Hello, Fragrant Friend 👋,

I’m writing this in the middle of everything, only now realising what has actually happened over the past weeks. I met Christophe Laudamiel, we launched Before the World Moved Again, Chester presented it at Paris Perfume Week, and the first orders are coming in from across Europe. Some dream partners (🇳🇱, 🇧🇪, 🇮🇹, 🇩🇪) now have it in store, alongside the first genuinely moving reviews on Parfumo and Fragrantica.

At the same time, there have been a few painful lessons. Damaged packaging, DHL frustrations, and the quiet tension between creative freedom, expensive formulas, and building this as an industry rebel.

I’ll share more reflections on this this Sunday at www.scentlyspeakinglab.com

Now onto this issue!

🗓️ Contents of this Issue

1. Note Worthy: Placebo, CuriosityOverLoyalty, Akigalawood

2. Niche Newcomers: Spicy Road, Agapimu, Lovers and Strangers

3. Quiz: How long are captive molecules generally protected?

4. Scent MythBusters: The complexity of naturals versus synthetics and why some perfumes are clone‑proof

Note-Worthy 🔎🌸

#PLACEBO: Kolido’s Placebo is less a perfume than a controlled experiment. Developed with Nose Magazine, the same formula was presented alongside different visual cues to test how perception alters smell. Participants described completely different scents depending on what they saw. The takeaway is uncomfortable: fragrance is not just chemistry, it is context. What we smell is heavily constructed by expectation, not only by molecules.

#CURIOSITYOVERLOYALTY: Snif is building a brand on the idea that loyalty is fading and curiosity is taking over. Instead of signature scents, consumers are rotating through “experiences” driven by sampling, social discovery and low commitment formats. Their success with unconventional launches, including gourmand concepts that feel almost absurd, shows that novelty now outperforms consistency. Fragrance is shifting from identity marker to something closer to content, constantly refreshed, rarely fixed.

#AKIGALAWOOD: Akigalawood is a case study in how modern perfumery creates value. Developed by Givaudan through biotechnology from patchouli, it delivers a spicy woody profile with exceptional diffusion and longevity. More importantly, it is a captive molecule, meaning competitors cannot legally use it for years. This creates a new kind of differentiation: not storytelling, but controlled access to smell itself. Innovation in perfumery is increasingly happening at molecular level, not just creative level.

Niche Newcomers 🎨 🌟 

A brief disclosure.

Scently Speaking runs without ads and without paid placements.
It exists because New Niche exists.

New Niche is the fragrance publishing house we’re building in parallel.
Obtaining one of its perfumes is not merchandise.
It’s how this work stays independent.

Quiz 🎲 

Scent MythBusters 🎭️ 

TL;DR

Yes, most perfumes can be copied. But only a few can be reproduced.

The more a fragrance relies on linear synthetics, the easier it is to reverse-engineer. The more it leans into naturals, variation and proprietary molecules, the more a dupe becomes an approximation rather than a replica.

Misconception

The popular belief is simple: perfume is just chemistry. Analyse it, list the ingredients, rebuild it. This idea is reinforced by the rise of clone brands that promise “identical” scents at a fraction of the price. If it smells similar in the opening, it must be the same formula.

But that assumption confuses resemblance with replication.

What’s actually happening

Reverse-engineering works best on clarity. If a fragrance is built around a tight structure of well-defined synthetics, it can often be mapped and reconstructed with surprising accuracy. That is why certain modern compositions feel instantly familiar across brands.

But perfumery becomes far less predictable the moment you move away from that clarity.

Natural materials are not single ingredients, they are complex systems. A rose absolute is made up of hundreds of molecules that shift depending on origin, season and extraction. Even if you match the “idea” of the rose, you rarely match its behaviour over time. The fragrance starts to diverge where it matters most, on skin, in the drydown, in the hours no one talks about.

Then there is everything that sits outside a clean analytical read. Ageing, maceration, the use of fixatives that shape evaporation rather than announce themselves. These elements do not show up as clear signals, yet they define how a perfume breathes. Remove them, and the structure remains, but the experience flattens.

And finally, there are ingredients that are simply out of reach. Captive molecules like Akigalawood are designed to combine performance with complexity, then locked away for years. You can analyse around them, approximate them, even get close. But you cannot access the material itself.

So what you end up with is not a copy, but a translation.

Final judgement

The idea that all perfumes are equally easy to dupe is convenient, but wrong. Synthetics bring precision, but they also make a formula easier to decode. Naturals introduce variation, and proprietary molecules introduce limits. Together, they turn a fragrance into something that resists exact repetition.

A dupe can mirror the outline. But the deeper the composition, the more it reveals the gap.