On Saturday, Sainte Cellier had the pleasure of welcoming Nata Dyshliuk, the perfumer behind Sentire in Kyiv, to our London studio for an intimate afternoon devoted to perfume, materials and the craft of composition.
There is something particularly revealing about hearing a perfumer speak about their materials. A finished fragrance can feel almost inevitable, its different elements so completely integrated that it becomes difficult to imagine all of the individual decisions that preceded it. Listening to Nata talk about her work makes those decisions visible.
Like a brilliant composer choosing the instruments that will carry a piece of music, Nata approaches her palette with extraordinary discernment and precision. Materials are not interchangeable building blocks. Each has its own timbre, texture, quality and expressive potential, and she seeks out superior ingredients with an exacting understanding of what they can contribute to a composition.
That attention to material is one of the qualities that first drew us to her work. Across the Sentire x Sainte Cellier capsule collection, richness never feels indiscriminate. These are perfumes of depth and abundance, but also control: compositions in which every resin, flower, wood, spice or tincture appears to have been chosen because nothing else would quite do.
It was wonderful to watch Nata share that way of thinking directly with fragrance lovers in the studio, allowing guests not simply to smell the finished perfumes but to understand something of the intelligence, curiosity and painstaking selection behind them.
From a perfumer working in Kyiv, these remarkable compositions have travelled outward and found an increasingly international audience. That feels especially meaningful to us. Independent perfumery is sustained not only by novelty, but by recognising and supporting singular talent: the people developing a distinctive language of their own and insisting upon the quality of the work required to express it.
Our deepest thanks to Nata for spending the afternoon with us, and to everyone who came to listen, smell, ask questions and share in the work.
