At Esxence I had the luck to meet Pia and Nick, the people behind Boujee Bougies – originally a candle company, but one that now has a perfume line. I had heard about these perfumes before Esxence and continued to hear about them in Milan. People in the know kept telling me how fresh and good their perfumes were, and it made sense. Nick and Pia have been immersed in the world of perfume, and have worked for and with different brands. If anyone knows great perfume, it’s them.
When I smelled the scents at their booth, I got to see why. They had that perfect combination of uniqueness that surprised you, but not so much that you couldn’t handle what you smelled. They are expertly blended and each scent has a story and distinct point of view that makes the perfumes easy to understand and enjoy.
Infleurno isn’t out yet so I’ll talk about that one later, but Gilded is easily the best daring new scent I’ve tried this year. It has notes I love, yet it smells like nothing in my collection and nothing I’ve smelled before. You may have heard of this perfume as an incense scent, but throw away your ideas about what that means. This isn’t Avignon, it’s not Palo Santo, it’s not wooden pews and smoke. It’s not sorcery, it’s alchemy.
Gilded smells like a multi-denominational place of worship in the sky. It’s where everyone comes to meet and accepts one another. It opens with a blast of lemon and saffron that smells very herbal to me – truly, it still reminds me of a Ricola cough drop, and I love it. Imagine that you’re being transported to this church and you can smell the fresh lemon in the air. There’s saffron rice pudding being served, wax candles illuminating the space, myrhh, yes, and also people. It’s happy, it’s uplifting, it’s mouth-wateringly delicious in the opening. The opening is big and welcoming but the scent settles down after a while and becomes more resinous, waxy, and contemplative in character, while it still throbs with energy. There’s a sweetness that lasts from the opening to the finish, even when it sits close to the skin, but no, it’s not at all a gourmand, it’s just not a dark smoky incense.
If the spice on the planet Arrakis was good for you and it had a scent, then this would be it.
I had to ask Pia and Nick some questions because they’ve both got tons of experience working with different brands. They were nice enough to answer, so have a read.
- You both are familiar with lots of perfumes, both vintage and modern. In your opinion, how important is it to be familiar with the perfume landscape when you’re creating new scents?
Nick: I think it’s important to have other fragrances in mind when we’re working on new developments so that we don’t accidentally stumble into something else that’s a trope or archetype that’s already on the market. You can reference classic structures in interesting ways, too, by flipping the script on the original theme and using other materials that evoke similar effects, for example. It’s easier when we’re working on our own ideas because typically those are things that haven’t existed before – and we have a lot of creative license as a result. Similarly, over-familiarity with the landscape could cause you to subconsciously take a fragrance in an existing direction. So it’s an important balance.
Pia: How can you create the future if you don’t know what has gone on before? What if you think you’re creating something new and instead you’ve stumbled on a classic accord that you just didn’t happen to be aware of? On the other hand, is it absolutely necessary to possess this awareness of other perfumes before starting to create? No, and obsessive cataloguing and study of what has gone before can leave the perfumer limited by boundaries that restrict possibilities quite needlessly. A degree of naivete in interrogating raw materials can lead to wonderful discoveries.
There is also a known phenomenon of creative zeitgeist that I’ve witnessed first-hand ever since my London College of Fashion days – people working in the same field and same media end up expressing their creativity through the materials available to them at the time (in perfumery this might be something like the discovery of coumarin or a fragrance molecule becoming available out of its patent and now suddenly everyone has access to it), and reaction to other art, culture, political and world events. Fashions of the period you are in are harder to pinpoint than fashions from thirty years ago. You may think you’re being an outlier when actually you’re part of the zeitgeist. My personal route to perfumery means I was exposed to a lot of different fragrances from many eras and types before I so much as picked up a pipette. I never set out to deliberately recreate an existing accord, but in the search for new olfactive forms, I often find I’ve ended up coding in something vintage. It’s my dream to be truly original but is any art, ever?
- What is something that you want people to keep in mind when they try Boujee Bougies perfumes?
Nick: Our stories and scent impressions. We’ve worked to align the feeling that we want to inspire with the actual scent experience. Gilded should smell of golden light. Verdant of a towering skyscraper of futuristic green. Quir of a leather night at a club. Queen of post-modern Victoriana, and a trippy wonderland experience. Of course, they won’t resonate to absolutely everyone – we all have such a personal smell-scape and relationship with scents – but it’s what we hope to get across.
Pia: That each scent is intended to make a statement. Even though they are all completely different from one another, there is a unifying theme of distinctiveness and irreverent joy of perfume. We wanted each scent to convey striking imagery and evoke strong emotions.
- What is another perfume brand or perfumer you admire, and why?
Nick: There are so many brands, creative directors, and perfumers I admire – for lots of reasons! But I’ll take an opportunity to shout out a fellow Nick: Nick Steward’s work at Gallivant, for his very clear aesthetic vision of how a fragrance should perform and behave, and the way he achieves that consistency with various perfumers.
Pia: Ack! What a question, where do I even start? It’s impossible, I admire and respect so many perfumers and brands from years gone by to today. Limiting myself to just ones in the current UK scene, I want to mention Ruth Mastenbroek and her achingly elegant perfumes that feel like modern compositions created by a perfumer transported to the present day from the Golden Age of fragrance. If anyone complains about there not being classic chypres around anymore, they need to smell her Signature Edp. Also, what Mabelle O’Rama and Maya Njie are creating really speaks to me due to their multidisciplinary methods – and Maya’s Nordic heritage comes through in her creations; her Nordic Cedar is one of the handful of perfumes I actually wear on my days off. Liz Moores of Papillon has an unerring sense of decadent luxury – and having followed her journey closely from the beginning, I just want to cheer from the sidelines to celebrate all she’s achieved.
- What’s a perfume you have as a reference and what is it a reference for?
Nick: Rose Privée by L’Artisan Parfumeur – a reference Rosa centifolia (rose de mai). It’s a travesty that it was discontinued, a truly exquisite rose perfume that displays and enhances every facet of the material beautifully.
Pia: Well – at one point I had a personal collection of over 200 perfumes, of which I only wore about 10% and the rest I just kept to smell again and again for nostalgia, reference, mood, educational purposes. I’ve since reduced that collection to about 50 and at the lab we keep maybe another 50. We use them in training clients or new perfumers (here are these examples of classic eau de cologne; here are some fougeres), but I don’t have any specific one that I could point to and say “this is my reference for X”.
- What material do you love the scent of on its own, before it has even been blended with anything else?
Nick: Styrallyl acetate. It smells like rhubarb, plastic petals, faintly metallic and is like a gradient between lime green and barbie pink. It reminds me of a bunch of sweets from my childhood.
Pia: There are a few, but like “what music are you into?” would never be a static question and answer for me because it depends on when you’ve asked me that, I can’t narrow this down to just one, or even say I’d give the same answer if you asked me this time next year.
One material I’ve always adored – and wait for it because this is like saying my favourite composer is Mozart – is bergamot. I love it, and yes it goes with almost everything, but that doesn’t make it bland. It has a wonderful natural perfume made up of peppery, citrus, herbal, woody and floral facets and smelling a good quality bergamot oil just brings an instant smile to my face.
Head to Boujee Bougies to buy the scents and the candles. There are travel sizes available of all the scents so that you can try them before you buy.
