Don’t expect Melanie Bender to give a quick answer about what her perfumes smell like. The founder and chief executive of the fragrance line LORE, which came out this month, online and in Sephora, prefers to tell stories instead.
Take Sublimity, one of her first four scents. It starts with a group of friends piled into a truck heading to a secret beach in Hawaii. “Your cooler is full of cold drinks, and you’re going to be there all day. The sun is so incredibly intense that after five minutes of being on the beach, your skin is just screaming at you, so you dive into the water,” she said. “Sublimity is that very first wave that you go under.”
Ms. Bender knows the Hawaii she alludes to. She grew up on Oahu with a marine biologist father. The notes in Sublimity include ylang-ylang, musk and coconut nectar as well as the less olfactory and still sensuous “warm skin” and “full sun.”
LORE’s name refers to both the traditional meaning of storytelling and its more colloquial use, meaning back story. She used abstract references like poetry, images and feelings in the development process with the French perfumer Jérôme Epinette, who worked on Byredo’s signature Gypsy Water.
LORE’s three other perfumes include Disfruta, which is supposed to smell a bit like a mezcal cocktail; Somewhere but Nowhere, which Ms. Bender compared to living in a cabin and which has notes of leather and smoke and cedar; and Lovely and a Little Twisted, a pistachio, amber and rose scent that is meant to invoke “Versailles stuck through the looking glass where you can never quite get it to sit still,” she said.
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