Until significant technological advancements are made, the only way we know how to transport through time is with scent. A whiff of golden syrup can take you back to the Sunday morning pancakes of your childhood; the lingering smell of cigarettes to that trip in Paris; while the soft, musky smell of old library books can teleport you to a time you’ve never experienced, somewhere between the past and present, molded by the hundreds of hands that have touched, read, and cried on the pages before you. 

ānti Parfum, a fragrance brand by Brieuc Larsonneur and Larissa Sugaipova, takes this concept one step further with “olfactory archeology”. Like time travellers, they’ve designed fragrances that delve into history by excavating places, moments, rituals, material culture, and even people to to recreate experimental scent stories with a modern twist. “Very early on, we became obsessed with the idea that perfume is humanity’s first time machine,” Brieuc tells Dazed. As a retail architect and set designer, Brieuc’s resume boasts stints with Atlein, Altuzarra and Balenciaga, where he worked closely with Demna Gvasalia. After leaving Kenzo to pursue a role at Vilhelm Parfumerie, he met Larissa, whose background was in marketing and e-commerce. This encounter led not only to a friendship, but a partnership of transformative ideas fuelled by the desire for something bigger.

In October last year, they launched ānti with seven fragrances that are mapped across a timeline beginning in 2000 BC. Bast, an interpretation of the first documented perfume in Egypt, which shares its name with the brand itself – ānti – is an opulent, incense-imbued formula with sparkling amber, frankincense and myrrh. Rosa Antiqua, is found 2,078 years later in 79 AC, mined from a preserved perfume extraction produced in Pompei. Although Nashi Toro borrows from Japan’s Yayoi period in 86 AC, it feels au courant with today’s fragrance heavy hitters; soft and creamy with the freshness of the pear making it incredibly chic. Then there’s Antinoüs, named after the young lover of Roman Emperor Hadrian, who mysteriously drowned himself in the Nile River in 130 AC. Unofficially, Brieuc quips that this is also partly inspired by the smell of Timothée Chalamet’s armpit, specifically in Call Me By Your Name. The funkiness of the cumin blended with the aromatic sage is divisive: people either love it or hate it. But the esoteric smell dries down soft and peppery on the skin, like the salty, sun-kissed mark of a hot summer day. 

At the beginning of April, ānti added Kleopatra to its lineup. A reimagination of royal milk baths, the fragrance is the brand’s first gourmand offering, an intoxicating concoction of vanilla bourbon, sandalwood, musk and almond milk. It's a fitting addition to a lineup underscored by the thesis that the most exciting place to look for what’s next in fragrance might just be the past. Below, Brieuc and Larissa discuss misunderstood scents, emotional truths, and what they want people to experience when they smell ānti. 

How did you arrive at ‘olfactory architecture’ as your guiding philosophy?

Brieuc Larsonneur: Very early on we became obsessed with the idea that perfume is humanity’s first time machine. Scent has always existed as a way to preserve memory, identity, power, seduction, devotion. So rather than inventing stories from nothing, we started looking backward.

Olfactory archaeology is our way of describing the creative process we follow. We research the historical emotional, symbolic and material traces a civilization has left behind, with information from botanists, perfume historians and anthropologists. In practice, it means reading, gathering visual references, studying rituals, architecture, trade routes, cosmetics, food, religious practices, even climate. You have to do your research because sometimes something is called incense in an ancient text but it doesn’t refer to frankincense. It could mean myrhh or something else entirely. Then we restrict the perfumer to ingredients that were available at that time and place.

But your perfumes aren’t purely historical recreations.

Brieuc Larsonneur: Yes, you also have to adapt. The work the botanists do is the technical base and then we bring in the emotional part: the storytelling and the feeling. So that’s when we research the weather, the religion, and the fashion of the time. And ultimately, we mix the technical base with the emotions and add one pop culture reference in there. We are not trying to make a museum artifact. We are trying to make history breathe again on skin.

Can you tell me more about your modern twists? 

Larissa Sugaipova: We allow our perfumers to use one ingredient which is more common today because you can’t wear the exact fragrances from ancient Egypt. It won’t be wearable. We don’t want to just redo the past, we want to bring its essence into today for a contemporary nose.

Brieuc Larsonneur: For example the modern twist in Bast. We have all these ingredients from ancient Egypt: cardamom, saffron, papyrus, myrrh, incense. Then, we have the modern twist, which is the amber accord that’s made with vanilla. Vanilla arrived in this area of the world after the 15th century, and we are here like 2,000 years before Christ. But the amber accord brings this certain warmth, evoking the desert, the climate. There are already historians redoing – perfectly and technically – perfumes from history. There is a super cool place in France called The Osmothèque, and they do a lot of conferences where you can smell these fragrances, so we go there a lot.

“Donkey milk! That was Cleopatra’s secret, to bathe in it. But it was too animalic. Even classic dairy milk, Larissa and I were grossed out by” – Brieuc Larsonneur

Are you two history buffs? 

Larissa Sugaipova: Yes, absolutely, although perhaps not in an academic way. 

Brieuc Larsonneur: We have different periods we’re into. For example, I’m really into the medieval period. I’m fascinated by it, but there’s no good perfume there. The few we tried, Larissa was like, ‘Uh-uh. This won’t pass, this is too weird.’

Larissa Sugaipova: We also had one from the future that we wanted to launch. It was horrible [laughs]. 

Brieuc Larsonneur: We made the most abstract perfume only using aldehydes. None of that reminds you of any actual existing ingredients, and your brain hates not knowing what it’s smelling. So we basically just created this monster. Some people said it smelled like freshly baked bread or white flowers with a slow wind. And I was smelling chlorine and blood. It smelled like pure fear. It gave me this whirring sound in my ear and I had shivers down my spine. My friend said it smelled like someone waiting for you behind the door with a knife.

Larissa Sugaipova: Your friend has issues though. 

Brieuc Larsonneur: So, we aborted it. 

There are actually a few fragrances of yours that are misunderstood. I met one of your investors and he told me Nashi Toro smelled like wet socks to him, even though to me it’s one of your most accessible scents.

Brieuc Larsonneur: It’s our best seller and everybody likes it except Thomas! There’s also Antinoüs. The cumin note is known to be polarising. It’s a bit like coriander; either you love it or hate it. Most of the time people smell it they’re either like, ‘ugh, vile’ or they go more into like, ‘ooh, mm, yum!’ The salty skin accords, the cumins, the sage, the white pepper, all these animalic and sweat-leaning ingredients seem very challenging to people. When you tell them it’s inspired by the armpit of [Timothée] Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name, it can be a bit offputting. But when you put it on your skin, it’s actually super wearable.

Brieuc, your background is in architecture, working with Demna at Balenciaga, Altuzarra, and Kenzo. How does that show up in how you build a fragrance house?

Brieuc Larsonneur: My diploma was actually called the smells of structures. It was a manifesto for architects to take smell into consideration. For example, when you enter a hospital, you’re stressed because of the smell. Architecture actually leads to many things; art, drawing and photography, then you think about music and acoustics. You have to learn about how the body works and proportions, because it’s actually a body inhabiting space. It’s constructed almost like a nose. You have the base notes – the foundations – then you have the heart, which is like the main part of your building. Then you have your top notes that are protecting this structure.

You’ve just released Kleopatra in the US, and are launching it globally in September. Tell me about it?

Brieuc Larsonneur: When we first launched, so many people came to us and asked where is the gourmand? We realised some people didn’t find their entry point into the collection because we were missing this. Gourmands have been done by so many people, and they do it well, so we wanted to release something original. We had the recipe of the perfume of Cleopatra as a perfume oil but we don’t redo perfumes, we create something around it. She was known to take these milk baths so we decided to do a gourmand the milky way with almond milk, which isn’t overly sugary. Then we decided on vanilla and jasmine. And then we had it! We had created something addictive, soft and powerful at the same time. 

Larissa Sugaipova: As Cleopatra was! 

I remember when we met at the Stele launch, you said something about testing goat milk?

Brieuc Larsonneur: Oh no, that was donkey milk! That was Cleopatra’s secret, to bathe in it. But it was too animalic. Even classic dairy milk, Larissa and I were grossed out by. 

ānti is only 7 months old and you’ve already achieved so much. What has this last year been like for you?

Larissa Sugaipova: I remember when we started to just think about ānti, we’d imagine that one day maybe we’d be sold in Liberty in London. That also turned out to be our first point of sale ever.

Brieuc Larsonneur: We start from the bottom and now we here – and then we did the opposite [laughs].