Paraphrase Perfume

I smell like incense and spice

I'll be Dune this all night

Reverend Guais Helen Mohiam is here to get the universe back in order (wearing Gilded)

Ok for real, I can be pretty shy. Probably the reason I am drawn to the solitude of making perfume and why I love product photography. Video shoots are inherently busier. They require more coordination, more negotiation and more people. Not ideal for someone who would rather be at their desk building little worlds.

I have wanted to shoot Fin de Siecle in this space for a really long time though. The scent is inspired by late nights in rowdy Parisian bars 100 years ago and the wood clad walls and drama of this space felt perfect. So sometimes even when you are shy and feel reclusive, if there is a vision you just have to spray on a big, assertive scent as armor and ask for what you need. Then like magic, every time people end up being wonderful and helping to make this vision happen. It is great to put out something singular but the rush of letting other people help, of building things that are bigger than you can do on your own is truly exciting.

Fin de Siecle feels like the perfect scent for being bigger than you feel inside. It is the late night communion formed in wild and dark places. It is the elegance you can walk with when you love how you feel in this moment.

Thank you to M&M for being the perfect heartbreaker, LEX for the great video work, Vivian for being so damn talented and Blair Junior for letting us take over the space.

There are roses you bring home in a vase, delicate and polite. And then there’s the rose that waits for you in the dark, tangled in oakmoss, stained with blackcurrant, sharpened by bitter orange. That’s the rose at the heart of Fin de Siècle.

It doesn’t sit pretty. It pulls you barefoot into the forest, hair tangled, heart racing, daring you to abandon restraint. Notes of patchouli and civet push it deeper, animalic, unpolished, alive.

This isn’t a fragrance for safety. It’s a rose gone feral, a decadent bouquet at the edge of ruin — haunting, sensual, and unforgettable.

As the nights stretch longer and October settles in, Fin de Siècle feels like the season itself: shadowy, romantic, and a little dangerous. The perfect scent for anyone who wants their perfume to linger like a secret after dark.

Tree resins have been one of the earliest forms of fragrant material used by humans. Worked into oils, burnt to scent the body and the spaces people occupy. There is a notable hierarchy of these resins however. Frankincense typically being held in the highest regard by the modern perfume world. Even the name frankincense (also known as olibanum) comes from the French “franc incense” or “good incense”. The commonly accepted name of this resin is literally the taste of french colonialists wound into our understanding of the material.

This filter through which so much of the perfume world has been shown over the past 150 years leaves so much out. What of copal from Mexico? Elemi from the Philippines? What even of pine resin from the boreal forests?

These were some of the thoughts I had been pondering as I have been collecting pine resin over the years. Obviously the characteristics of each of these materials are different and olibnum and other revered resins are undeniably beautiful but I can’t help but think of how much we are missing when we automatically take the tastes and relationships, commercial and cultural of European nations as they wound there way around the globe taking what had tickled them. What aromatic wealth and cultural wisdom are we surrounded with everywhere on the planet.