The space between.

The Inspiration

In Alban Berg’s opera Lulu, the title character is a woman built from contradiction, scored in twelve-tone serialism — a language built on tension and resolution — to capture her passion and duality. I imagined this enigmatic femme fatale getting ready for the evening: a powdery mist settling over the room, her wooden vanity scattered with pearls, compacts, and a bar of frothy floral soap. Each gesture, deliberate yet impulsive, mirrors the tension between artifice and authenticity, vulnerability and confidence. Le Bain de Lulu (Lulu's Bath) is a tribute to the harmony of contrasts.

The Inspiration

I first encountered Chant du Rossignol while playing the viola in orchestra. Stravinsky's tone-poem, drawn from Hans Christian Andersen's The Nightingale, depicts the triumph of nature over artifice. I found the same tension in the Golden Pheasant: a bird that soars between instinct and intention, between the presence it offers the world and the one it keeps close. Not guided by pretense or desire, but by genuine talent and dedication. It doesn't perform authenticity, it simply holds it, unhurried and grounded, without ever needing to be seen. Faisan d'Or doesn't choose between who it is and who it shows itself to be. It holds everything, at once.

The Inspiration

I was captured by composer Cécile Chaminade's piano piece, L'Ondine (Water Sprite). Its light melody is layered over arpeggiated figures in the bass, giving the impression of water, while a choral-like harmonic progression projects a kind of sanguine curiosity. I found in it a mirror of Chaminade's own story: a female composer who left the current of what was expected for a woman in 19th-century France. On solid, unmapped ground, Lutin Errant (Wandering Sprite) is at that same crossing. Not lost, just curious about what the forest was hiding. It moves playfully and unexpectedly, venturing from what's familiar into the unknown, trusting that new ground can still feel like home.

The Inspiration

I loved music before I understood it, then left it, certain the door had closed for good. But it never really left me. Music followed quietly, a shadow just behind my shoulder, resurfacing in phrases I hummed without noticing. When I eventually returned, I built this fragrance the way I once built music: through discipline, structure, control. But the composition kept slipping past me, the way a phrase resists resolution no matter how carefully it's played. So I stopped searching and started listening. L’Hantise (The Haunting) doesn't ask to be understood — only that you stay a moment in the space between one note and the next.

The Inspiration

At seventeen, performing with the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, I played the Polonaise from Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin. This is the grand, stately dance that marks the moment of the character's return years later, composed and poised, entirely her own. Its sweeping chords hold a kind of quiet endurance: not the fire of youth, but the steadiness earned after it passes. I named this fragrance Mischa, the old word for bear and a childhood dream of being chased barefoot through midnight woods. Mischa is about the moment the running stops and you turn around. It isn't about becoming someone new. It's about recognizing the person that was there all along.

The Inspiration

I've always been drawn to Debussy's imaginative voice. It is fresh, fluid, and alive with watercolor harmonies and textures. In 1889, he visited the Paris Exposition Universelle and stood mesmerized before the Javanese gamelan orchestra. Those cyclical rhythms and pentatonic harmonies would echo through his compositions for years after. I imagined Debussy in that same crowd, turning from the gamelan to find a stranger throwing knives. Not danger, not hesitation, just certainty, the moment seeing and doing become one. Knife Thrower isn't about being fearless. It's about that instant when focus arrives and everything else falls away.