It’s commonly said that scent is personal, but for Holly Tupper, the founder and nose of Cultus Artem, a boutique fragrance house based in San Antonio, TX, that is true in a multitude of ways. In addition to developing the range of rich natural scents, Tupper personally oversees everything from production to packaging.

The entire brand—design studio, salon, lab, production and packaging facility—is vertically integrated and housed in a single building, constructed in 1921 as a telephone exchange. It’s like walking into a laboratory wedged inside an art museum: On one floor, pristine rows of test tubes and instruments; the next is full of paintings and design documents; on another, a library of individual scent ingredients and a nineteenth-century copper bathtub (a gift from the building’s previous occupant, an antiques dealer). Many brands outsource production to third parties, Tupper explains, which makes her one-woman show particularly unique.  

If unique fragrances are your thing, you’d better run to Bergdorf Goodman: The luxury department store has just unveiled its new fragrance lab, an exploratory experience for customers to engage, discover, and interact with a selection of incredibly chic niche fragrance brands.

The store has curated a selection of global exclusives, limited editions, and new offerings from established favorites, including fragrance houses such as Cultus Artem, the Parisian 777 Stephane Humbert Lucas, M.Micaleff of Grasse, and Swedish brand Byredo. The lab provides an inviting environment for clients to experience and experiment with these scents, expanding upon BG’s existing curation of first-look brands that later become prominent in the beauty industry, such as Killian, Jo Malone, and Maison Francis Kurkdjian.

In the world of ultra-high-end fragrance, where bottles and tonics can run into the thousands, there has never been a brand like this: The just-launched Cultus Artem is radically transparent with its ingredient list and is independently vetted by a toxicologist. And in a space where formulations and recipes are a perfumer's prized secret, this is no small feat. Given the price tag, this won't be for everyone, but it's at least impressive to see change coming at all levels of the industry. Poeticus is wildly opulent.