CURIONOIR | The New Zealand Perfume House That Turns Memory into Scent and Craft into Vessels

“Curionoir would not be what it is without my Māori heritage.”
“Without my Māori roots, Curionoir would not have become what it is today.”
— Tiffany Witehira

When discussing perfume from New Zealand, looking only to the land’s plants can mean missing the essence of Curionoir. What this house seeks to translate into scent is not so much the plants themselves as the memories of people who encountered them, craft passed down through families, fragments of ancient history and mythology, and private stories completed only on the skin.

Essential Information
The Founder and the Brand’s Origins
What Defines the Brand
The Perfume Lineup
Incidentally…
Additional Note

Essential Information

Brand name: CURIONOIR
Established: 2011
Founder: Tiffany Witehira (identified in early articles as Tiffany Jeans)
Base: Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa New Zealand
Main products: Extraits de parfum, candles, hard soaps, and scented objects made from handblown glass and ceramics
Official website: curionoir.com
Official Japanese website: remedy.jp

Curionoir began operating as a brand in 2011. Its name combines “Curio,” a rare object that arouses curiosity, with “Noir,” a word reflecting the sleepless nights of its beginnings and its dark, dreamlike aesthetic.

The Founder and the Brand’s Origins

A Childhood Surrounded by Craft

Tiffany Witehira belongs to Ngāpuhi, a Māori iwi of New Zealand’s North Island. Women in her family practiced crafts, and her uncle was a bone carver. As a young girl, she is said to have seen him as something like a “warrior.” Weaving flax, carving bone and wood, and making tinctures from native plants were not decorative motifs borrowed later in life. They were skills and memories within the family’s everyday life.

It was particularly time spent with her great-grandmother that nurtured her sensitivity to scent. Her great-grandmother practiced rongoā Māori, traditional Māori healing using plants. The smells of tupakihi and kūmarahou encountered in the forest bring her great-grandmother back to mind, while Poison, which her mother wore in the 1980s, connects to memories of her mother. For Witehira, scent was a sense linked to “someone” from an early age.

“Fragrance has always been an essential part of my life, from the time I spent as a child with my great-grandmother practicing rongoā in the forest to creating emotions today with ingredients from around the world.”
— Tiffany Witehira

A Wedding and a Small Army of Wax

As an adult, Witehira built a career in fashion and advertising. The turning point was her wedding to film director Andrew Morton. In 2009, she hand-cast small skull-shaped candles, one by one, as gifts for the guests, and wrapped them in tulle. The very act of making, wrapping, and handing something to another person became the first impulse toward the brand.

While learning to develop fragrances, she had a dream in which her daughter appeared before her with white eyes. She carved the image by hand, made a mold, and gave it a fragrance, creating The Lilith Doll, a candle in the shape of a doll’s head. This candle became Curionoir’s first official creation, and its form later remained in the logo.

“I had a dream in which my daughter appeared with white eyes. That led to The Lilith Doll, a scented doll’s head that I carved and molded.”
— Tiffany Witehira

Small quantities of the first products were placed in Miss Crabb, the boutique run by her friend Kristine Crabb. The distinctive doll’s-head candles gradually attracted a devoted following. In 2011, Curionoir began as a small studio centered on candles and one-of-a-kind objects.

Toward Perfume, and Then Grasse

Witehira had not planned from the beginning to become a perfumer. She continued learning through correspondence courses and classes in various countries, and also trained in Grasse, France, the center of the perfume industry. At the same time, she explored techniques in glass, ceramics, and whakairo, Māori carving. This was because her aim was not simply perfume as a liquid but a sensory experience encompassing vessels, space, and customer service.

In 2016, she opened the flagship store on Ponsonby Road in Auckland. Beyond deep red velvet, the approximately 40-square-meter interior is composed of stained walnut and aged brass, designed to restrain sight and touch while bringing smell to the fore. That same year, she began a full-scale development of the fragrances cultivated through candles as “absolute parfums” for the skin. The first four were created in collaboration with perfumers in Grasse. A monolithic counter carved by her family stands in the center, making the store not merely a retail space but a place in which the family’s crafts continue.

The brand subsequently entered overseas retailers, including in the UK, but did not pursue expansion for its own sake. It has maintained small-scale production and an unhurried approach to creation, with some works taking several years from conception to completion. Witehira herself has said that “only around 1% of the ideas that arise take shape.”

What Defines the Brand

Turning Memories into Scent Rather Than Explaining Them

Curionoir sees perfume as “stories connecting past and present and weaving worlds together.” Those stories, however, do not impose a completed plot. When fragrance is applied directly to the skin and mingles with the wearer’s own scent, the work becomes an experience unique to that person. It chooses the intimacy of settling close to the skin rather than being sprayed and diffused into the surroundings.

Its imagery of ingredients also foregrounds the physical substance of plants: petals, crushed roots, and tree resins. All the fragrances are extraits de parfum, a category with a higher fragrance concentration than ordinary eau de parfum. The basic formats are the 4mL Pocket Parfum and a 50mL bottle. Even the gesture of placing a small quantity on the skin becomes part of the work.

Making the Perfume Bottle an “Heirloom”

Alongside the standard bottles are handblown Glass Heirlooms, made with the local Monmouth Glass Studio. Each differs in color and shape; buyers use a pipette to decant 50mL of perfume into them. The idea is not a container whose purpose ends when it becomes empty but an object that remains, ready to receive the next fragrance.

For the Clay Relics made with potter Kirsten Dryburgh, clay from New Zealand’s South Island is formed on a wheel, glazed, and fired multiple times. Treating fragrance, glass, clay, and woodcarving as crafts on equal terms explains why this perfume house also describes its work as “art objects that harbor scent.”

Building a Relationship with the Land into the Process

Working with local foragers, glassmakers, potters, woodworkers, and filmmakers, the brand considers details down to packaging and how its work is communicated in the store. Witehira seeks to combine creating a sensory experience unlike any other with supporting local makers and giving back to the local economy.

Māori culture here is not merely a symbolic addition to perfume names. It enters the method of creation itself, which treats whānau (extended family), genealogy, land, and craft as inseparable. Perhaps her perfumes can be both personal and communal because those two qualities are not contradictory.

The Perfume Lineup

The overall picture of Curionoir’s perfumes becomes clearer when approached through memories and scenes rather than conventional fragrance classifications such as “citrus” and “floral.”

Family and Personal Memories

Cellar Feels: Memories of making wine with her grandfather in a cellar are depicted through apple, black tea leaves, grape leaves, tree moss, and two kinds of cedarwood. The focus is less the fruit itself than the suggestion of damp floors, dust, and time spent waiting for fermentation.
Purotu Rose: Its starting point is the simultaneous presence at her great-grandfather’s tangi (funeral) of hot earth, smoke from the earth-cooking hāngī, and roses decorating the dining hall. Rose otto and rose de mai are layered with cumin, teakwood, and vetivers from Haiti and Java.
Dark Bouquet: “Earth and citrus,” composed of orange flower, cypress, jasmine, and vetiver. An early core creation, it connects to memories of walking the land with her grandmother and learning about native plants.

History and Mythology

415 AD: Inspired by Hypatia, the philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician murdered in 415, this work imagines the atmosphere surrounding her. Tomato leaf, rosemary, galbanum, frankincense, myrrh, agarwood, and other notes create a green, resinous landscape.
Irtiu Nefertiti: Inspired by ancient Egypt and Queen Nefertiti, this fragrance brings together blue lotus, fig wood, osmanthus, passionflower, and guaiac wood. The brand introduces it with the words “the beautiful one has arrived.”
Orpheus Incarnate: Its inspiration is the story of Orpheus and an underwater scene the brand imagined from the voyage of the Argonauts. Carnation, fig, blond tobacco, tonka, heliotrope, licorice, and orris combine weightless stillness with a sense of being drawn in.
Pablo: Pablo Picasso’s gaze, tobacco, paint, and flushed skin are constructed through lemon, frankincense, mimosa, Cuban tobacco leaves, vanilla, and tonka. Rather than rendering a likeness, the fragrance translates the atmosphere around the person into scent.

Body and Nature

Ngutu Pā: Māori for “touching lips.” The softness of cinnamon, cacao, rose, and orris is layered with earthy, animalic shadows of nagarmotha, oud, labdanum, and castoreum. It was inspired by a sensual story in Māori mythology and a poem by E. E. Cummings.
Moon Moss: Orchid, hyacinth, white lily, algae, oakmoss, birch, and cedarwood depict moonlit wetlands and swans in the shallows. The perspective of wetlands as “the earth’s intelligent organs” underpins the fragrance’s quiet sense of life.
Kihikihi: Māori for “cicada.” It follows the long time spent underground, memories of tree roots, and the mating song that resonates above ground for just one summer. New Zealand’s native tarata, lemon, pepper, incense wood, lavender, violet, styrax, smoked wood, labdanum, and cedarwood create depth extending from the piercing call into dark soil.

Gaze and Consciousness

Opia: This work turns the warmth, vulnerability, and sense of intrusion experienced when looking into another person’s eyes into fragrance. Rhubarb’s tartness is layered with oud, Virginian cedarwood, Australian sandalwood, and labdanum.
Diaphanous: Its theme is “bewildering clarity.” Mandarin and sambac jasmine are combined with saffron, narcissus absolute, cayenne pepper, and amber, concealing a stimulus within transparency.

Curiosity Sets containing five different 4mL bottles are also available. Set I comprises Tobacco Night, Diaphanous, Cellar Feels, Opia, and Dark Bouquet; Set II comprises Purotu Rose, Irtiu Nefertiti, Pablo, 415 AD, and Orpheus Incarnate.

Incidentally…

The first Lilith Doll and the skull candles made for the wedding are not simply pre-founding history. The idea of “putting scent and light into forms evoking death or bygone eras and turning them into gifts” continues directly in perfumes that call ancient figures back onto present-day skin, and in vessels reminiscent of relics.

In Japan, several pop-ups were held at doinel in Tokyo in 2024. Today, Sense of Style in Ikejiri, Tokyo, introduces the perfumes, candles, and small-production objects as the official directly operated Japanese store. Curionoir is not merely a brand selling the regional character of distant New Zealand. It is a house seeking, through the collaborative creation of fragrance and craft, to hand memories received from family on to the memories of wearers in another land.

Additional Note

Some perfume databases give the founding year as 2012, but the official Japanese website and interviews with the founder in New Zealand give 2011. Founder Tiffany Witehira is introduced in early English-language articles under the name Tiffany Jeans.

References