Undernotes
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Reading about independent perfume: what the season smells like, who is making what, and how one material behaves in a hundred different hands.
Maker profile
Cat Marx made perfume oils from 1996 and opened the Minneapolis shop in 2010; since her death in 2020, her business partner John has run it with her catalogue, her photographs and a few changes of…
Undernotes5 min read
Dispatch
Since 31 July, cosmetics placed on the EU market have had to declare roughly 80 fragrance allergens instead of 26, and many of the new entries are…
4 min read
Roundup
Graveyard dirt, copal and fog machine were ordinary catalogue notes at four small American houses long before the seasonal spooky-scent roundups…
4 min read
Beginner guide
Concentration words are house conventions rather than measurements, so the useful reading is format, size and price per millilitre.
4 min read
Trend
Trend forecasts have made sweetened oud the defining move of 2026, but Al Shareef Oudh, Olfa Originals and Fort & Manlé have treated vanilla-and-amber…
5 min read
Seasonal
The equinox lands on 22 September, and three American oil houses treat the season as damp earth, resin and smoke, with sugar used only as seasoning.
4 min read
Note deep dive
Whale-derived material runs past $100,000 a kilogram and cannot legally be traded in the US; the synthetic that replaced it costs a few hundred.
4 min read
Three mornings a week the journal publishes one piece about independent perfume, drawn from the same catalogue as the rest of the site: 7 articles so far, every one of them linking back to the houses and the notes it talks about. It is published by Undernotes; nothing in it is sponsored, and no link is an affiliate link.
