When Behnaz Sarafpour was still a child, roses and orange blossoms were ever-present in her everyday. Not just are both essential to her native Persian cuisine – you’ll taste rosewater in many dishes – but her family also kept orange trees, more typical to southern climates and less so to Tehran in the north, in a greenhouse and bring them out each spring.
“You’d pick the blossoms early in the morning, string them up and wear them around your neck,” Sarafpour recalls. “You put them in drawers, in cookie jars, in your tea. It was such a part of your everyday life.”
Now, Pure Rose and Pure Neroli are the first two Behnaz fragrances. “It’s something that I have always wanted to do,” Sarafpour, currently on break from ready-to-wear but still making custom pieces for clients, says. “If you are a women’s luxury designer, to do your own fragrance is one of those things that is always in your wish-list.”
Sarafpour is a pioneer with these two scents. “I have been so inspired by what is going on in the beauty industry in terms of clean beauty and everyone being very conscientious about the quality of ingredients that you use,” she explains. “That resonated to me, because in my women’s ready-to-wear, I was always focused on high-quality producers and mills. Quality always meant a lot to me.”
And to that end, she wished to create a fragrance that played to her personal proclivity for top-quality ingredients. She worked exclusively with natural and organic ingredients from fresh flower extracts. There are no dyes, fillers, preservatives and no alcohol here. Like a fine wine, each is labeled with the month and year it was bottled. Consider it a real luxury for the skin – perfect for those who are conscious about a lifestyle free of chemical ingredients or toxins.
“I wanted to work with flowers where the chemical process of producing the fragrance and extracting scents from flowers are not the same,” she explains. “Orange blossoms and roses work well with this technique.”
She was inspired to work on these scents on a trip to Iran 11 years ago where she visited an old distillery of flower essences. “I loved the technique,” she says. “We now live in a time where people are so conscious of the environment. It is in fact something that is a very ancient. It is how Persians started developing fragrance in the Middle Ages. That ancient technique of perfumery was my inspiration for how to do these water-based fragrances.”
And in addition to being all-natural, the perfumes are not the kind that lingers in a room long after you left it. It is, as Sarafpour puts in on the packaging, “Made for your benefit, enjoyed only by those close to you.’” And what’s not to love about that?
Click here or go to BehnazSarafpour.com to purchase the Behnaz fragrance!
