Perfumer Celine Barel learned about her latest job with Aesop after being sent a mysterious brief. In it were a set of abstract cultural artefacts: a photograph of the night sky, various images of the colour amber, and a poem by Mayuzumi Madoka titled ‘Shooting Star’. Barel, who has worked with the brand for over a decade, spent time mulling over its fragments. Although they were cryptic, the challenge was clear: could she bottle the smell of a shooting star?

Unusual briefs are nothing new for Barel; it’s what she’s come to expect, and enjoy, from working with Aesop. In 2015, she created Tacit, the brand’s first citrus fragrance, born from a prompt that included Serge Gainsbourg songs, a Pantone swatch of green, and a still from In the Mood for Love. A decade later came Aurner, their so-called “defiant bloom,” inspired by Chinese poetry and Nina Simone’s version of Lilac Wine. But their latest project, titled Above Us, Steorra, was maybe the most ambitious brief yet. “They knew they wanted to create something amber-y,” Barel tells Dazed. “But it was super complex, because nearly every brand has a representation of amber, so I couldn’t come to them with something that’s been done a thousand times.” 

A shooting star is about energy. It’s fast, it’s fiery, it disappears

So she began sketching out ideas for an “unorthodox, anti-conformist” amber that could capture the unknowable magic of a star-strewn sky. Where other amber scents lean sweet and powdery, Barel wanted hers to be alive with movement. “A shooting star is about energy. It’s fast, it’s fiery, it disappears,” she says. To mimic that dynamism, she made spices the fragrance’s “backbone”. She used cardamom for its sizzling, zingy qualities, and to replicate its heat, she used the warmth of cumin and cinnamon bark.

But the goal wasn’t just to evoke heat and movement. It was to create contrast, to bottle the sensation of something incandescent streaking through the dark vacuum of space. “I liked this duality of constructing a ‘celestial’ amber,” Barel explains. “An amber that is fiery like the trail of a shooting star, and very warm. Then, when it falls on the ground, it becomes very cold and mineral.” To mimic this cold mineral quality, she layered in pepper, before adding elemi, a citrusy resin that added brightness to the blend’s darker heart.

To bring depth, she turned to labdanum, a resin she associates with her childhood in Grasse. “I spent numerous nights there, just like every human being, looking up at the shooting stars in the summer sky,” she remembers. She used the leaves and twigs, too, as well as Frankincense, to add a more “mystical” character. There is also vanilla – stripped of its sweetness – which brings a smoky, leathery carnality. “It appeals to your guts, to your basic instinct,” Barel says. “We said that Above Us, Steorra is probably the most carnal of all fragrances that Aesop has in the portfolio, because there are aspects of pleasure and sensuality, but not done in an exuberant or maximalist way.”

There’s a philosophy behind that restraint. “It’s a new opulence, a minimal opulence,” Barel says. “Life can be pleasurable even when it’s restrained.” In a world of overconsumption and sensory overload, Above Us, Steorra – named after the Old English word for star – is an ode to both the simple pleasures of life, and a call to embrace the unknown. “It’s very important in a world where people are more and more egocentric.” The underlying philosophy, she notes, is that there is always something much bigger than us, beyond us, “like an invisible hand that is putting everything back into perspective.” If you ever feel like you’re bogged down in a world of your own worries, then Above Us, Steorra is a call to cast your eyes up to the sky. “It is a symbol of all those who live with their head in the sky and both feet on the ground,” Barel says.