PHLUR’s Chriselle Lim and Perfumer Jérôme Epinette Take Us Inside Vanilla Canyon

Vanilla has a reputation. It’s sweet, comforting, familiar and, depending on who you ask, perhaps a little predictable. So when PHLUR decided to make it the centre of its latest fragrance, Chriselle Lim knew exactly what she didn't want.

“When you hear vanilla, you immediately think sweet or juvenile,” the PHLUR Co-Founder and Creative Director tells JDEED. “I wanted our vanilla to have a little more edge to it. Something darker, sexier, a little unexpected.”

The result is Vanilla Canyon, created with perfumer Jérôme Epinette, and making its global debut in Dubai. There is still the warmth that makes vanilla so easy to love, but this time it sits alongside velvet plum, wild honey, patchouli and oak wood, taking something we know very well and giving it considerably more attitude.

“You still get that warmth that makes vanilla so addictive,” Lim explains, “but then there’s the plum, the patchouli, the woods… together, they create a vanilla with a little more attitude to it.”

By Cynthia Jreige

What Does Limitlessness Smell Like?

Interestingly, Vanilla Canyon didn't begin with vanilla at all. Its starting point was a feeling: limitlessness. “At PHLUR, we always start with a feeling first and let it shape the story, the scent notes, and the entire world around the scent,” Lim explains.

For Vanilla Canyon, that feeling also had a landscape. Wide-open spaces, canyons, roads stretching towards the horizon and the particular sense of possibility that comes from having no idea what might be around the next corner all became part of its visual and olfactory world.

For Epinette, translating something as abstract as limitlessness into perfume meant resisting the temptation to make vanilla too heavy. “For me, ‘limitlessness’ is about openness, freedom and a sense of possibility,” he tells us. “I wanted the fragrance to capture that expansiveness, so rather than making vanilla feel dense or overly sweet, I gave it space to breathe.”

Madagascar vanilla provides the warmth and sensuality, while oak wood and patchouli bring what Epinette describes as a “grounded, textured depth.” Velvet plum and wild honey add luminosity. “That balance of openness and warmth is what brought the feeling of limitlessness to life.”

For Lim, the idea also speaks to the way she thinks we should actually wear perfume. “Some days you want to feel sexy, some days you want to feel cozy, and other days you want to feel more confident,” she says. “You’re constantly changing, and your fragrance can change with you.”

Finding Their Vanilla

Getting there took time. “We went through a lot of iterations trying to find the right balance,” Lim says. It wasn't until they grounded the fragrance in oak wood and allowed the patchouli and plum to become more prominent that everything began to make sense.

“At PHLUR, we never move forward with a scent unless it creates the visceral emotional reaction it's intended to.”

When Lim finally smelled the version that would become Vanilla Canyon, it took her back to a very specific chapter in her own life: arriving in Los Angeles and driving through the canyons for the first time. “It brought me back to when I had first moved to LA and drove through the canyons and really said to myself there are so many opportunities ahead.”

She found herself repeatedly returning to the scent, which she says is usually a very good indication that they have landed on something. “It was familiar, but there was something a little unexpected about it. That's when I knew.”

That emotional reaction has become something of a PHLUR signature. Rather than beginning the creative process by assembling a wishlist of fashionable fragrance notes, Lim starts somewhere much less tangible.

“I’m not someone who starts with, ‘Okay, I want these three notes in a fragrance.’ It’s usually more like, ‘I want to feel this.’ and then we figure out what that feeling smells like.”

It's an approach that makes more sense when you consider Missing Person (JDEED's personal favorite), perhaps the clearest example of how something extremely specific to Lim can take on completely different meanings once other people begin wearing it.

“That came from such a personal place for me, and then once we put it out into the world, everyone had their own story for it,” she says. “Some people thought of their mom, others thought of an ex, others thought of their home, and seeing everyone’s own interpretations was the coolest part.”

It also explains why storytelling feels inseparable from the actual perfume at PHLUR. The fragrance begins with Lim's emotion, Epinette gives that emotion a smell, and eventually someone thousands of kilometres away sprays it and attaches an entirely different memory to it.

That translation from feeling into fragrance is where Epinette comes in. When we ask where Lim's creative brief ends and his own instinct begins, he doesn't really believe the distinction exists.

“I don’t really see a clear line between the two,” he says. “My role is to understand the intention behind the brief and what feels authentic to Phlur, then find a way to bring my own creativity into that world.”

For him, the interesting part lies in finding the detail that makes something familiar feel slightly strange. “I’m always looking for the detail that makes a fragrance feel a little less expected… an unusual contrast, a shift in texture, or an ingredient used in a different way.”

With Vanilla Canyon, restraint was important. The surprises needed to be noticeable without pulling the fragrance away from the emotion they were trying to capture. “That instinct was about finding those subtle surprises without ever losing sight of the original vision.”

Vanilla Canyon's global debut in Dubai feels particularly fitting for Lim. As PHLUR has grown from fragrances including Missing Person and Father Figure to Vanilla Skin and now Vanilla Canyon, it has also had to speak to people whose cultures, memories and relationships with fragrance can be completely different.

Lim's solution is surprisingly simple: don't try to make something universal. “I think that's actually the interesting part, the more personal we get, the more people seem to connect with it.”

Every PHLUR fragrance might begin with something specific to her, but she accepts that her story stops being the only story once the bottle reaches somebody else's hands. “People tell me what it reminds them of, and it's never what I expected. The stories are always different, but the feeling underneath them is usually the same.”

It's a philosophy she wants to protect as PHLUR continues to enter new markets. “We're not trying to tell anyone how they should feel about a fragrance,” Lim says. “We're just creating something that makes you feel something and allow you to bring your own story to it.”

And vanilla, perhaps more than most fragrance notes, arrives with plenty of stories already attached.

“Dubai is such a meaningful place for Vanilla Canyon to make its global debut, because vanilla is a note so many people already have a relationship with, no matter where they're from.”

The difference is what PHLUR has decided to do with it. “But this is our take on it: darker, sexier, a little unexpected.”

And after years of smelling vanilla in almost every possible incarnation, a little unexpected is exactly where we'd like to go next.

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