For our final Summer edit, we invited illustrator Sarah Burford beneath the surface.
As August slips into September, Sarah has imagined four mermaids, each with her own world, her own personality and, naturally, a perfume she refuses to be without.
There is the languorous beauty reclining in her shell, the glamorous equestrienne with a seahorse for a steed, the pearl-loving romantic at her underwater dressing table and the sun-worshipper stretched across the seabed. Each has found a fragrance that feels entirely her own.
Keep reading to meet Sarah’s mermaids, discover their signature scents and spend a little longer in summer before we come back up for air.
Ashoka, Neela Vermeire Créations x Nerithea
Nerithea has been living in the same enormous pink shell for several centuries and has arranged it entirely to her liking. She keeps flowers in her hair, her favourite perfume close at hand and a very selective social calendar. There were once rumours about sailors, princes and one spectacularly ill-advised midsummer feast, but she considers gossip an occupational hazard of being interesting.
She wears Ashoka for its contradictions: green and milky, luminous and contemplative, with fig, lotus and water hyacinth drifting into incense, woods and soft leather. It is serene without being innocent, which Nerithea considers an important distinction.
Belle De Jour, Eris x Thaléssia
Thaléssia has never understood why anyone would make a rule they did not secretly hope someone might break. She is a familiar sight at every worthwhile gathering beneath the waves, usually arriving astride her favourite seahorse some time after midnight and leaving with considerably more stories than she arrived with. Invitations are appreciated but by no means necessary.
Her appearance? Immaculate. Her behaviour? Anything but predictable.
She wears Belle de Jour, Antoine Lie’s luminous floral for ERIS Parfums, because loves beauty with something improper underneath. Orange flower and jasmine shimmer, polished and radiant, before musk, cedar and seaweed pull the perfume somewhere saltier, warmer and distinctly more intimate. What begins beautifully composed gradually comes undone.
Thaléssia considers this the correct direction of travel.
Nymphaea, Studio Tanaïs x Elowytha
Elowytha tends a floating garden in the quietest part of the sea, where lotus flowers open over silt and the water changes from fresh to salt with the turning tide. She can tell when rain is coming long before the clouds appear and is occasionally consulted on matters of love, weather and dreams, although her answers have a frustrating tendency to make sense several years later.
Every morning she adorns herself at her shell dressing table, fastening strings of pearls around her neck and placing a freshly opened lotus in her hair. Perfume is part of the ritual.
She wears Nymphaea because it smells like the world she understands best. Blue, white and pink lotus emerge through the mineral scent of wet earth, as mitti attar evokes monsoon rain falling onto parched clay. Sandalwood, river silt and sea salt carry the flowers towards the place where river water meets the ocean: serene and almost impossibly beautiful.
Elowytha says some perfumes are worn to be noticed. Others are worn to remember what is sacred.
Viva Maria, Faux Rose x Vesperella
Vesperella lives in the flooded remains of an old palazzo, where she has furnished the crumbling rooms with things recovered from shipwrecks: Murano glass, tarnished gilt mirrors, embroidered silk and an unreasonable quantity of pearls. She sleeps late, entertains beautifully and has been known to disappear halfway through her own parties because the moon looked particularly good on the water.
Nobody is entirely sure whether Vesperella is a romantic or simply very committed to romance as an aesthetic. She sees no reason to clarify.
She wears Viva Maria, Amelia Rose’s pearlescent jasmine for Faux Rose. Fichi d’India gives the opening a juicy, almost translucent freshness before jasmine blooms across the skin, luminous at first and increasingly indolic as it warms. Crushed seashells and ambergris move underneath it, saline and softly animalic, turning something exquisitely pretty into something considerably less innocent.
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About Sarah Burford
Sarah Burford, also known as Curious Pip, is a Bristol-based illustrator and maker whose whimsical world is populated by mermaids, starlets and handmade characters with the charm of another era. Drawing since childhood, Sarah’s imagination has long been shaped by old Hollywood, vintage dolls, beautiful costumes and the sea. Her illustrations and hand-stitched creations combine nostalgia with a wonderfully playful sense of character, while her enduring love of shells and mermaids makes her a particularly natural guide for our final journey beneath the surface this summer.
Sarah is also a longtime admirer of ERIS Parfums’ Belle de Jour. In fact, our collaboration began after she bought a bottle from Sainte Cellier and we discovered her work in return.
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We want perfume retail to make room for more than selling perfume. Every purchase from Sainte Cellier helps us continue commissioning original work from artists, writers and other independent creatives, and creating projects like this one.