Demeter Fragrance Library

Essential Information

Founded: 1993
Founders: Christopher Brosius and Christopher Gable
Official website: English-language official site (the Japanese distributor is here)

Why did a company like Serge Lutens become popular, and why did Annick Goutal emerge? Because we focused on making perfume and abandoned the idea that we had to have a collection, make a statement, or create something other than perfume for a licensing deal. Perfume is not a fashion accessory like a wallet. It does not work in quite the same way.

Christopher Brosius

The Founding Story

Demeter Fragrance was founded in 1993 in Pennsylvania, in the northeastern United States, by Christopher Brosius and Christopher Gable. The name Demeter comes from the Greek goddess of grain and the earth and means “Mother Earth” in Ancient Greek.

The Founder

Born around 1963, Christopher Brosius spent his childhood in the 1960s surrounded by nature: dirt, dandelions, vegetable gardens, and woods. In the late 1970s, he took chemistry in high school and learned how to measure precisely. Interested in architecture, he then went to Columbia University to study visual design.
After graduating, he spent several years driving a taxi in New York. It was apparently during this period that he realized he hated perfume. A woman once got into his cab, and even 12 hours later, at the end of his shift, it was still filled with her fragrance, making him feel ill.
He later attended school to study couture and worked at Barneys, before serving as creative director at Kiehl’s from 1988 to 1992. There he learned to create scents by blending essential oils. Apparently, his first fragrance was for Cindy Crawford, a Kiehl’s fan. He also created perfume for Naomi Campbell.

After leaving Kiehl’s, he founded Demeter with his business partner Gable in 1992 and created its perfumes as perfumer and creative director until 2004. He left the brand that year to establish his own house, CB I Hate Perfume, which continues today. In fact, he has said that very poor personal relationships were the reason for leaving. CB I Hate Perfume was founded on the idea of doing something about perfume precisely because he hated it. Compared with Demeter, its creations evoke more specific places and times, such as “wet stone,” “wet London pavement,” or “November.”

Mark Behnke, who runs Colognoisseur, describes him as “one of the perfumers who has most successfully created fragrances capturing naturally occurring smells not abstractly, but as realist compositions,” and calls him “one of the most talented independent perfumers; no other perfumer can do what he does with fragrance.”

My perfumes are not simply designed to evoke a sensation, but to use that sensation deliberately to make the person wearing the scent feel truly wonderful and special. It is the difference between “Oh my God, this smells like dirt!” and “I love this scent because I love gardening, and that is always when I am happiest.”

Christopher Brosius

Demeter Fragrance Library

Demeter began with the idea of “capturing the beautiful everyday smells of gardens and nature and turning them into perfumes everyone could wear.” In 1996, it launched its first three scents, Dirt, Grass, and Tomato, making its debut at the New York department store Henri Bendel.

In September 1999, it opened a standalone store in New York’s East Village, selling 140 fragrances alongside clothing designed by Brosius. Created to “bring back memories and turn back time,” Demeter perfumes live up to the Fragrance Library name: the house has produced hundreds of scents that open doors to different people’s memories.

In 2002, the two founders sold Demeter Fragrance to Mark Crames, and Gable went on to work as marketing manager, continuing to the present day. Mark was probably instrumental in transforming the Demeter founded by Brosius, who would have been happy with a small community, into a major brand sold around the world. Incidentally, Mark had worked as a fragrance distributor selling brands such as Halston and Pierre Cardin.

What Matters to the Brand

At the heart of Demeter’s approach is the single note: expressing a familiar object or experience as one recognizable scent. A note here does not mean a single raw material, but a combination of materials that conveys an identifiable smell. Demeter values a linear structure in which the subject is apparent from the first application and the fragrance does not change dramatically over time. Familiar everyday smells provide the starting point for perfumes that are easy to wear each day.

Demeter also says that smell is humanity’s most powerful emotional trigger, and perfume is a personal expression of emotion. And that all its fragrances are for the wearer, not the designer.

As part of its approach to ingredients, 95% of its ingredients come from natural or renewable resources. It uses no synthetic coloring, so any color in its perfumes comes from natural ingredients. Its alcohol is derived from corn. Both natural and synthetic fragrance materials are used.

Collections for Discovering Scents

Demeter groups fragrances with shared subjects into collections within its library of hundreds of scents. In 2010, Mark Crames, who took over the business in 2002, explained that their purpose was to make it easier to find a fragrance through a common theme rather than traditional fragrance classifications. His examples included Happy Hour, based on cocktails, and Herbology, devoted to herbs.

The idea of turning familiar objects and experiences into fragrance also led to projects with confectionery and toy brands. Crames identified three criteria: a product should have a distinctive, recognizable smell, be unexpected as a wearable fragrance, and have a widely known name. Projects with Hershey’s, Jelly Belly, and Play-Doh translated subjects with a direct connection to people’s memories into perfume.

The current Specialty Collections include Destination, inspired by places; Zodiac, based on astrological signs; Orchid, devoted to orchids; and Dark Flowers, which imagines flowers that do not exist. Within a library built around individual everyday smells, these collections extend the approach to fragrances that share places, plants, or stories.

Destination Collection

The Destination Collection depicts a place through its natural surroundings, culture, and atmosphere. Its settings include New Zealand’s rainforests, Morocco’s spice markets, the streets of Cuba, and the waters of the Great Barrier Reef. Rather than gathering the same type of fragrance material, each creation finds its own olfactory clues to a particular place.

Cuba begins with the distance between geographical proximity to the United States and the sense of a faraway, exotic place felt by many Americans. It focuses on Havana’s warm, lively nightlife. Notes evoking tobacco leaves, green sugar cane, and Latin spices convey the richness of the city at night.

New Zealand draws on the plants of the southwestern lowland rainforests, the rich soil beneath the canopy, and the rainwater that sustains them. Impressions of leaves, bark, grass, water, and stone create a green, outdoor scent. The fragrance was given to guests at a special New York screening of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers in December 2002. The present collection therefore also includes scents of places created years earlier.

Zodiac Collection

The Zodiac Collection translates the personalities and symbols associated with the twelve astrological signs into twelve unisex fragrances. Presented as 50 ml eaux de toilette, they have a higher fragrance concentration and more complex compositions than the regular colognes. They retain Demeter’s linear approach, with each scent’s character apparent from the first application.

The collection is designed for layering as well as for choosing a single fragrance associated with one’s sign. It proposes combining scents according to the celestial positions corresponding to a birth date and time, or layering one’s own sign with that of someone important, to make a personal fragrance.

Sagittarius takes its inspiration from the urge to travel and explore unfamiliar places. Notes evoking Mojave ghost flowers, green laurel leaves, saffron, amber, and oud portray an adventurer drawn to change. Suggested layering partners for Sagittarius include Aries and Gemini.

Orchid Collection

The Orchid Collection explores the variety of orchid flowers and their scents. At its announcement in 2015, Demeter cited both the growing familiarity of orchids, long associated with love, luxury, and beauty, and their broad range of fragrances as reasons for creating the collection. The intention was to explore the character of different flowers and add new floral expressions, rather than reduce them to a single orchid scent.

Calypso takes inspiration not only from the pink flower but also from the velvety texture of its lush petals. The intended sensation is one of being immersed in orchid petals, expressed through an exotic, subtly tropical fragrance.

Cattleya combines a slightly sweet, creamy floral character with the brightness of citrus. Patchouli adds a depth that the softness of the flower alone would not provide.

Dark Flowers Collection

Dark Flowers moves away from familiar everyday smells to depict imaginary flowers. Its theme combines floral beauty with an enigmatic darkness and mystery. Unlike the library’s realistic scents, these fragrances use multiple notes to create an invented floral world and explore depth and complexity.

Dark Roses combines impressions of rosewater tea and Bulgarian rose petals with thorny stems, alongside the fruitiness of red currant. Earthy shades of patchouli, dark amber, and Haitian vetiver give the brightness of the rose a darker depth.

Transfixed centers on images of ylang-ylang and red poppy, layered with tobacco leaves and black vanilla. A cold, medicinal accord and the powdery impression of coca petals introduce an unusual texture beyond sweet flowers. These are notes describing the fragrance, not a statement that extracts of all the named plants are used.

Blending Categories and Layering

Alongside its thematic collections, Demeter offers Blending Categories to help people combine fragrances themselves. The three groups are Universal, covering clean, citrus, fruit, water, and green scents; Fragrant Heart, covering food, flowers, and spices; and Base Accents, covering incense, leather, tobacco, wood, earth, and herbs. These are guides to combining scents, rather than ranges defined by release order or concentration.

Universal fragrances are positioned as easy to combine both within their own group and with the other categories. For Fragrant Heart and Base Accents, the suggested starting points are combinations within each group or with Universal scents. The classification is intended to reduce the difficulty and apprehension of making a personal fragrance, rather than impose strict rules.

To experiment, apply fragrances to separate scent strips and bring the strips together. Adding more strips of the same fragrance lets you test different proportions. The order in which fragrances are layered on skin can also change the result, and a favorite combination can be mixed in a blending bottle. Alongside the pleasure of choosing a finished perfume, the library offers the possibility of using its scents as a palette.