I grew up in New York City’s East Village, on Second Street, where I still live today.
I was born in Brooklyn, of all places, to Lithuanian parents. My mother ran the dental clinic at Brooklyn Hospital, so the smell of clove oil, isopropyl alcohol, dental x-ray film fixer, and waiting rooms is part of my earliest sensory memory. My father was an architect, his office smelled of pencil shavings, rubber erasers, and contact glue. He spent his working life in a very different atmosphere, on Madison Avenue towers and private interiors. He served as resident architect on IBM’s world headquarters tower at 590 Madison Avenue, a polished glass and granite high rise monolith that became one of IBM’s main New York addresses, and he even designed Adnan Khashoggi’s bedroom furniture in Artistotle Onassis' Olympic Tower, looking straight out over St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
So on one side I had hospitals and nitrous oxide, on the other IBM world headquarters and billionaire penthouses. And in the middle of it all, I had my own little strip of the East Village.
Through all of this, my very best friend, right up until his recent passing, was Paul Bridgewater. Paul was a long time East Village gallerist and curator, a key figure in the downtown art scene. He cofounded Hard Art Gallery in the seventies, later ran Bridgewater Gallery and Smart Clothes Gallery in New York, and spent decades discovering and supporting artists in the East Village and the Lower East Side.
A feature documentary, Man From Pretentia (Chih Hsuan Liang), paints him as a quirky, charming, gay New York art dealer who hitchhiked to Manhattan at eighteen, became a beloved figure in the art world, and devoted his life to artists, often at great personal cost.
Paul and I had an extraordinary best friendship. We each moved in our own orbits, but his eye, his taste, his stories, his courage and his complete devotion to art had a profound influence on how I see the world. His way of looking at paintings and people quietly rewired the way I would later look at scent.
In the nineteen seventies I was an audio engineer at CBGB. I was standing in the middle of what turned out to be one of the most influential music and art scenes on the planet. CBGB, at 315 Bowery, opened in nineteen seventy three and is now remembered as a legendary East Village club and one of the birthplaces of New York punk, where bands like the Ramones, Patti Smith Group, Blondie, Television and Talking Heads helped launch punk and new wave into the wider world. CBGB is now a John Varvatos, ha.
Around that same tight grid of streets, within a block or two of where I lived then and still live now on Second Street, people like Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe and, a little later, Jean Michel Basquiat were turning the same downtown air into poetry, photography and painting that ended up in museums and galleries across the world.
Back then I did not have the language of perfumery. I had the language of sound checks and feedback, microphones and guitar amps. But I was already living inside dense accords: stale beer, warm dirty cables, cigarette smoke, leather jackets, cheap incense, spray paint, sweat, wet concrete and piss from the Bowery outside.
If you walk that same stretch of Second Street and the nearby blocks today, the picture looks very different. The old Bowery skid row of flophouses and dive bars has been steadily replaced by high design hotels, galleries and luxury Ian Schrager residential buildings, a transformation that writers often summarize as the Bowery’s evolution from skid row to an upscale corridor.
On that same street now you find billionaires and movie stars, a niche perfume house, glossy developments by star architects and hoteliers, and the kinds of apartments that are marketed to global money rather than broke musicians.
The physical street where my life started is also a little cross section of New York’s trajectory: from grit, punk, winos, crackheads, and underground art, to contemporary wealth, modern design, museums, luxury and perfume.
Somewhere along that same arc, something in me changed too. I did not lose the electric, experimental impulse of those CBGB nights, or the way Paul and that whole art world looked at things, but it started reaching for something else: refinement, clarity, balance, and Tibetan Buddhism. I became more interested in poise and proportion, in compassion and awareness, in how raw energy can be edited and understood rather than just amplified.
Today, my own style as a nose in progress feels like this: elegance with a twist of avant garde.
The polish and structure I admire in classical perfumery, wrapped around a small live wire that still comes straight from Second Street.
I still live in New York City. But there is another place that has become very important in my life: San Miguel de Allende, in the central highlands of Mexico.
San Miguel is a colonial mountain town of baroque facades and cobblestone streets, known for its Spanish architecture, thriving art scene and large expat community. Its historic center is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and it is widely described as a place with a strong arts culture and a long-standing appeal for expats and creative people alike.
New York is kinetic and vertical. San Miguel is slower, sunlit, and warm jets. It is there, in that high altitude pure air, that I most enjoy mixing molecules.
I took my very aging mother to San Miguel so she could have the most pleasant and easy last years of her life. New York is many things, but gentle to the very old is not always one of them. San Miguel, with its walkable colonial center, temperate climate and well documented expat community, has become a refuge for people seeking a more relaxed vibrant chapter.
San Miguel smells to me like sunlight on stone, incense from old churches, market fruit, marigolds, fireworks, tropical flowers and woodsmoke from the hills. And over all of that, the soundtrack that so many visitors notice: church bells and constant fireworks waking the saints to come, rolling across the town like a noisy prayer.
So my life moves between two cities. In New York, I listen to the subway under concrete. In San Miguel, I listen to church bells and fireworks over tiled roofs while I weigh out jasmine, cedar and labdanum.
My nationality is Lithuanian. My birth certificate says Brooklyn. My sensory education says Bowery and Second Street. My current bench work often says San Miguel. Somewhere in that weave, with my parents’ worlds and Paul’s world folded in, is the style I am trying to grow into: elegance with a twist of avant garde, grounded in something deeper.
In this talk, I want to walk with you from New York to Paris, then to other fragrance worlds. Not with bullet points or diagrams, just as a story.
When I think of New York perfumery, I think of scent sitting just above the sidewalk. The baseline smell of the city is hot pavement, exhaust, deli coffee, street food steam and damp cardboard after rain. That is the shared air we all stand in. New York perfumery accepts that and quietly looks up.
Because I dwell on Second Street, on essentially the same street as a Bond No. 9 boutique, I pass a physical expression of this idea almost every day. Bond No. 9 launched with the mission of reconnecting artistry with perfumery and celebrating New York by giving each neighborhood and landmark its own scent. Their collection is literally organized by neighborhood, with bottles named for places like Greenwich Village, Soho, Bleecker Street, Tribeca, Central Park, New York Nights and New York Flowers, each presented as a portrait of that part of the city.
The bottles are shaped like stylized stars, printed with maps, tokens and bits of skyline. You are not just buying rose, sandalwood or vanilla. You are buying a small, idealized slice of the city.
A short ride from Second Street, in Nolita, Le Labo takes a different angle on the same theme. Two friends opened their first lab on Elizabeth Street with the idea of a scented revolution. The stores feel like workshops: brown apothecary bottles, simple type labels, perfumes mixed and labeled in front of you with your name and the date.
The fragrances are gender inclusive and focused around themes. Santal thirty three, their dry, smoky sandalwood and leather composition, became so widely worn that people now talk about it as one of the defining smells of downtown creative New York in the early twenty first century.
In Le Labo you can feel New York as workshop. The city is outside. The formulas are inside. Perfume is not untouchable; it is mixed at street level.
A little further east on the Lower East Side, Aedes de Venustas takes the opposite approach: a temple of beauty. The boutique is a jewel box of rich colors, flowers, chandeliers and a carefully edited wall of niche perfumes, including its own line of complex, baroque compositions.
Aedes is New York taking European high perfumery and staging it downtown.
What I hear in New York perfumery is this. It is tightly tied to geography. It is comfortable showing its concept and its process. It leans into unisex signatures. And beneath all of that, it practices quiet transcendence. It never pretends the city is pristine, but it floats a few feet above the sidewalk.
Now let us cross the ocean to Paris.
French perfumery rests on two pillars. One is Grasse, a town in Provence. Since the late eighteenth century, Grasse has been a major center of the perfume industry, often called the world’s perfume capital. Jasmine, rose and other flowers are cultivated and processed there, and family farms around Grasse still grow jasmine for houses like Chanel and Dior under long term contracts.
The other pillar is Paris, where those materials were turned into finished perfumes linked to couture houses and to the city’s identity as a capital of style.
When people talk about the French school or Parisian perfumery, they usually mean this Paris ecosystem and the way it came to treat perfume as abstract luxury.
Chanel N° 5 is the classic example. Chanel describes N° 5 as a floral aldehydic bouquet in a radically simple bottle, the very essence of femininity, built on aldehydes and a bouquet of neroli, May rose, jasmine from Grasse and ylang-ylang, over woods and musks. It does not try to smell like a realistic single flower. It smells like an idea of modern elegance, like an invisible dress.
Guerlain is another pillar. The house talks about a recurring signature often called the Guerlinade, built on a small family of raw materials such as bergamot, rose, jasmine, iris, tonka bean and vanilla. That accord appears in different forms across many Guerlain perfumes and gives them a recognizable, soft, ambery base.
The French school is also deeply concerned with structure. Perfumers think in terms of a pyramid of top, heart and base, the way a composer thinks in movements. Top notes are the first impression, often citrus and light aromatics. The heart is florals, spices and richer notes. The base is woods, resins, musks and ambers. The craft is in balancing those layers and smoothing the transitions.
French perfumery also embraced synthetics early. Coumarin, ionones, aldehydes and later modern musks and woods allowed Parisian perfumers to move beyond literal colognes and floral waters into more abstract, textured compositions. Chanel N° 5 itself depends on aldehydes plus carefully sourced jasmine from Grasse to create its distinctive, abstract brightness.
From where I stand now, this is the part of perfumery that feeds my sense of elegance: the discipline, the careful editing, the feeling that a composition has been polished until it feels inevitable.
If you place New York and Paris side by side, you can feel both the contrast and the resonance.
New York, especially in the niche scene that lives around where I still live on Second Street, tends to start at street level: with the neighborhood, the loft, the lab, the map on the bottle. Perfume becomes a way to make a piece of the city wearable, with its noise edited into something beautiful but still recognizable.
Paris tends to start with abstraction and couture: with an ideal of elegance, a floral aldehydic bouquet, a signature base. Perfume becomes a way to dress you in a character or mood that is not tied to any one street.
And then there is San Miguel de Allende, that hill town in central Mexico where I mix molecules most happily. San Miguel is known as a UNESCO World Heritage city with a thriving art scene, colonial architecture, a mild climate and a strong international community of artists and writers.
If New York smells like concrete heat and subway brakes, and Paris smells like abstract elegance, San Miguel smells like sunlight on stone, incense from old churches, market fruit, fireworks, flowers and woodsmoke from the hills. It is where I took my very aging mother so she could have the most pleasant and easy years of her life, and where I found that my work at the bench softened and deepened in response.
So my own sensibility now lives between three poles. New York’s street-level concepts and voltage. Paris’s structure, polish and abstraction. San Miguel’s slower, sunlit, art-driven calm.
Add to that a Lithuanian background, a Brooklyn birth, parents whose lives ran from dental clinics to IBM headquarters and Fifth Avenue penthouses, an extraordinary best friendship with Paul Bridgewater whose East Village gallery life (and apartment) is now the subject of a feature documentary, and a long relationship with Tibetan Buddhism, and you get the mixture I am trying to put into bottles.
The style that emerges from that is exactly what I call it: elegance with a twist of avant garde. Classical structure and polish, still humming with a little Second Street voltage underneath, grounded by the quiet of San Miguel and by inner work that is less about noise and more about awareness.
Beyond these cities, other perfume cultures add their own voices. Oil based attars and oud from the Middle East and South Asia, long used in religious and ceremonial contexts, give you depth and continuity rather than a staged top, heart and base. Italian colognes like Acqua di Parma Colonia give you bright citrus and herbs and the feeling of stepping into a courtyard full of lemon trees. Japanese fragrance culture, shaped by the idea of smell harassment, tends to keep scent close to the skin, favoring quiet florals and musks over shouting.
If you love perfume, one way to smell more deeply is to ask of any fragrance a simple question: what does this perfume believe about life in the place it comes from?
A New York scent, especially from houses like Bond No. 9, Le Labo or Aedes, tends to believe in individuality and place. It believes in specific corners of the city, in the idea that something refined can float just above the noise.
A Parisian classic tends to believe in structure and elegance, in the power of a well-balanced top, heart and base, plus a consistent house signature, to turn raw experience into myth.
A Middle Eastern attar believes in depth and heritage. An Italian cologne believes in light and ease. A Japanese fragrance believes in subtlety and respect for shared space. A place like San Miguel de Allende believes in art, community, history and a sunnier rhythm of life.
In my own case, the philosophy is a blend of all of these, filtered through one very specific biography.
I stood in a small, smoky club on the Bowery that history now calls the birthplace of punk. I grew up in a family where my mother ran a Brooklyn hospital dental clinic and my father spent his days on Madison Avenue towers and Fifth Avenue apartments. My closest friend was a gallerist whose East Village life has now been preserved in a feature documentary. I still live on the same Second Street blocks that saw that downtown scene radiate outward. I carry Lithuanian roots and a Brooklyn birth certificate. I spend long stretches in a UNESCO listed Mexican hill town whose streets and light invite slowness and care. I practice a form of Buddhism that keeps pushing me toward clarity and compassion.
Now I stand at a bench and weigh drops of cempasuchil (flower of the dead), bergamot and labdanum, jasmine and cedar, trying to make all of that a poem in the air.
I still love that charge of experimentation. I just want it dressed in something tailored, balanced and beautiful, and aligned with the inner values that have slowly taken over my life.
That is what I mean when I say my style is elegance with a twist of avant garde.
The elegance comes from what I have learned from Paris and the classical French school. The twist comes from New York. The space around it comes from San Miguel and from practice. All of it together comes from the knowledge that a tiny patch of city can send waves through global culture, and that even a single life can move from punk clubs to perfume organs, from skid row to UNESCO streets and Madison Avenue towers, in one human lifetime.
If you are absorbing this as someone who loves scent, your own path will be different. Your city might not be New York. Your starting point might not be a punk club or a Lithuanian kitchen or a Mexican mountain town.
But the question is the same.
What city’s dream are you carrying, and how will you twist it into your own style?
When you begin to answer that, perfume stops being just something you spray on. It becomes the way your biography quietly turns into air.