Neandertal: Kentaro Yamada Explores Humanity’s Past and Future through Scent and Stone-Tool-Shaped Bottles

“This project grew out of my art practice.”

— Kentaro Yamada (founder)

Neandertal’s bottles are shaped like black or white stone tools. Yet the perfumes inside them are not intended to recreate prehistoric smells. If another kind of human had survived to the present, what cultures and aesthetics might it have developed? That imagining drives both the fragrances and their containers.

The founder of this London-based brand is Japanese artist Kentaro Yamada. From his interests in ceramics, technology, and human history, he extended perfume into wearable art. Once the stone-tool-shaped bottles have caught your eye, tracing why this shape and this scent were chosen begins to reveal the brand’s contours.

Essential Information
The Founder and the Brand’s Beginnings
What Matters to the Brand
An Aside…
References

Essential Information

Founded: 2015
Founder: Kentaro Yamada
Base: London, United Kingdom
Fragrance collaborators: Euan McCall, Chris Maurice, and others
Official websites: Neandertal / olfatto, exclusive distributor in Japan

The brand name comes from the Neanderthals, another kind of human that once existed. Yamada takes their past and their unrealized future as his subjects. Through something as familiar as perfume, he seeks to question the perspective that takes our own civilization for granted.

The Founder and the Brand’s Beginnings

From Fukuoka to Studies in Science and Art

Yamada was born in Fukuoka and later studied in New Zealand. He earned a Bachelor of Science at the University of Auckland in 2000, followed by a Bachelor of Fine Arts at its Elam School of Fine Arts in 2004. After attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he studied art at Goldsmiths in London, completing his master’s degree in 2011.

His immediate surroundings involved craft and aesthetics. His mother reportedly taught the tea ceremony and his father ceramics. In a 2012 interview, he said that his experience of living in both East and West influenced his life and work. Those multiple backgrounds also overlap in his current practice, which moves between ceramics and digital technology.

For Yamada, a work’s material was something to choose according to the idea or experience he wanted to communicate. He could work wood or write programs. Rather than displaying the skills themselves, he was interested in what each medium could express. Perfume emerged as an extension of that practice.

Looking at Humanity from Outside through Neanderthals

Before deciding on the names or bottles of the perfumes, there was a question: what kind of beings are humans within the long span of time? Researching Neanderthals and speaking with researchers at the University of Cambridge, Yamada began to imagine their view of the world and their encounters with early modern humans.

What attracted him was not simply life in the distant past. What might have happened if these people, with their stone-working skills, had survived? Perhaps they would have built a sophisticated civilization different from our own. With that hypothesis, he sought to unsettle the idea that human history had followed a single inevitable path.

The choice of perfume shares the same intention. What we consider a pleasant smell or a beautiful shape cannot be separated from our experiences and culture. Neandertal became a project that uses the possibilities of another humanity as a mirror through which to reconsider our present senses.

Becoming Perfume through Collaboration with Euan McCall

Yamada’s collaborator on the early fragrances was Scottish perfumer Euan McCall. For approximately two years before the first release, the two considered how to make this subject work as perfume. McCall would later become a co-founder of JORUM STUDIO (in Japanese).

The name “Neandertal” sometimes prompts people to imagine sweat or crude smells. Yamada, however, wanted contemporary, sophisticated fragrances. The shared task with his perfumer was to move toward works that could convey both a shadow of the past and a future that might have been.

In a 2023 interview, Yamada said that he also experimented with smells found around seas and lakes that are not necessarily pleasant on their own. Placing them within a whole can create a sense of place and a grounded impression. He was bringing questions into the fragrance materials and their balance, rather than simply adding an explanation of the subject.

Presenting the Work in 2015 and a Small-Scale Launch in 2017

Yamada’s record of works lists Neandertal Perfume as a project beginning in April 2015. The exclusive Japanese distributor also identifies this as the brand’s founding year. It was the period when the perfume and its ceramic containers based on stone tools took shape as an artist’s work.

Yamada later recalled releasing a small quantity of perfume at the Ace Hotel in London to coincide with the 2017 Frieze Art Fair. From artistic practice to a perfume that could actually be worn: the project expanded beyond something encountered in an exhibition into something people could take home and bring into their lives.

Questions Expanding from us and them into Publishing

With us and them, which followed dark and light, the inquiry widened to people’s sense of belonging. The distinction between “us” and “them” also appears when considering social and political positions and national borders. By making the two a pair, Yamada sought to create space to think about what lies between them.

In September 2024, he also introduced us & them Volume One, a publication addressing the same subject. Rather than a booklet merely explaining the perfumes’ story, it presents responses by ten writers to the themes of connection and division. In the limited bound edition, Yamada’s ceramics form the covers, and designer Peter Harpin undertook the hand-binding.

From fragrance to writing, from containers to book covers: even as the media expanded, the central inquiry into human existence and ways of seeing continued. While centered on perfume, Neandertal became a place connected with activities in art and culture as well.

Based in London, Reaching Japan in 2025

The brand continues to maintain its studio in London. In Japan, olfatto became its exclusive distributor in 2025, and advance sales began at PHAETON FRAGRANCE FIELD, which opened in Hankyu Umeda Main Store on August 27 that year. An artist born in Japan brought the perfume work he had developed in Britain to Japanese retail spaces.

Yamada aims for a brand with multiple points of contact, from enjoying a fragrance to taking an interest in the questions behind the work. There is no need to understand the philosophy the moment one puts on the perfume. First one is drawn to a shape or a smell, then learns the reasons behind its creation. Perfume is the entrance that brings art closer to daily life.

What Matters to the Brand

Bottle Design Based on Stone Tools

The bottle’s original model is a flint hand axe worked in Norfolk, England. Yamada repeatedly visited stone-tool specialist Will Lord, and together they developed a shape that satisfied them both. Rather than adding a stone pattern to an existing perfume bottle, he conceived the container from a form obtained by actually working stone.

The 90 mL ceramic bottles are made by slip casting, pouring liquid clay into molds, and fired at temperatures exceeding 1,400°C. The flaked stone surfaces and the contours that fit the hand are transferred to the ceramic surface. An NFC chip that allows individual bottle information to be checked is also incorporated, layering modern technology onto the form of an ancient tool.

The 30 mL glass bottles are made by capturing the stone’s form through 3D scanning and working through digital processes. Even when the material changes from ceramic to glass, the starting point is the same hand axe. By choosing different techniques, the form of a stone tool is reconnected to a vessel for contemporary perfume.

Considering Similarities and Differences through a Pair of Fragrances

Neandertal conceives its works in pairs, such as dark and light, or us and them. Rather than dividing the two bottles into good and bad, it places a difference between them to draw attention to what lies between and what they share. This method connects with Yamada’s creative approach to subjects ranging from human history to social boundaries.

us turns toward memories of ritual and daily life, taking as its subjects spices, plants, and fruits used across different cultures. It layers citrus and green elements with smoky expressions of vetiver, sandalwood, oud, and other materials to construct a fragrance with familiarity and calm.

Meanwhile, them imagines a future not yet experienced, including technological advances. It combines transparent expressions of woods and flowers with elements of seaweed and ambergris. One looks at the same human journey through inherited culture, the other through possibilities still to come. This difference in direction also appears in the design of the scents.

Composing with Green, Marine, and Metallic Elements

In dark, delicate accords suggesting leaves and plants are set against pepper and incense, developing toward an iodine-like expression. Oud and leather add animalic depth, while earthy and root-like elements reveal the green aspect again from a darker direction. It is a choice not to reduce nature to fresh botanical smells alone.

light, in contrast, expands hinoki and restrained green expressions, with orris giving cohesion to the composition. A metallic accord, leather, and ambergris are added. The perfumers officially credited are Euan McCall for dark and Chris Maurice for light, placing two interpretations by different makers side by side as a pair.

Wood, sea, and metal seem distant from one another if one looks only at the note names. Yet their combination is a concrete way of bringing an ancient sense of nature together with contemporary expression. The brand’s intention lies in not making the scents old-fashioned simply to match the stone-tool-shaped containers.

Comparing Human and AI Creativity in is and was

is and was are a pair created from the same brief, one by a team of perfumers and the other by AI. The official product information credits both to “AI, or a team of Isaac Sinclair, Fanny Grau, and Nicolaj Koralewicz”, without disclosing which is which.

is takes as its theme a scent suggesting the flesh of an artificial fruit that does not yet exist, combining it with chocolate and metallic elements. was moves from the warmth of woods and spices to the softness of iris, with a composition that layers the bitterness of maté over amber and clove.

Here too, pairing the fragrances is not intended to decide in advance which is better. It is a way to consider how knowing who or what created something changes our perception of it. An inquiry that began with the possibilities of another humanity is moving toward an age in which humans and artificial intelligence both create.

An Aside…

In a 2026 interview, Yamada was asked whether the bottles could be recognized as Neandertal from their shape alone if all branding were removed. A brand with such a distinctive form might be expected to answer that it was its own symbol.

Yamada’s answer, however, was that the hand-axe shape had been developed by humanity as a whole over a long period, so it was shared rather than the property of any one person.

From the hand holding the bottle to people who held the same form in another age: alongside an individuality that identifies the brand, these are the connections Yamada puts into its containers.