I truly believe that joy is the new luxury. So I decided to bottle it.
— Yasmin Sewell (founder)
Vivid glass bottles wrapped in a large brand logo. At the bottom, a small crystal gleams. Vyrao is a perfume brand born in London in 2021. Its starting point for choosing a fragrance is not only the names of flowers or woods, but a question: how do you want to feel today?
Its founder, Yasmin Sewell, has worked in fashion for many years. She connected her interest in wellbeing, a sense of mental and physical fulfillment, with collaborative creation alongside perfumers. In Vyrao, which seeks to engage emotions through color, words, and scent, her work and her everyday life overlap.
Essential Information
Founded: 2021
Founder: Yasmin Sewell
Place of origin: London, United Kingdom
Official website: https://vyrao.com/
The Founder and the Brand’s Origins
A Childhood by the Sydney Sea and in Her Mother’s Hair Salon
Sewell grew up near Coogee in Sydney, surrounded by her family of Lebanese heritage. Relatives and friends gathered at her mother’s hair salon. It was a place not only to have their hair done, but also to enjoy beauty and share time caring for themselves.
Her mother was also her first connection to fashion. In the early 1980s, she sewed clothes for herself and her daughter. A taffeta ball gown is one garment Sewell remembers. Expressing herself through clothes also reminded her of the love she received from her mother in childhood.
As a teenager, meanwhile, she aspired to be a surfer girl. She wore oversized MAMBO T-shirts and embraced life by the sea. Sydney’s nature and ocean would continue to influence her later creative work.
Working in London and the Boutique Yasmin Cho
Sewell left school at fifteen and began working immediately, moving to London in the 1990s. Although she wanted to work in fashion, she did not have a clearly defined role in mind from the start. One of her early jobs was creating window displays for the boutique Browns.
There, the feelings of people visiting the store mattered to her as much as the products. She felt uncomfortable with the pretentious service found in some luxury shops at the time.
Could I create a shop where everyone who walked in would always feel good?
— Yasmin Sewell
This question became the foundation of her first shop, Yasmin Cho. Choosing clothes and making the people there feel comfortable: from the stage of creating a store, Sewell valued both.
She subsequently worked in buying for Browns and Liberty, expanding into consulting. In 2013, she co-founded the fashion brand Être Cécile; in 2015, she became fashion director of Style.com. In 2017, she became Farfetch’s vice president of style and creative. Her role broadened from a small shop to work bringing products and images to the world.
Learning Meditation and Healing alongside Her Fashion Work
Alongside her glamorous career, Sewell paid attention to her own mind and body. At twenty-two, divorce, the failure of a business, and her mother’s serious illness coincided. Wanting to study wellbeing in depth, the first book she picked up was Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life.
This interest did not arise just before she launched her perfume brand. By 2014, she had studied reiki and practiced Vedic meditation. Although she found it difficult to meditate every day alongside work and raising children, she held classes in London with teachers including Gary Gorrow to help people find mental and physical balance.
Not limiting beauty to the appearance of clothes or cosmetics, but also looking at how one lives and feels: this way of thinking had developed over a long period within the same life as her fashion work.
From a Break in 2019 to the Idea of a Perfume Brand
In 2019, Sewell felt it was time to change her work and her life. For about seven months, she spent time with her sons, put her home in order, and made a vegetable garden. She wanted to work in wellbeing, but making perfume was not her intention from the outset.
The path Sewell chose was to offer joy through the senses. She put that intention into something people could pick up in daily life and use for themselves. Scent, long familiar to her, became the center of her new work.
The first person she consulted was Louise Mita, her healing teacher and friend. The ideas of energy healing that Sewell herself had studied became the foundation of Vyrao’s worldview. Perfume was a form of expression that made those beliefs tangible in everyday life.
Collaborating with Lyn Harris and Launching in 2021
To give the fragrances form, she brought in Lyn Harris, the perfumer behind PERFUMER H (in Japanese). Meeting her for the first time at the start of the project, Sewell was nervous about whether she would accept the commission. Harris immediately understood the concept and joined the creative process.
Sewell also visited the laboratory and was deeply involved in making the scents. The two discussed emotions and states of mind such as courage, liberation, clarity, self-love, and attraction.
She spoke of courage, liberation, clarity, self-love, and attraction. I was fortunate to be able to translate those ideas into scent.
— Lyn Harris (perfumer)
Sewell also looked to traditional plant-based therapies and aromatherapy and shared those ideas with Harris. Alongside the beauty of a scent, she made the emotion they aimed for part of the creative brief.
Development coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. Sewell invested her own savings and had more than 100 people try the fragrances. She too worried about whether the idea of healing would be accepted. Even so, seeing people who tried them enjoy several of the scents gave her encouragement.
In 2021, Vyrao launched with five perfumes composed by Harris. Rather than dividing them by the wearer’s gender, it began with different emotional themes. At the center of the brand was a practice of wearing fragrance while considering how one wanted to be that day.
The Brand’s Commitments
Fragrance Starting with Emotion and Memories of a Grandmother
The emotion always comes first. What do we feel we need?
— Yasmin Sewell
At Vyrao, the desired emotion is decided before the materials, fragrance composition, color, and name are considered. The positive words accompanying the bottle are chosen with the same intention. “Spray & Say,” in which one says those words when applying the perfume, is proposed as a practice for becoming aware of how one wants to be.
Georgette, one of the launch fragrances, brings this approach together with Sewell’s personal memories. It is named after the grandmother she lived with as a child. Behind the scent are her grandmother’s Elizabeth Arden Red Door and the time they spent picking roses in the garden and arranging them in the house. What Sewell remembers is the feeling of being close to a loving person.
The original Georgette, themed around self-love, layered Turkish rose with black tobacco and guaiac wood. Sewell wanted a rose that combined softness and strength, unrestricted by gender. Rose was also a material through which memories of someone close could give form to the theme of caring for oneself.
Bringing Research on Scent and Emotion into The Sixth
The Sixth, released in 2022, broadened the method of collaboration. Its perfumer, Meabh McCurtin, holds a doctorate in molecular biology. Sewell’s concept was joined by advice from Katt Nicholson, the psychic adviser she had consulted for many years, and by the fragrance company IFF’s Science of Wellness.
IFF has researched emotional and cognitive responses to scent for many years and uses its findings in perfumery. The Sixth incorporated such research into material selection and took mindfulness, meaning awareness of the present moment, as its creative theme.
McCurtin’s own inspiration also included a monk’s herb garden she visited in Ireland. The world of bitter plants she encountered there, including wormwood and gentian root, fed into the fragrance’s construction. The Sixth combines such herbs with juniper, conifers, and moss materials. It is a creation in which traditional uses of plants and contemporary scent research intersect.
This collaboration continued in 2026 with Ever 11. Sewell’s theme was deep self-acceptance. Starting from her own sense that confidence fluctuates, McCurtin and IFF combined black cherry, leather, vanilla, and other elements. With each new fragrance, an emotional question is posed and its form in scent explored anew.
Bottle Design Expressed through Color and a Large Logo
A rounded black cap, thick colored glass, and a large logo crossing the bottle’s curved surface. Vyrao bottles attract the eye through color and form before the perfume is used. Creative director Jaime Perlman was involved in the design and packaging, and KeepMe worked on manufacturing the glass bottles and outer packaging.
The brand name derives from the Latin “vireo.” It carries images of growing green and sprouting vigorously, a meaning also expressed in the vivid green signature color. The green bottle of I am Verdant likewise connects with the fragrance’s theme of growth and change.
The launch perfumes also featured a Herkimer crystal tucked into the bottom of the bottle. A transparent quartz also known as a Herkimer diamond, it is given the brand’s intention through Mita’s role. Sewell’s belief in investing stones and healing with meaning is contained in a small form inside the bottle.
Alongside those beliefs, Vyrao also draws on IFF’s research into emotional responses to scent. Combining fragrance, color, and words, with crystal rituals and research each providing their own background, is characteristic of the brand’s creative approach.
Extending Scent into Everyday Life with Incense and Candles
In addition to perfume, Vyrao makes incense and candles. Sewell herself enjoys burning fragrance at home and experiencing the change in a room’s atmosphere. Beyond scents applied to the skin, the brand creates a place for the senses in time spent at home. This extension reflects the value she has placed on her garden and family life.
Incidentally…
Her attachment to green extends beyond packaging. When Sewell launched Vyrao, she also repainted all the walls of her home green. Even the space she lived in every day was enveloped in the brand’s color.
References
- Our Story — Vyrao’s philosophy and the founder’s words — https://vyrao.com/pages/our-story
- I am Verdant — Official product information and bottle images — https://vyrao.com/products/i-am-verdant-1
- VOICE FROM YASMIN SEWELL — Life&Beauty by JUN ONLINE, August 12, 2022 — https://landb.junonline.jp/news/178375
- Yasmin Sewell Created High-Vibration Fragrances To Heal, Shift And Optimise Your Energy — GRAZIA, founder interview — https://graziamagazine.com/articles/yasmin-sewell-vyrao/
- Yasmin Sewell, Founder, Être Cécile — Into The Gloss, 2014 interview — https://intothegloss.com/2014/10/yasmin-sewell-etre-cecil
- Farfetch appoints Yasmin Sewell as VP style and creative — TheIndustry.fashion, August 10, 2017 — https://www.theindustry.fashion/farfetch-appoints-yasmin-sewell-as-vp-style-and-creative/
- Five Vyrao Perfumes to Enhance Your Mood — The first five fragrances by Lyn Harris — https://vyrao.com/en-us/blogs/news/five-vyrao-perfumes-to-enhance-your-mood
- Yasmin Sewell On Crafting Sensory Joy With Her Fragrance Brand Vyrao — Official republication of a Forbes interview, March 10, 2025 — https://vyrao.com/blogs/news/yasmin-sewell-on-crafting-sensory-joy-with-her-fragrance-brand-vyrao
- Yasmin Sewell’s Favourite Perfume For Creativity — Official republication of a The Zoe Report interview, September 26, 2022 — https://vyrao.com/en-us/blogs/news/yasmin-sewells-favourite-perfume-for-creativity
- The Sixth: Meet Our Perfumer — Meabh McCurtin’s creative background, October 5, 2022 — https://vyrao.com/en-us/blogs/news/the-sixth-meet-our-perfumer
- The Story Behind The Sixth by Vyrao — Background to the collaboration, September 26, 2022 — https://vyrao.com/blogs/news/the-story-behind-the-sixth-by-vyrao
- Science of Wellness — IFF’s research and development program on scent and emotion — https://www.iff.com/scent/science-of-wellness/
- The Sixth — Official product information — https://vyrao.com/products/the-sixth
- Ever 11 Has Landed — Yasmin Sewell introduces the new fragrance, August 6, 2026 — https://vyrao.com/en-us/blogs/news/ever-11-has-landed
- Vyrao — A project by KeepMe, manufacturer of the bottles and packaging — https://keepme.co.uk/portfolio/vyrao
- Mine — Herkimer Diamond Mines, on Herkimer crystals — https://herkimerdiamond.com/mine/
- Meet Our Energy Healer Louise Mita — Crystals and her role within the brand, October 14, 2022 — https://vyrao.com/en-us/blogs/news/vyrao-meet-our-energy-healer-louise-mita
