It has that bright-eyed quality: the fragrance equivalent of getting your brain online.
For gourmand lovers, there is A Bit Hazelnutty, Antonio Alessandria’s tribute to Piedmont and the combination of coffee, chocolate and hazelnut found in the region’s culinary culture. There is plenty here that sounds edible: coffee, cocoa, hazelnut, cream and rum. Yet spices, woods, amber and musk stop the perfume from turning into a pastry. During our conversation I called it “grown-up Nutella,” which is inelegant but still probably the fastest way I can explain why it works.
She Is Glowing is another personal favorite and one of Kateryna’s own creations, centered on Magnolia alba sourced from Thailand with passion fruit, mango, grapefruit, rose, geranium, sandalwood and musk. It is fresh, romantic and genuinely joyful. Kateryna jokingly calls it her first-date fragrance, and that feels about right. It does not try too hard to be mysterious or intellectual. It simply makes you smell very, very good.
Finally, El Badia takes the collection firmly into the Middle East. Arabic coffee, cardamom, saffron, honey, leather, smoke and woods create the darkest and most assertive fragrance in the wardrobe. The cardamom is particularly strong to my nose, while the coffee sits inside a much broader atmosphere of heat, spice, leather and amber. If She Is Glowing is the perfume I would wear when I wanted to seem approachable, El Badia is the one I would choose when I wanted to remain slightly mysterious.
Why KV Stayed With Me
What stood out to me across the collection was how well balanced the perfumes are. They have presence and they last, but they never feel as though performance was the main objective. I have become increasingly tired of perfumes that rely on enormous projection to make an impression. I want longevity and I want diffusion, of course, but I also want to be able to smell what is actually happening in the fragrance. With KV, I could pick out the materials, notice how they developed and enjoy the space between them. They perform beautifully without overwhelming everything around them, and for me that is far more interesting than simply making a perfume louder.
My personal starting point would be Silent Serenity, Icicle Popsicle and She Is Glowing, but the fascinating thing is that I can see a wearer and an occasion for every fragrance in the collection.
There is much more to Kateryna’s story, from how she learned perfumery and sourced some of her materials to the extraordinary process of producing those bottles and the realities of launching an independent perfume house. We get into all of that, and smell through the entire collection together, in my full conversation with her.
Watch my full interview with Kateryna Vel’menko to hear the stories behind KV directly from its founder and perfumer.
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