Slow Fragrance Is Reimagining the Future of Sustainable Perfume

Katie Becker, Marie Claire
June 2025

When I arrive in San Antonio, I expect to encounter “bigger in Texas.” What this trip is really about, I soon learn, is slower in Texas. As I walk up the front steps of a well-shaded 100-year-old brick building that headquarters Cultus Artem—a niche fragrance studio housed in a former Southwestern Bell telephone exchange—a small vintage plaque by the doorbell reads:
“Please Ring Bell. And Wait.”

On an unseasonably cold day, I sit with Cultus Artem founder Holly Tupper and her small team of four at a large dining table in the center of the office for a family-style lunch. The industrial space is perfectly styled with antique finds from Tupper’s world travels—she also designs and creates Cultus Artem skincare and one-of-a-kind fine jewelry here. Sun beams through the original 10-foot windows onto the beautiful spread: salmon, gourmet cheeses, warm rolls, and a fresh green salad. No laptops in sight, no phones out save for mine recording our discussion. I assume the relaxed meal is specially prepared for my visit, but quickly learn that this is, in fact, standard operating procedure: make and share meals together, away from screens and Slack messages, a few times a week. Fittingly, the Cultus Artem chemist, Danya Batallas, also makes the salad dressing.

“It’s just olive oil, apple cider vinegar, and mustard,” Batallas tells me. “We joke that it’s kind of like a large-scale manufacturing project because we go through so much. This is the only large-scale product we have in the house.”

Cultus Artem, which can be found at Bergdorf Goodman, is a 10-year-old luxury brand of only eight fragrances and less than one new launch a year. Each is inspired by unusual scents from Tupper’s travels and years living in Southeast Asia—Champaca, for example, is an otherworldly white floral that was inspired after jogging through an old abandoned cemetery in Singapore; Ilex is a “hot citrus-like sunrise” of smoky green tea with animalic jasmine and powdery iris inspired by playing polo. Having trained at The Grasse Institute of Perfumery in France, Tupper is the nose behind her own fragrances, mixing at a small fragrance organ in her studio on the second floor.

“The point of being an artist is not to distribute your artistic vision to somebody else, to interpret it on your behalf,” says Tupper. “It's my vision and the making process is as interesting to me as the creative process.”

What is behind the slow fragrance movement?

“I think there’s a backlash to consumerism,” says Tupper. “What makes more sense is to go back to what luxury used to be, which was luxury that is rare, and less about this big publicly-held company version of what luxury is.”

As romantic as it is, this philosophy also means doing things the hard way. Batallas creates every bottle by hand, working with Tupper in a process that can take years to bring a new scent to market and painstaking hours of complicated safety compliance paperwork. This makes them outliers even in the indie industry, where most small brands outsource formulation, production, and regulatory processes to large contract manufacturers. And while most commercial fragrances rely heavily on synthetics that can be much cheaper, Tupper uses a high percentage of natural ingredients, many sourced from small family-owned farms, she says.

“I once visited one of the largest contract filling companies in the country,” says Tupper, who worked in finance early in her career. “The process they go through just to prime the pumps of their bottling machinery requires huge amounts of undiluted perfume—it would have cost us $300,000 just to prime the pumps before we even had the first bottle. Then it goes into their watershed and then goes where?"

Over the lunch table at Cultus Artem, the plates have been cleared and the conversation moves between sustainability, AI in fragrance, chocolate farming, and Tupper’s newest project, her first home fragrance: a refillable porcelain candle vessel handmade and handpainted in Portugal. It’s ornate, delicate, and timeless—seemingly untethered from social media aesthetic trends. “I’ve been working on this for five years,” says Tupper. “I am making things that I want in my life that I truly can't find.”

In an age wherein “instant gratification” is almost too late, when the white noise of constant consumption can blind us from the original reason we clicked “buy” to begin with, there’s something relieving about a pause, a slow down, and an appreciation of the moment. This is especially so for the transportive, meditative art of fragrance—the sense most directly tied to emotion and memory center of our brains.

Good things take time. Please ring bell. And wait.