The inspiration for perfume brand Gamine has been a decade in the making. Since moving to Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant 10 years ago, founder Melanie Dir has absorbed the historic neighborhood’s character—its character and community—eventually distilling those influences into a fragrance brand that debuted this April.
From the Bed-Stuy brownstone she shares with her artist husband, Frenel Morris, the couple drive their grey Jeep to a cavernous, skylit studio in neighboring Bushwick. There, Morris’s large-scale, high-contrast graphic paintings fill the space alongside the shifting aromas of Dir’s latest fragrances. “Brooklyn shaped the brand’s DNA—it’s real, unfiltered, and impossible to manufacture,” she says, alluding to the cinematic quality of street life and the neighborhood’s layered olfactory influences.
In spring, she says, jasmine and fresh greenery mingle with barbecue smoke, blunts, and beer. By late summer, humidity draws out Nag Champa incense, OG Kush, hot concrete, and the metallic tang of the elevated subway tracks. “Brooklyn’s ability to embrace contradiction became one of the foundational ideas behind Gamine,” she says.
That tension carries through the collection. One Gamine fragrance, Heroic Dose, opens with fresh cypress, blue hemp, and salty marine air, but underneath lies an earthy, gritty complexity brought in by cumin and vetiver bourbon. “Beauty isn’t about removing the rough edges, it’s about elevating them to reveal character and individuality,” she adds. “You also see it in [our bottles]—the durable rubber material, the weighted glass… the industrial design language that runs throughout.”
Dir is not the only perfumer to find creative inspiration in the borough, which, for some years now has become home to a community of perfumers, many of them self-taught, who have incubated brands in industrial-spaces-turned-studios or out of their tiny apartments. “Brooklyn in the 2010s was full of artists who took inspiration from the vivid, often overlooked details around them, creating an exciting wave of artisanal, small-batch brands,” explains Tanaïs, an award-winning author and multidisciplinary artist, who started a perfume line 12 years ago now known as Studio Tanaïs.
They remember discovering pioneering labels such as D.S. & Durga, MCMC Fragrances, and Joya Studio at local markets and neighborhood shops, inspiring them to begin making perfume in their Williamsburg apartment. They later moved into a studio in East Williamsburg that they still occupy; a raw, industrial space in which they compose fragrances drawn from influences as varied as Bollywood movies, Hawaiian goddesses, and the ceremonial incenses of the Americas—palo santo, wild white sage, and black copal.