Kismet Olfactive: How Shabnam Tavakol Came to Turn Poetry and Memory into Perfume

The relationship between fragrance and storytelling is everything to me.

Shabnam Tavakol

Kismet Olfactive is an independent fragrance studio born in New York, USA. Founder and perfumer Shabnam Tavakol turns into perfume the scents she knew in an Iranian family, her studies in Grasse, and memories of celebrating friends while traveling. These stories extend beyond titles into combinations of fragrance materials and structures incorporating poetic forms.

Key Information
The Founder and the Brand’s Origins
What Defines the Brand
References

Key Information

Brand name: Kismet Olfactive
Founder and perfumer: Shabnam Tavakol
Place of origin: New York, USA
Timeline: conceived in 2015; presenting creations as a brand by 2020
Official website: Kismet Olfactive

The Founder and the Brand’s Origins

An Iranian Family and a Move from Publishing to Perfume

Tavakol was born and raised in California to parents who had emigrated from Iran to the United States. Perfume was familiar to her family, and rose water, saffron, and aromatic plants were also part of everyday life.

After studying fashion in Los Angeles, she moved into publishing. She worked at Monster Children magazine, then moved to New York and became involved with BULLETT Magazine. During a meeting with Coty that she attended to sell advertising to the fragrance market, she became aware of the world of work behind perfume and began researching how to enter it.

At Le Labo (in Japanese), she encountered fragrance blending, ways of communicating scent, and the commercial side of the business; at the natural fragrance specialist Enfleurage, she learned about sourcing raw materials and creating with natural fragrance ingredients. Experience serving customers and working with materials would later become the foundation for making and bringing her own perfumes to people.

To Grasse with a Personal Statement Kept for Six Years

Early in her interest in making perfume, Tavakol had written a personal statement for an application to the Grasse Institute of Perfumery in southern France. She did not apply at the time, however, and the document remained on her computer for six years.

As she accumulated experience at Enfleurage, people around her encouraged her to pursue technical training. She submitted the old statement almost unchanged two days before the deadline. About a month later, she learned that she had been accepted and left her life in New York. In 2016, she studied perfumery in Grasse, then undertook an internship at Chanel’s perfume laboratory in Paris.

Independence to Decide Everything from Formula to Name

The idea for Kismet arose in 2015 while she was traveling by car through Iran with her father. “Kismet,” the basis of the brand’s name, derives from the Persian qismat, meaning fate, a word she often heard at home. It expressed things falling into their proper places and unexpected events connecting with one another.

After her studies in Grasse, friends and peers began asking to try Tavakol’s personal scent experiments or collaborate with her. Eventually, requests came from beyond her immediate circle, and her creative work grew into a company’s activities. By 2020, she was presenting Kismet creations from a base in New York.

Before choosing independence, she also experienced disappointment while seeking employment in the fragrance industry. During her internship in Paris, on the other hand, perfumers welcomed her warmly and shared their knowledge. What Tavakol sought was an environment in which she could carry her ideas through a creation from beginning to end.

For me, being an independent perfumer means having full creative control.

Shabnam Tavakol

For her, the name is an important element shaping a perfume’s character and contours. As well as developing the formula, she takes responsibility for the title and its final presentation. She finds the significance of independence in that breadth of responsibility.

Layering Her Feelings for Grasse into Fourteen Lines of Poetry

The first Kismet perfume she made was Nostalgia (A Sonnet for Grasse). As Tavakol considered how to express her feelings for Grasse in scent, her partner Cody, a poet, told her that a sonnet could also express love for or praise of its subject. From that came a structure in which fourteen fragrance materials correspond to fourteen lines of poetry.

Today, Cody Koester works on the brand’s storytelling and writing, while creative director Melia Tandiono handles its visual expression and packaging. This structure, connecting scent, words, and presentation as distinct areas of work, also supports the process of turning stories into perfume.

What Defines the Brand

Nostalgia: Creating a Poetic Turn with Leather, Flowers, and Pastis

The composition of Nostalgia layers the history of Grasse with Tavakol’s own memories of living there. Accords suggesting suede and leather depict its past as a thriving center of tanning, overlaid with floral expressions such as Rose de Mai. An accord is a combination of several fragrance materials that creates a single impression.

An anise scent corresponds to the “volta,” the point at which a poem’s meaning turns. Its inspiration is pastis, the anise-flavored drink she came to know after classes. The perspective shifts from the town’s history of leather and flowers to her own after-school hours. The work borrows not only the number fourteen but also the poetic turn, incorporating it into scent.

Combining Materials and Developing Trials

While valuing the complex expressions of natural fragrance materials, she also combines them with synthetics in her compositions. Production is carried out by hand in small batches, and the perfumes are finished without filtration.

As her relationship with raw materials deepened, the way she made trials also changed. Once apprehensive about handling powerful ingredients, she gained experience and began testing substantial changes, such as moving patchouli from 1g to 10g. By widening the range of variation, she examines how a material works in ways that small adjustments alone can make difficult to see.

In our work, you cannot skip steps.

Shabnam Tavakol

She also learned to leave time between stages of creation instead of rushing a formula toward completion. Changing the amount of a material boldly and not rushing to judgment: both have become methods for developing a scent that begins with emotion into a finished work.

Memories of a Wedding in Oaxaca

Wedding in Oaxaca arose from the memory of celebrating a close friend’s wedding in Oaxaca, Mexico. After the ceremony, friends and family moved through the streets, led by a mariachi band and large dancing puppets. They shared mezcal, and among the crowd were garlands of gardenia flowers. Tavakol sought to preserve in fragrance the joy of those colors, sounds, tastes, and smells coming together.

The perfume layers a milky quality recalling coconut milk and tuberose with the freshness of violet leaf and woody impressions. Rather than depicting individual flowers one by one, the choice is to compose the softness and liveliness of a celebration.

Common Ground: Places in the City That People Share

The Common Ground collection takes urban public spaces as its subject. Parks and squares are places where different people share the acts of meeting, passing through, playing, and resting. It draws on the textures of cities as fragrance subjects, such as the sea breeze and cypress of San Francisco’s Embarcadero, or tobacco and damp granite on London’s Southbank. Within Kismet, personal journeys and everyday life connect with the memories of places through which people pass.

Labels Carrying Poetry and Memories of Places

Nostalgia’s 50mL bottle is printed with a short text about Grasse’s history of leather and flowers, fourteen lines, and fourteen fragrance materials. In addition to the work’s name, the container lets the wearer read the background to its creation close at hand. Words placed outside the perfume also provide clues for imagining scenes through smell.