Notes from the Perfumery

Q & A with the Perfumer Q. LVNEA has a strong and devoted following. What do you hope people feel—or remember—when they wear your scents? A. Ideally, the experience of wearing a LVNEA fragrance transports the person somewhere else–into a story that is both new and exciting, while also comforting and strangely familiar. I want the wearer to feel as though they’ve stepped into a story or a landscape, something intimate but also timeless. Scent has the ability to connect us to memory, but also life and creation; nature and imagination. If someone feels that connection, then the perfume has...

Who says the carnation has gone out of style? Today, this blushing, frill-frocked stem is one of the most commercially grown flowers in the world—a legacy carried for thousands of years by the reigning symbol of admiration, endurance, and revolution.

Traders from southern Arabia would conjure fantastic stories of the hardships endured to procure these precious spices, claiming that the pepper groves were guarded by poisonous serpents that had to be burned away in order to be harvested (a claim ‘substantiated’ by the peppercorns’ signature dark, shrivelled appearance).

The world of perfumery is inherently political;  customs from ancient times immortalized through modern wellness, sacred/cultural rites, and everyday practices of self-care, beauty, and pleasure. Working with natural essences binds us to their diverse histories and wholly implicates us in the welfare of the land and peoples who’ve historically developed the art of scent.