The Scent Lab
There's a quiet revolution happening in perfumery, and it smells like almost nothing—at least at first. While mainstream fragrance houses continue their arms race of ever-more-complex compositions (seventy notes! A...
There's a certain kind of fragrance that doesn't walk into a room—it makes an entrance. Louis Vuitton's Ombre Nomade is that fragrance. Launched in 2018 as the house's first oud-centric...
Chicago isn't supposed to be a fragrance city. Not in the way Paris is, or even New York. It's a place of brutal winters, industrial grit, and Midwestern practicality—a city...
From the niche perfumeries of Wynwood to the custom scent studios of Coral Gables, Miami has developed a fragrance culture as vibrant and complex as the city itself. Here's what...
Viktor&Rolf did something unusual in fragrance. They took two concepts — a floral explosion and a spice detonation — and made them so definitive that the originals became cultural shorthand....
There's a particular pressure to Valentine's Day gift-giving that doesn't exist with other occasions. A birthday allows for practicality. Christmas permits variety. But Valentine's Day demands romance—or at least the...
There's a particular theater to shopping on Rodeo Drive that borders on religious experience. The marble floors gleam like church altars. Crystal chandeliers cast a soft glow that makes everyone...
There is a particular kind of fame that belongs only to things that were never meant to be famous. A limited-edition crystal bottle, commissioned for a birthday party (albeit a...
There's a certain audacity to blind buying fragrance. It's the olfactory equivalent of agreeing to a blind date, booking a holiday to a destination you've only seen in photographs, or...
The first Comme des Garçons fragrance I ever encountered smelled like a electrical fire in a flower shop. This was 1998, I was standing in Liberty's perfume hall, and the...
There's a particular shade of grey that exists only in Stockholm during November—not quite dove, not quite charcoal, but something altogether more nuanced. It's precisely this appreciation for the spaces...
In 1966, Yves Saint Laurent put a woman in a tuxedo and called it Le Smoking. The fashion press lost its collective mind. Restaurants turned women away at the door...
