UK's Best-Kept Niche Secret

Hello, Fragrant Friend 👋,

Three weeks ago, you helped spark the vision for our first fragrance — crafted by Chester Gibs and inspired by the theme of Reflection. Chester is now blending the initial scent (including your inspiration), we’re close to choosing a design studio, and in our first video podcast my friend Aron and I deconstruct one of perfumery’s great white florals using both naturals and synthetics.

🗓️ Contents of this Issue

1. Note Worthy: Scent Database, Scentzine, and Paris Perfume Week
2. Strictly Independent: Mabelle O’Rama
3. Quiz: Marine-like scent
4. Scent MythBusters: Fragrance only changes because of skin chemistry

Note-Worthy 🔎🌸

#SCENTDATABASE: ScentsAndFlavors.com launched with 46,500+ entries covering materials across the flavour and fragrance industries. Developed by BeWiDo and backed by the British Society of Flavourists, it’s free and smart-search enabled, with chemical, physical, organoleptic, safety and sourcing data in one place.

#SCENTZINE: Immortal Perfumes founder J. Ruth dreamed of newspapers before fragrance. That love lives on in The Scent Strip, a community-driven perfume zine where scent meets storytelling, with quarterly themes like Wanderlust and Spellbound.

#PPW2025REVIEW: Paris Perfume Week 2025, curated by Nez, offers a welcome contrast to Esxence — slower-paced, indie-leaning and thoughtfully curated. Over 60 brands, from Velvetvelo and Judith to Amouage, Frassai and Atelier Materi. For those craving depth over noise, PPW remains a quiet yet compelling stage.

Strictly Independent 🎨 🌟 — Mabelle O’Rama

A visual artist and self-taught Lebanese-British perfumer based in London, Mabelle channels memory, mythology and cosmic wonder into scent with a delicate yet resolute hand. Forbidden Bloom is a 2× finalist at the Fragrance Foundation UK 2024 Awards. Scents: 3.

Phoenix Flame — Rebirth in Smoke. Sumac and cardamom blaze against immortelle’s golden sweetness, while frankincense and oud ground the story. Notes: sumac, cinnamon, cardamom, immortelle, frankincense, myrrh, oud.

Forbidden Bloom — The Garden of No Rules. Frangipani and gardenia in forbidden union, lush and tropical under a veil of coffee and musk, with juicy pear and peach. Notes: pear, peach, frangipani, gardenia, coffee, cedarwood, ambergris, musk.

Lunar Dust — Moonlit Skin. A cosmic skin scent: powdery iris through soft amber and cedar, white woods shimmering like stardust. Notes: iris, cedarwood, amber, white woods.

Quiz 🎲

Which ingredient creates a marine, ozone-like impression despite not being derived from the ocean?
Calone · Driftwood · Waterlily · Cucumber

Scent MythBusters 🎭️

“Fragrance only changes because of skin chemistry.”
Myth of the week

TL;DR

It’s not just “your skin chemistry” at work — your skin’s microbiome (the microbes living on you) may be changing how your perfume develops. These microbes can break down fragrance ingredients and shift how a scent smells over time.

The reality check

Your skin is home to a microbiome that interacts with your perfume, transforming some scent molecules — so a note that smells creamy on your friend might turn sharper or muskier on you. Perfume isn’t just what’s in the bottle; it’s a collaboration between the formula and your body.

So, is the myth busted?

Fully busted. Perfume really can smell different on different people — and your skin’s microbiome is a big reason why.