Welcome to Scentrified Interviews, where I explore the stories, inspirations, and dreams of selected people from the perfume industry, people who have truly dedicated their life to the pursuit of scentual excellence. Happy reading!
Robin Dünner, from one of our many meetings at Esxence in Milan. My own photos.
Somewhere between remembering and forgetting is where perfume lives. A Tuesday. A train platform. A stranger’s coat. A past self. Robin, co-founder of Pernoire, a Swiss niche perfume house, lives somewhere in that space too – between utility and mystery, between art and content calendar, between what smells good and what sells.
“It took us years to get to eight perfumes,” Robin says, referring to the Anima collection — eight black bottles that now stand like quiet sentinels on a shelf. But their newer white collection, Odus, is accelerating. Three perfumes released in its first year: Poka, Anelo, and the recently released Melos. A fourth, still unnamed, is floating somewhere in the future, set to arrive this fall.
Robin says the white line needed siblings. “Otherwise it would look too lonely.” That wasn’t a business reason, exactly. More of a visual logic. An aesthetic alignment. An impulse to balance.
“I admire brands like Orto Parisi or Nasomatto,” he tells me. “They take their time.” He says it almost like a wish.
But Pernoire cannot take too much time.
Because the world does not wait for your slow ideas.
The world scrolls.
The world refreshes.
The world wants more.
Anelo, Otimo and Poka. My own photos. See more here.
Anelo is already a bestseller. “It’s new, it’s summery, it’s easy,” Robin says, not with pride exactly, but something more like curiosity. Like he’s watching the brand behave independently of him, developing instincts of its own. Then Melos is more niche again. Rooted. Inspired by Cleopatra, who is said to have had one of the first-ever beauty rituals. That kind of reference isn’t “on trend,” which is perhaps the point exactly.
Both of these scents are slightly more expensive to make than some of the other scents. Not because they last longer or are much heavier in concentration, but because the raw ingredients are costly. “This is a topic that sometimes breaks my brain,” Robin admits, laughingly.
Some decisions are made in chemistry labs. Others in spreadsheets. Some in Instagram DMs.
“You can have great scents,
but if no one notices,
you’re done.”
And yet, attention is not a fixed thing. It comes with eyes and strings and brand deals and baggage. “Authenticity is very important to me,” Robin says. “But it’s impossible to do a complete background check on each person you work with.” He shrugs. It’s a shrug you can almost hear happen. “It’s part of the game.”
Poka submerged in popcorn. My own photos. See more here.
Some of the promotional videos on Pernoire’s Instagram feed are made with AI. They show perfume bottles in places and landscapes that don’t exist. A geometry of light that never touches earth. And Robin has a background in video. He knows how much it costs to make something truly beautiful – not “content”, but a feeling, a narrative. So they use AI sometimes. For freedom. For efficiency. For the same reason anyone turns to machines: for survival.
“With AI, it’s resource management,” Robin says. “But I’m trying to be conscious about the impact. We still pay a photographer for our photos.”
Will that line hold? Will ethics keep pace with innovation? “We probably won’t be able to escape AI,” Robin says. Then, almost to himself:
“Will people stop caring about the ethics of it at some point?”
Pernoire is small. Only three full-time salaries (until very recently they were just two). The rest is a labor of love, endurance, and instinct. Like always, some scents sell better than others. Vitias, the second ever release, is still a steady favorite. Others, like Masar and Tierra, are perhaps more “out there”.
“We’re going to be a bit more approachable now,” Robin says, referring to the Odus collection. “But we still don’t want to lose our niche.”
There’s that word again: niche. It’s a space, but also a scent. A shape of air that not everyone wants to breathe. A refusal, a risk, a kind of promise. And somewhere between a spreadsheet and a memory lives a small Swiss brand, trying not to disappear. Trying to stay strange. Trying to last.
And maybe that’s all any scent really does…
It lingers.
It fades.
But if you’re lucky – it lasts.
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