The Letter No. 8 — the handover

Hi Fragrant Friend 👋

A couple of weeks ago my videographer and I drove up near Hamburg to see Sophia. She's the second artist on the project, the one interpreting the second scent.

If you're new here, a warm welcome. Some of you are joining from my old Scently Speaking letters, and I'm glad you came along. The short version: New Niche is building its first collection of fragrances, and this is the letter where they take shape.

The reason for the drive was specific. I'd come to hand her the final formula of her scent, in person. I've done this once before, with Stephanie, and I've worked out by now that it's one of my favourite moments in the whole thing.

Here's the awkward order of it. The artwork has to be finished early, because we need it for the packaging. So the artist interprets a near-final version of the scent, paints from that, and only later does the formula actually lock. Between those two points the scent can move a little, and sometimes more than a little. So I'm never fully sure the finished thing still lines up with what she painted. That gap is on purpose, it's part of how we work, and it still makes me nervous every time. This visit more than the others, because the scent moved a long way right at the end.

The scent itself

I won't give it all away here. If I had to put words on it: a dry, lactonic-woody composition with a bitter-citrus contrast. You can hear Christophe Laudamiel in it, in the sense that Mansour has stripped it back to almost nothing. Mansour Osman built this one, and he spent more than six years learning next to Christophe. For me it lands somewhere near a Le Petit Mouton in the wine world. Linear to the point of being austere, a little avant-garde, clean all the way down. I'm no scent critic, so take that with some salt.

It also does the one thing I keep asking for. Leitmotif number three around here is a plain sentence: "A New Niche fragrance should feel new." I went looking for where this one sits in the usual fragrance families and came up with nothing. It doesn't really ask to be filed anywhere, which suits me fine.

Sophia, in the room

Rather than describe her, here she is. One short clip from the visit.

Thank you for the labels

Last week I asked you to look at the label designs and tell me what worked. A lot of you did, more than I expected, and it genuinely helps. It's how we work out which label actually belongs on the bottle, and which one only looked good in my head. So, thank you.

8.8 on Parfumo

We're not at the point where you call your mum to say you made it into Forbes or Vogue. There's a smaller version of that, though. I checked our Parfumo page yesterday, a handful of new honest reviews, and the average is sitting at 8.8. What gets me more than the number is that the story behind scent number one, the one that moved Chester to make it, keeps getting retold by other people. That's a strange thing to watch happen.

See the reviews on Parfumo.

And if a sample has been sitting on your shelf and you've been meaning to write it up, review number ten is open. No pressure at all. You can find it here.

As always, if any of this sparks something, just hit reply. I read everything.