We’re laughing and we’re squashed up so close in the throng of people that our noses are almost touching. On the bus home, I see the boy with the black curly hair and almond eyes and I spritz on some perfume. Suddenly the freshness of berries beds down with the smoke on my leather jacket. It’s sexy, it’s comforting, and a little witchy—exactly stages of bleached hair like Mixed Emotions. It’s a scent that says I’ve got personality, and that’s precisely what I want that boy—and any boy thereafter—to know about me. Gorham, known for perfumes such as Gypsy Water, Bal D’Afrique and Velvet Haze, didn’t set out to become a scent savant, starting his career instead as a basketball player.

Delilah Future Resist foundation. Most of the Byredo products featured on our site are not vegan-friendly, but you can view those that are by simply looking for the vegan icon on the relevant product page. Byredo products can be bought online in the US from Neiman Marcus, eCosmetics and Bloomingdale’s. You can also get these products from Mr Porter and Selfridges.

With time, I learned more about perfumery as a craft and a science, and I started to understand Jerome ‘s approach, and I was able to get a bit more into the raw materials and into the technical composition of fragrance. But it became the biggest challenges when I went from these very literal translations of places or objects to a more abstract idea. If I wanted to talk to Jerome about this idea of what love smells like, all of a sudden, I was in a different space. So, I needed I needed to create different references for him to understand what my perspective on love was. One thing I did understand was that smell was subjective, and so it was going to be a very self-indulgent process for me for many years. What white space did you see in the fragrance world?

That didn’t exist in the fragrance industry; it was very much copies of copies. Most of the products that had been in the market and did well were the result of numerous focus groups. Everybody was trying to find a smell that scored high in a general sense, partly because that was the model for so many years. For us, just making products of a high quality that told specific stories, and that smelled unique, that’s what people wanted.

Gorham is the son of an Indian mother and French-Canadian father—he is a tall, tattooed former pro-basketball player who grew up in Toronto and lives in Sweden, yet feels a deep connection to the culture of India and its people. At this point, I’ve at least smelled almost every Byredo fragrance there is. It’s easy to see why the Stockholm-based brand is so popular. In addition to the incredibly chic and minimal packaging, the unisex scents are as unique as they come yet undoubtedly wearable and intriguing as well. Trust me—everyone will ask you what scent you’re wearing when you spray on Byredo, and anything you buy from the brand is worthy of the price tag, but I’m here to help you narrow it down to thebest perfumes they have .

It certainly has signature scent potential but not really year-round. Mojave Ghost is one of Byredo’s buzziest scents, so I was eager to try it. I do see why this one is so popular—it’s a lovely option for the evening but isn’t sweet or overly floral in the least. It’s soft and the floral aspect is soft and more woodsy, with a hint ofsandalwood and amber. The only reason I don’t think I’d adopt it is my signature scent is that it develops a bit of a powdery note on me as the day wears on, but some people may embrace that. There are plenty of fragrance reviews out there, but I find them to be quite technical, speaking to all of the different layered notes in a scent.

And now that makeup is becoming more genderless, has that inspired your approach to cosmetics? But at the same time, I don’t wear fragrance either. Initially, when I imagined makeup, I approached it in the same way we had fragrance and not knowing anything.

It’s really interesting because clients now have expressed ideas of what they like and don’t like. They aren’t the typical faces that you see for a fragrance. Most of the people we’ve shot for fragrance relate to some idea of real life. We’ve shot models, we’ve shot celebrities, but I try to be diverse in every stance, even when it comes to body type, when comes to skin tone, when it comes to race or culture or gender or gender identities.