GOAT

I used to call her the mother of contemporary perfumery.

This is the great Sophia Grojsman sitting beneath my olfactory artwork in my Brooklyn loft, probably around 2008. The blurry image is a screenshot from what may have been one of the earliest YouTube videos featuring a perfumer.

I spent five years working with Sophia on a fragrance called 100% Love. We had a wonderful time together, always trying to make the fragrance bolder and more beautiful. I liked to believe that during those five years, we developed some kind of spiritual bond. She always wore a Japanese amulet I had given her around her neck.

This was around the time several niche fragrance brands began appearing on the shelves of major department stores in the United States. The consensus within the niche world was that fragrance had no gender—that the division between perfumes for men and perfumes for women was purely marketing bullshit.

One day, while Sophia and I were talking on a bench in Central Park, I asked her why she had never created a men’s fragrance.

“A fragrance is a sex identifier,” she said. “I create fragrances for women and for myself. I am not a man, so I cannot make a fragrance for a man.”

To this day, it remains one of the most revealing statements I have ever heard from a perfumer. It was also entirely Sophia Grojsman.

Whether a fragrance is called feminine or masculine may seem increasingly irrelevant. But fragrance itself has become an identifier—not of what the market tells us we are, but of who we believe ourselves to be, and perhaps who we want to become.