I spent almost three years living inside other people's perfumes before I made my own.
Working with decants meant I was always surrounded by scent — testing, comparing, learning what a fragrance could do to a room, a mood, a memory. I loved it. But somewhere in those three years, loving perfume stopped being enough. I wanted to make something.
Not just something that smelled good. Something that felt like nobody else's. A bottle heavy enough to feel substantial in your hand. A citrine crystal roller instead of the plain metal ball you find everywhere else. Something small enough to fit in a pocket, but considered enough to feel like a little ritual every time you reached for it.
Then people started asking what I was wearing.
That question, again and again, is what pushed me from someone who loved fragrance to someone who made it. I started experimenting — teaching myself as I went, adjusting formulas, throwing out what didn't feel right. A year later, DAINA is what came out of that year of trial and error.
I care about how it looks as much as how it smells. That's why every bottle is thick glass instead of thin plastic, why the roller is citrine instead of steel, why the oil itself is cold-pressed jojoba instead of the cheap carrier oils that leave your skin feeling like nothing happened at all. Jojoba sits differently on skin — softer, closer to how skin already behaves on its own.
DAINA started as a question I couldn't stop asking myself: what if my perfume looked as good as it smelled? A year in, I'm still asking it — just with better answers every time.