Our “Recommend Me a Perfume” thread is open this week. You can use this space to find perfume recommendations, to share your discoveries and favorite scents, and to ask any questions about scents, aromas and flavors. Or you can just tell us what perfume you are wearing.

How does it work: 1. Please post your requests or questions as comments here. You can also use this space to ask any fragrance related questions. To receive recommendations that are better tailored to your tastes, you can include details on what you like and don’t like, your signature perfumes, and your budget. And please let us know what you end up sampling. 2. Then please check the thread to see if there are other requests you can answer. Your responses are really valuable for navigating the big and sometimes confusing world of perfume, so let’s help each other!

To make this thread easier to read, when you reply to someone, please click on the blue “reply” link under their comment.

Photography by Bois de Jasmin

English
Lviv smells like stories whispered in old stairwells, like candle smoke in quiet churches, like coffee simmering on hot sand. I arrived in this city not just as a visitor, but as someone listening—to cobblestones underfoot, to the way a bakery smells when it rains, to the perfume of lilacs drifting over rooftops shaped by centuries of change.

This city once belonged to the Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia, then to Poland, then to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It’s called Lwów in Polish, Lemberg in German, Leopolis in Latin. Each layer left its trace: in architecture, language—and scent.

There’s a particular kind of fragrance here that blends the sacred and the sensual. In the morning, it’s fresh bread and sun-warmed stone. By afternoon, it becomes beeswax, tobacco, ink, roasted apples. The churches exhale frankincense and dust; the cafés—cinnamon and chocolate.

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The first time I smelled White Peony by Dolna Sofiya, I had the sensation of stepping into a memory I hadn’t lived yet—a sunlit room, lace curtains swaying, petals scattered on a linen tablecloth. The perfume didn’t just unfold, it breathed, as if it had been waiting to be noticed: a gauzy blend of rose buds, green leaves, and the faintest trace of nectar. But what stayed with me wasn’t only the scent—it was the sense of intent. This was no imitation. It was a statement: delicate, yes, but deliberate.

Its creator, Sofiya Dolna, is part of a quiet, brave movement blooming in Ukraine—one where scent becomes not just personal expression, but a cultural declaration. In the lingering wake of White Peony, I sensed something larger stirring—a new kind of perfumery, rooted in emotion, resilience, and place. And today I want to tell you about Sofiya—and about what it means to make something beautiful in a time of rupture.

Perfume

White Peony opens like a page in spring light—soft, yet vivid. The initial impression is the brightness of green tea and crushed flower petals, fresh and dewy. The green facets are pronounced, which initially gives the fragrance sharpness. Yet as the composition evolves, the verdant notes soften into a sweet, creamy floral accord. There’s something restrained about the sweetness, as though Sofia didn’t want to romanticize the flower but instead to show it in its quiet strength as well as a fantasy of a blossom. Think a Monet painting of a peony, rather than a high-resolution photograph.

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Уперше відчувши аромат White Peony Софії Дольної, я ніби ступила в пам’ять, якої ніколи не жила — залита сонцем кімната, мереживні фіранки, пелюстки на лляній скатертині. Цей парфум не просто розкривався — він дихав, ніби давно чекав, щоб його помітили: прозора суміш пуп’янків троянди, зеленого листя і найніжнішої краплі нектару. Але залишився зі мною не тільки аромат — а його намір. Це була не імітація. Це була заява: ніжна, так, але цілеспрямована.

Його творчиня, Софія Дольна, є частиною тихого, сміливого руху, що розквітає в Україні — там, де аромат стає не просто особистим виразом, а культурною заявою. У післясмаку White Peony я відчула щось більше — початок нового парфумерного простору, вкоріненого в емоціях, стійкості й відчутті місця. І сьогодні я хочу розповісти вам про Софію — і про те, що означає створювати красу у час розломів.

Як розкривається White Peony

White Peony відкривається мов весняне світло — м’яко, але яскраво. Перше враження — це свіжість зеленого чаю і подрібнених квіткових пелюсток, свіжа й росиста. Зелені ноти яскраві й трохи різкі на старті, але з часом вони пом’якшуються, переходячи в солодку, кремову квіткову ноту. У солодкості є стриманість — ніби Софія не хотіла ідеалізувати півонію, а показати її справжню, тиху силу. Так, це півонія, але її образ, забарвлений трояндовими штрихами, поданий крізь призму фантазії — радше як акварель Моне, ніж як чітка фотографія.

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People often come to me—students, perfumery hopefuls, artists halfway through a formula and a mild existential crisis. Inevitably, they arrive with this question:
What does it mean to be a perfumer? Am I allowed to call myself one if I’m self-taught? If I don’t have a professional lab?

Let’s be honest: this world can be a little obsessed with gatekeeping—as if the right to create scent were handed down from Mount Firmenich on stone tablets.

So let me offer this, not as doctrine, but as lived experience.

I trained as a perfumer at IFF. I’ve studied and worked with legends—Sophia Grojsman, Dominique Ropion, Maurice Roucel. I’ve created fragrances in labs that featured the rarest raw materials, surrounded by shelves of cutting-edge captives and supported by extraordinary teams. I know what it’s like to formulate with everything at your fingertips.

But I also know what it’s like to create with very little. I’ve been taught to compose fragrances on a shoestring budget, with limited access to materials. And I’ve seen other perfumers do the same—crafting something resonant and exquisite not in spite of constraint, but because of it. Maurice Roucel, for instance, has built breathtaking perfumes from formulas that read like haiku. Sophia Grojsman worked magic on a single-digit budget. There is no correlation between the number of raw materials or even their quality and the greatness of a fragrance. Sometimes, it’s precisely the restraint that makes the structure sing.

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