Day Three Fragrances

Whether you're chasing desert sunrises or city-light deja vu, scent has a way of pinning life's best chapters to the present tense. We build ours for everyone who'd rather wear a memory than a logo. Collect moments, not just bottles.

This is us. This is us. I am Michael, the perfumer. That is my wife Vanessa, who runs Day Three and is the heartbeat of it.

The trophy is the Aftel Award for Handmade Perfume. We won it when we took the leap of faith to create our first fragrance, La Tacita de Café.

Most days we split our time between formula rewrites and dinner prep. The rest of our family and our team get the orders out the door and write the thank you notes that go in your box.

We build scents inspired by our family moments. Pull up a chair and spray a memory with us.

When I started dating Vanessa (now my wife), we would visit her mom's house quite often. She would sit us both down and make us a little cup of coffee, served with a spoonful of brown sugar and a slice of Dominican cake.

That happened at almost every visit. After a while, it felt like she was adopting me into her family. She treated me like her son... and it was a feeling I'd been missing in my life.

I started to associate that smell, the coffee and the cake and the brown sugar, with having a mom again.

So when we made our first fragrance, I built it to smell like her house.

I gave her the first bottle and told her we made it for her. Then I asked her to name it. She wore it for two weeks, came back, and said, "Whenever I wear this perfume, I feel like I'm sitting with my little cup of coffee."

That is how La Tacita de Café got its name.

Each formula is composed by Day Three perfumer, Michael Paul. After the formula is written, the perfume is then compounded in house, and left to macerate on site, in our Arizona lab.

Every single bottle is poured by the perfumer, and assembled by a member of our family. Then, those bottles are labeled and boxed by hand.

Finally, each and every bottle that leaves our lab is accompanied by a personal, hand written thank you note, and a complimentary sample.

This is what the Aftel Award for Handmade Perfume is given for. It goes to one small batch perfume a year, and to qualify, the perfumer has to have actually made it. Hand blended, in house, with no outsourced compounding at any stage. Most perfume brands hire an outside company to make their perfume. We don't.

They are. We use only the highest quality, skin safe ingredients in our fragrances. We use naturals where we can, and use synthetic molecules when they are safer for the skin, or to avoid using animal products.