I think some of my earliest memories of fragrance come from my grandad’s bottle of Eau Sauvage. I must have been five or six, and I remember thinking it smelled incredibly grown up. It was one of those old splash-on aftershaves, and every now and then I’d be allowed to wear a little myself. Even now, that scent takes me straight back to happy times with my grandparents.

I didn’t really become fascinated by fragrance until I was about 18, when I got a job working in a perfume shop. To be honest, I don’t know how I got the job because at the time the only fragrances I really knew were Paul Smith Extreme and Boss Bottled.

What completely changed things for me was realising that the notes listed in a fragrance weren’t necessarily what was actually in it. They were more like impressions of what something smelled like. That was the point where I became obsessed with understanding how fragrances were actually made.

I started buying individual raw materials and trying to identify them in fragrances I liked. I was drawn to ingredients like Patchouli and Jasmine, but when I smelled them on their own I realised how different they were in isolation. What I thought I was smelling in a fragrance often wasn’t that ingredient at all, or it was only a tiny part of it.

For years, I bought hundreds of materials and experimented constantly. A lot of what I made in the beginning smelled muddy and honestly not very good. Over time, I realised I had to slow down and really study each ingredient on its own — how it changed over time, how long it lasted, how it behaved with other materials.

I probably only made two or three fragrances I actually liked in the first six years or so. It wasn’t until I created Cedre Doux in 2018 that I really felt like I had something good. People enjoyed wearing it, and for me everything just worked. Nothing shouted over anything else. It just smelled right.

I still think I’m finding my style as a perfumer. Or maybe my style is constantly evolving. I’ve never wanted to create fragrances that smell like every other fragrance out there, and I’m completely against dupes. At the same time, I know I still have to create things people genuinely want to wear.

One of the first fragrances I ever made was called Metallic Rose. At the time I thought it was too unusual, so I left it behind. Since then, I’ve smelled fragrances with a similar kind of feel and realised maybe I should trust those instincts more.

I think the people who buy Sentir are usually looking for something different. They’re bored of mainstream designer fragrances that all start to smell the same. They want something with more personality.

That’s really what I want Sentir to be. Every fragrance is created by me from start to finish. I source the materials, build the formulas, test them, refine them and make them myself. There are a lot of brands that outsource the fragrance itself and focus on the marketing around it, but it was important to me that Sentir was different. Even if parts of the business grow and change in the future, the creative side will always stay with me.

For me, fragrance says a lot about the person wearing it. You can be quiet but wear something really bold and expressive. You can be outgoing and wear something softer and more understated. Fragrance can say things about you that you would never say out loud.

More than anything, I want people to wear Sentir and feel confident, uplifted and like themselves. I want it to give them that feeling of walking out the door and thinking: I’ve got this.

-Michael