Marissa Zappas makes perfume that smells like tornadoes and birthday cake

Independent New York-based perfumer Marissa Zappas is known for her romantic, esoteric fragrances, made to evoke Technicolour films and beguiling historical figures. She is also interested in capturing the scent of natural phenomena, such as petrichor and damp earth, alongside the brazenly artificial: the rubbery smell of balloons, or an orange-flavoured Ring Pop. ‘My taste,’ she says over the phone while on a business trip to Paris, ‘is inherently nostalgic.’

Zappas began working in fragrance in 2015 while studying anthropology and cemetery construction, though says that she has ‘always been very, very sensitive to smell.’ She started her namesake brand in 2021, specialising in perfume that draws from hyper-specific points of reference. Some include ‘Maggie the Cat is Alive! I’m Alive!’, a tribute to Elizabeth Taylor, with notes of peach, orris, champagne and ‘sunlight’; or the gourmand ‘Annabel’s Birthday Cake’, a creamy, sophisticated take on a Proustian childhood memory, with heliotrope, lemon sugar, ‘tuberose frosting’, and roasted tonka bean.

Marissa Zappas perfumes are radically imaginative

Each unique scent used to come in a variety of bottles, and with different branding and packaging. But now, Zappas has, in her own words, ‘levelled up’ with a recent refresh, stocking her fragrances in newly designed uniform bottles for a more cohesive feel. ‘There are intense differentiations between each of my fragrances because, in a way, they’re each in their own world,’ says Zappas. ‘So I wanted to maintain that differentiation, but also wanted my bottles to be recognisably from my brand’.

Reminiscent of vintage glassware, they now feature ribbed surfaces, and spherical brass-coloured tops, finished with dainty black bows. Zappas worked with artist and designer Gordon Landenberger on the concept, which nods to the late French perfumer Annick Goutal. Each bears a label with an illustration courtesy of artist and writer Anna Bane, or illustrator Cadence Sisco. There’s a Harlequin clown with a pink frosted cake for ‘Annabel’s Birthday Cake’; a feudal hay cart for ‘Violette Hay’, which evokes ‘the memory of a playful afternoon on a farm’, picking apricots and violets; and a woman peeking through curtains for ‘La Divina’ which contains rose, cassis, poplar bud, and sandalwood, and is named in tribute to the first famous Roman courtesan Imperia La Divina.

‘We worked so hard on [the illustrations] for each fragrance. They’re very whimsical, whilst being shockingly beautiful,’ says Zappas. The entire rebrand is tied together with Zappas’ ‘Cleopatra-like’, Art Deco-inspired logo, featuring her initials above a spiralled ribbon. ‘It was only after, I would say, four years of selling perfume that I was able to afford [to make] a bottle that I truly loved,’ says Zappas.

Despite the recent changes, Zappas dedcided to reformulate just one of her current fragrances, ‘Lilac Dream’, which is now called ‘Dream Sequence’. Zappas and her assistant, actress Ruby McCollister (who also collaborated with her on the perfume oil ‘Tragedy’) share a love for Fred Zinnemann’s 1955 adaptation of Oklahoma!, especially its wistful and eerie dream sequence. ‘We realised how important [that scene] was for us both,’ Zappas explains. ‘I was also thinking about tornadoes at the time. And so ‘Dream Sequence’ is the original ‘Lilac Dream’ mashed with some inspiration from that scene. There’s this idea of dirt swirling around a little, but it’s not that heavy. There is something just a little bit edgier going on now if that makes sense.’ The scent in its new iteration is described as ‘a tornado of lilacs, a swirling rush of greenery, earth and purple petals, painting the dark technicolour of an August sky.’

‘One of the main reasons why I love perfume so much – and why I love creating perfume so much – is that a fragrance can be inspired by literally anything,’ says Zappas. ‘I just love when my clients give me their sources of inspiration and it’s a 30-second clip from a movie, or a rare colour or a visual of their mother's shoe from 1958. And then to take all of these random sources of inspiration or ideas and turn them into [olfactory experiences] is mind-blowing. It's an honour to do this work and to be able to create in the way that I am.’

marissazappas.com