Cult favorite independent perfumer marissazappas talks to sophianjune about earnesty, obsession, and her new Elizabeth Taylor-inspired fragrance.
“I don't think it necessarily takes these grand intellectual ideas to move people. I think people actually really want to be moved.”In all the lives the independent perfumier Marissa Zappas has lived, she has always been in pursuit of beauty.
Everyone points to the same thing: Zappas’ fragrances hit different. But why? When I first interviewed Zappas in December, she told me she likes her perfumes to have one component that is unfamiliar. After spending three hours with her in April at her apartment, which also serves as her work space, what I think it is is that Zappas’ perfumes are wholly personal, extensions of herself, her own prosthetics, to borrow her term.
It was a classically masculine scent that she ended up turning into a fragrance called The Green Ribbon, of which she made 30 little vials for Retail Pharmacy to sell. Zappas took Green Ribbon as the base for Maggie the Cat Is Alive, I’m Alive! but then turned to her love for Taylor, whose eye Zappas has tattooed on her arm. A framed and autographed photograph of the actor sits on her fireplace mantle next to a diptych photograph of her grandparents.
For Zappas, the joy is in having the privilege to lose your head at all. It’s not about whether it works out, it’s the joy of… Zappas’ tidy apartment houses her entire business, which is neatly kept to a workstation and an armoire packed with empty bottles, packaging, shipping boxes, and sample-size vials. It’s a sight to behold: Shelves above a large counter house hundreds of raw materials, or the synthetic and natural scents that comprise perfumes, which are kept in glass vials. Each perfume has upward of 50 different raw materials. It looks not unlike a chemistry lab.
“Learning perfuming really takes a lot of obsession, honestly. You have to be completely obsessed with it, and then also have the opportunity and the means,” Zappas says. “I was so disciplined when I memorized the smells.” “There is sometimes this moment that happens when I’m smelling something and I really feel like ‘Ah, that's it. Ah, that’s it.’ And then sometimes I’ll tweak one or two things, but once I have that feeling, that’s it. I can stop,” Zappas says. “I can’t think of a perfume where I didn’t have that happen and I released it.”
But he was also crucial to Zappas’ experience of scent: He planted a fig orchard in his front yard, which was Zappas’ favorite place. So began Zappas’ deep dive into the history of perfumery. But she still wasn’t looking at it as a career: She had traveled on a study abroad program to Paris, where she became obsessed with cemeteries. Almost every day, she would go to Père Lachaise and wound up writing a mini ethnography on the cemetery and its history. She was going to get her Ph.D.
Zappas would like to expand her business, doing larger runs of perfumes and wider distribution around the world. She would like to be able to outsource her shipping and bottle filling — all things having an investor could help with — so she can focus on other things, details like having her boxes wrapped in cellophane.
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