Paradox - Our Shop

This iris, citrus, violet musk fragrance was made with Louise Woollam, the award-winning beauty writer of Get Lippie, following the loss of her sense of smell, and its unpredictable and sometimes very unpleasant return. Read Louise's description and the full story here. Paradox raises funds for SmellTaste, the organisation for people with damage to their sense of smell or taste.

This year we have created another fragrance in partnership with SmellTaste called Making Sense, based on a traditional English country garden.

• Top notes: lemon, iris
• Heart notes: violet, bergamot
• Base notes: musk

Ingredients: Alcohol Denat, Parfum, Apha-iso-Methylionon, Linalool, Limonene, Citral, Geraniol, Citronel.

Paradox is suitable for vegans.

The story behind Paradox:

In 2014 this happened to Louise Woollam, writer of the Get Lippie blog and Jasmine Award nominee several times over.  (Click the link to read her story in The Guardian).

Essentially, a normal cold turned evil, took away her sense of smell and as it returned it came back with some really awful malfunctions. After a trip to the Osmotheque, the perfume museum at Versailles, Louise - who knew her vanilla from her vetivert - identified that she could still accurately smell ionones (in violet and iris), citrus fruits and musks. Other things were missing or smelled truly awful.

As you do, we volunteered to blend a perfume to Louise's individual needs, so she came over to Acton, where our studio was at the time, for the testing session. It had to smell good to her, but also good to others, particularly Louise's husband. She wasn't going to go out in something weird, just because her sense of smell had been turned inside out and upside down.

So Paradox exists, named because it's a perfume for someone whose sense of smell was being erratic to say the least. With Sarah, Louise created a deep green iris, with citrus fruits and musk and let us sell it here too.