FUMparFUM: Turning the Echo of the Stage into Invisible Paintings

“To me, scent is like a painting that is invisible to the eye and experienced through the nose.”
— Aistis Mickevičius

Born in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, FUMparFUM began when an actor searching for another means of expression found his way to scent. Its central concern is not a universally appealing “beautiful smell.” Rather, it reconstructs subjects such as theater, cinema, travel, plants, and memory through perfumery materials, bringing short stories to life on the skin or in a space.

While continuing to work by hand in a small atelier, the brand has taken its creations to Florence, Milan, Paris, Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo. FUMparFUM treats perfume both as a product and as an art that disappears.

Basic Information
The Founder and the Origins of the Brand
The Brand’s Commitments
The Perfume Lineup
By the Way…

Basic Information

Brand name: FUMparFUM
Founded: September 2011, Vilnius, Lithuania
Founder and perfumer: Aistis Mickevičius
Positioning: A creative studio for art and conceptual perfumery
Official website: https://www.fumparfum.com/en/ The brand name is a play on words combining the sounds of the Latin Per Fumum (through smoke), the Italian Profumo, the French Parfum, and the English Perfume, among others. The repetition of “FUM” within the spelling distills both the smoke at the etymological root of perfume and the brand’s character as it crosses between languages.

The Founder and the Origins of the Brand

A Child Who Remembered Smells

Aistis Mickevičius was born in Vilnius in 1976. He studied acting at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, and after graduating worked as an actor in several theaters, as well as in voice acting, event hosting, television, and radio. In particular, he worked at radio station M-1 from 2005 to 2014.

His sensitivity to scent, however, did not suddenly emerge in adulthood. Since early childhood, he had smelled objects and committed their odors to memory, and his parents gave him his first perfume when he was a teenager. His tastes as a consumer gradually became more particular, making it harder to find the fragrance he truly wanted in stores. The smell of hay, which he would repeatedly discuss in later years, is another important memory that remained with him from childhood.

Beyond Theater and Radio

Although he had trained professionally as an actor, his theater career did not develop as he had imagined, and his radio work gradually became routine. The turning point came when his “hunger” as an expressive artist intensified and he began looking for another creative medium.

By chance, he came across an announcement for a course in blending perfumes with botanical materials, run by Laimė Kiškūnė, who had pioneered activities promoting olfactory culture in Lithuania. After taking the course, Mickevičius spent half his radio salary on various perfume materials and began experimenting in his kitchen at home.

“For me, making perfume is not simply a business or a hobby. It is a passion.”
— Aistis Mickevičius

This is not a straightforward story of graduating from a prestigious perfume school and then establishing a brand. Curiosity and creation came first; he gathered the knowledge he needed piece by piece and developed his skills through practice. He still regards himself as “a kind of autodidact.”

A Name Created Before the Products

On September 16, 2011, Mickevičius officially registered FUMparFUM. He says that although he had neither a business plan nor a clearly defined product range at the time, he was certain that he would one day need this name in order to live as a creator of scents. At the end of that year, the first five creations were unveiled to the public under the title “Fresh, Natural & Handmade.”

The first fragrance to become a product was Amber Lemonade. A botanical creation composed entirely of natural materials, it had a scent reminiscent of a well-known American soft drink. Seen in relation to the way today’s FUMparFUM moves freely between botanical materials and modern synthetics, this work marks the brand’s point of origin.

Lithuania, where the brand was founded, lacked the deep foundations of a modern perfume industry found in France or Italy. Mickevičius later transformed even the skepticism directed at local creators into the name of his main collection, Alchemist Charlatan: an alchemist and a fraud. Rather than concealing a weakness, he put it on the signboard as self-satire.

Learning Through Making

His education continued after the brand’s foundation. He attended courses abroad, mainly in France, and in 2017 studied the construction and deconstruction of scents at the Paris perfume education institution Cinquième Sens. His dream of apprenticing with a renowned perfumer did not come true. Coming from Eastern Europe with limited contacts and funds, he developed his own method through reading, trial compositions, and repeated failures.

At the time, there were also almost no specialist books on perfume available in Lithuanian, so in 2016 he published his own, Kvepalai. Olfaktorinės istorijos (Perfume: Olfactory Stories). A revised edition appeared in 2021. This was an effort not only to make fragrances but also to expand the language for talking about scent in his mother tongue.

“I think the first ten years were the preparation I needed in order to get started.”
— Aistis Mickevičius

Taking the Brand to the World

For a long time, Mickevičius attended international trade fairs not as an exhibitor but as an enthusiast or journalist. Eventually, he submitted samples for assessment, demonstrated his business and creative track record, and in 2021 participated as a brand in Pitti Fragranze in Florence. He subsequently expanded his activities to Esxence in Milan, as well as to Paris, Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo.

Japan was one of the turning points. A Japanese industry colleague whom he met at an international event became a friend and eventually a distributor. At least by 2025, Japan had become the brand’s largest export destination outside Lithuania. In 2024, it was formally introduced to Japan at Salon de Parfum at Isetan Shinjuku, and that same year Moriyama announced an agreement to import and distribute it in the country.

He says there are surprising similarities between Japanese and Lithuanian attitudes toward nature and the phenomena of life. He also describes his creations as fragrances in the “middle register,” rather than a binary choice between intense and light, and considers that this restraint resonated well with Japanese ways of wearing scent.

The Brand’s Commitments

Perfume as a Vanishing Stage

At the heart of FUMparFUM is a sense of time cultivated through acting. A theatrical performance disappears when it ends, and the next performance is slightly different even when it is the same play. Scent, too, evaporates on the skin and does not remain unchanged. For Mickevičius, theater and perfume are both temporary forms of expression that act directly upon human emotions.

“A scent can also be an object exhibited in a gallery. What interests me is turning it into a work that can be worn.”
— Aistis Mickevičius

For that reason, creation does not begin at the laboratory bench. He holds an idea in his mind for months, connecting images, writing, music, film scenes, and personal memories. He says he enters the laboratory only once its meaning and direction have taken shape, seeking to translate the concept into scent in as few trials as possible rather than producing large numbers of prototypes at random.

His subjects are not limited to theater and cinema. Spring in Catalonia, Venetian waterways, Ceylon tea, Argentine grasslands, Japanese hinoki, and autumn in Tokyo all place lived experience and imagination on the same palette. The short stories describing the fragrances are not merely promotional copy: they are closer to scripts guiding the formulas.

A Dialogue Between Natural and Synthetic

The creations use both carefully selected natural and synthetic perfume materials. Building on old European perfumery traditions, the brand characteristically introduces modern aroma molecules into botanical textures to create unexpected combinations. Its consistent approach is to choose the materials needed for expression, rather than to privilege the exclusively natural.

Products are made by hand in the Vilnius laboratory and released in very limited quantities. The official website explains that they follow IFRA (International Fragrance Association) guidelines, GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice), and EU standards. This approach aims to reconcile small-scale, author-led creation with manufacturing controls appropriate to products used on the skin.

Personal Style Rather Than Fashion

Mickevičius regards perfume as a matter of personal style and identity rather than fashion. He distances himself from recent excessive gourmand tendencies, including confectionery and milky notes, pointing to the danger of perfume being simplified from an intellectual construction into childish sweetness.

Yet he does not reject the classics. He says that over time he has come to find value in balance, quietness, and structure, not just shock and strong contrasts. Being avant-garde is not a competition in eccentricity, but a matter of reconstructing the relationship between subjects and materials in one’s own language.

A Box for Smoke

The visual presentation contains the same irony as the brand name. When revisiting the established visual world with packaging designer Dovilė Gervutė-Laurinkienė, the etymology Per Fumum inspired a case resembling a cigarette pack. The idea was that, since smoking is harmful and had become outdated, the pack could hold one’s favorite perfume instead of cigarettes.

Rather than conjuring luxury through excessive ornament, the packaging brings language, form, and cultural memory together in a single joke. Packaging in the spirit of FUMparFUM allows a small story to continue outside the bottle.

The Perfume Lineup

Here we look at representative FUMparFUM collections and creations.

Alchemist Charlatan

This is the current core collection. Combining innovative synthetic molecules with traditional perfume materials, its common thread is abstract, sophisticated minimalism. Although its name embraces skepticism directed at domestic creators, the works’ subjects strongly reflect both an actor’s theatricality and a traveler’s eye.

L’Artiste (2018): Inspired by Charles Aznavour’s “La Bohème.” Moving from bergamot and black pepper to geranium, rose, thyme, rosemary, and leather, it depicts the stage and dressing room of a cabaret.
Drama Queen: A work inspired by the Italian actor Anna Magnani. Freshly cut grass and juniper are layered with tuberose, hyacinth, leather, and other notes, translating emotional amplitude into scent.
Figueres (2016): Its starting points are a town in Catalonia, Spain, and springtime figs. It gives the tartness of unripe fruit through to fruit in the process of ripening a concise, green structure.
Gondolieri (2021): A creation that captures Venice’s Grand Canal through wood, sea salt, and light on the water.
Spring Poetry (2022): Green leaves, birch leaves, jasmine, tagetes, vetiver, and other notes depict the emergence of spring.
Tokyo Songs (2026): It develops from fermented ume plum, yuzu, pepper, and coriander leaf into osmanthus, Japanese carnation, black tea, and aromatic woods. The work reconstructs Japanese landscapes from the perfumer’s own perspective.

Black Alchemist

Introduced in 2019, this capsule collection comprises more intense olfactory projects. Its initial core was a trio: The Priest, Golden Sawdust, and Old Piano. Working with dark textures such as resins, incense, oud, wood, and leather, they evoke memories of places: a religious space, wood cut in a mountain sawmill, and a varnished piano in an old jazz club, respectively.

Old Piano, in particular, was presented as a work joining wood with a subdued sheen to a suggestion of whisky, as though changing the scene to an old jazz club. It is useful to understand this as a series whose protagonists are well-used objects and spaces rather than portraits of people.

Archive of Alchemist

Begun in late 2023, this is a collection of “mood and ambient fragrances” examining individual subjects. Tomato, green leaves, gin, fig leaf, black tea, thyme, olive, cardamom, and other subjects offer enlarged views of a single material or accord from the perfumer’s palette.

They are intended to scent a space and create a mood, or to be collected as olfactory specimens. Whereas Alchemist Charlatan depicts complex characters and scenes, this archive asks how closely a single smell can be observed.

Beyond Perfume

FUMparFUM also creates home fragrances, diffusers, candles, and scents for businesses and institutions. It additionally makes olfactory installations for exhibits and galleries, refusing to confine the brand to bottled perfume alone.

For its fifteenth anniversary in 2026, the brand introduced Bauhaus, a home fragrance combining waxed luxury parquet flooring, cognac barrels, and dense incense smoke. Mickevičius gives the name the additional meaning of “building a house,” using it as a metaphor for the fifteen years he has spent building a house of perfume from scratch in Lithuania.

By the Way…

Mickevičius’s acting experience informs not just the names of his works but also his creation of bespoke perfumes. He says he talks at length with a client, builds a psychological portrait through the observation of people cultivated in his acting education, and translates it into scent. For him, the process of understanding a person and bringing a role to life is continuous with that of constructing a client’s fragrance.

In 2021, he also held an exhibition of olfactory art in Vilnius titled “Retrospective: Ten Fragrant Years” to mark the brand’s tenth anniversary. For FUMparFUM, a retrospective was not a display of past products, but an attempt to bring disappearing scents back into a setting where they could be appreciated.

Even after fifteen years, the brand does not imitate the great perfume houses. The founder himself conceives and formulates the works, makes limited quantities by hand, and, when needed, turns perfume into an exhibit or the memory of a space. Its small scale is a constraint, but also the reason why his many identities as actor, writer, photographer, and traveler can be contained, undiluted, in a single bottle.

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